The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
In Iceni: The Year of Sacrifice, the reader is vividly transported back to Roman Britain, where rebellion is on the horizon. Stephen D. Owen sets the scene beautifully for the trilogy that will follows. In 60 AD, King Prasutagus dies, prompting the Romans to arrive in...
Welcome to Aspects of History, Stephen. Did you have a personal interest in Roman history before writing Iceni: The Year of Sacrifice? I have had a passion for Roman history for many years. I first became interested in Roman Britain and the Iceni Revolt during...
Nearly 2,000 years ago, during the early years of Roman Britain, Boudica, victim of Roman injustice, raised the Iceni in rebellion against Rome. During August 1984, a mysterious link with the Iceni Revolt may have been uncovered. The remnants of a male peat body were...
Back in the (late) 1980s when I was at university, it was the period leading up to and following AD 410 that most filled me with trepidation. Almost nothing in the way of contemporary written sources, combined with archaeological findings that were only really just...
There is a lot that has been said, written and mulled over when it comes to Roman Britain, and, consequently, a reader glimpsing Ferdinand Addis’ Conquest on the shelves might be forgiven for thinking it another interpretation of those well-trodden stories and a...
The western Roman Empire collapsed so long ago that we might well ask ‘why should that matter to us now?’. Yet, in multiple ways, our lives are conditioned, still, by those events. Take language, for example. Mostly, the western Empire spoke Latin. Despite substantial...
55BC, as Sellar and Yeatman knew, is “the first date in English history”. Caesar led his legions across the sea and gave the Britons a thrashing. This, of course, was “a Good Thing, since the Britons were only natives at that time.” Caesar could hardly have put it any...
First of all, Nicholas, congratulations on the publication of this endlessly fascinating and absorbing work. In the introduction, you describe the book as a fresh look at the subject rather than a rehash of your earlier work, Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons, some...
John Pitts – welcome to Aspects of History. Your book, Carausius and Allectus, is set amid uprisings in late Roman Britain. Talk us through how the idea for a novel came about? During the first Covid lockdown in 2020 I discovered a family history chart belonging to my...
