Sacred Britannia

Two thousand years ago, the Romans sought conquer a remote, almost mythical island at the very edge of the known world – Britain. The expeditions of Julius Caesar in 55 and 54 BC and the Claudian invasion of AD 43 brought with them a pantheon of new classical deities along with a clutch of exotic eastern cults, including Christianity. But what of Britannia and her own homegrown deities? What cults and cosmologies did the Romans encounter, and how did they react to them? Miranda Aldhouse-Green balances literary, archaeological and iconographic evidence to illuminate the two-way traffic of cultural exchange and interplay between imported and indigenous cults in Roman Britian. Despite the remoteness of this period, many of the forces, tensions, ideologies and issues of identity at work are still relevant today.