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Placed in command of the XX Legion, he directed the Irish Sea flotilla for a time; perhaps it had been then that the notion that Ireland was worthy of conquest had formed in his mind. Now, returned after distinguished service as a governor in Gaul and a consul in Rome, Agricola swept all before him: in the fastness of Snowdonia he reduced the Ordovices to abject submission and then, pressing relentlessly northwards into Caledonia, he reached the base of the Highlands, harried the Inner Isles with his fleet and ordered the erection of a network of castella.
The Roman Empire knew little enough about this island of Hibernia on the north-west edge of its world. Sailing directions, written by a sea captain of the Greek colony of Marseille about 525 BC, referred to Ireland as the ‘Sacred Isle’ two days’ voyage from Armorica and significantly larger than Britain. However, Himilco, the Carthaginian, journeying to the ‘Tin Isles of Scilly’ around 480 BC, warned of dense seaweed entanglements and threatening sea monsters beyond. It was the epic voyage of Pytheas, another Greek from Marseille, who visited Norway and circumnavigated Britain about 300 BC, which gave Mediterranean traders Ireland’s correct position; this explorer’s account does not survive but it seems to have formed the basis of Ptolemy’s map of Ireland prepared in the second century AD. Known only from a fifteenth-century copy, this map includes some identifiable names, such as Buvinda (the River Boyne), Senos (the River Shannon), Logia (the Lagan or Belfast Lough), Isamnion (Navan Fort) and Volunti (the Ulaidh, the people of Ulster). Even after Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55BC, the Greek geographer and historian Strabo was asserting that the Irish ‘think it decent to eat up their dead parents’, but fifty years later Pomponius Mela was better informed about Ireland:
Its climate is unfavourable for the maturing of crops, but there is such a profuse growth of grass, and this is as sweet as it is rich, that the cattle can sate themselves in a short part of the day.
Tacitus was a more acute observer, and his descriptions of the Britons and continental Celts in the first century AD dovetail remarkably well with early Irish law tracts and heroic tales. For information about the Celts of the British Isles, Tacitus relied on his father-in-law, Agricola:
Ireland is small in comparison with Britain, but larger than the islands of he Mediterranean. In soil and climate, and in the character and civilisation of its inhabitants, it is much like Britain; and its approaches and harbours have now become better known from merchants who trade there.
And it is from Tacitus that we learn that the invasion of Ireland was planned with a king in exile:
Agricola received in friendly fashion an Irish petty king who had been driven out in a civil war, and kept him for use when opportunity offered. I have often heard him say that Ireland could be conquered and held by one legion and a modest force of auxiliary troop; and that it would be advantageous in dealing with Britain too if Roman forces were on all sides and the spectacle of freedom were, so to say, banished out of sight.
Was this Irish king Tuathail Techtmar, forced to seek aid in Britain to recover his throne? We cannot be certain. However, Agricola’s invasion was not to be: a legion of Germans stationed in Galloway mutinied and there was disturbing news of Pictish rebellion. The Emperor Domitian ordered his governor north, and later, after Agricola’s recall, the Romans retired behind Hadrian’s Wall. Ireland would not become part of the Roman Empire after all.
Yet there are tantalising indications that the influence of Rome on Ireland was greater than previously thought. It seems likely that bands of soldiers who had served in the legions sailed to Ireland to conquer lands for themselves there. In 1842 the stamp, or trademark, of an oculist – an eye specialist who travelled with Roman legions – was found by the River Suir in Co Tipperary. Simple everyday Roman items – such as ladles, nail cleaners, brooches, a lead seal and an iron barrel padlock – have been found in places as far apart as Bantry in Cork and Clogher in Co Tyrone. Several Roman burial sites have been unearthed including one at Stoneyford in Co Kilkenny containing the cremation ashes of a woman in a glass urn, together with her bronze mirror and cosmetics phial.
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