As he watched his men destroy the holy groves in coming days, Paulinus must have mused upon his prospects of extending the Roman empire west across the tempestuous Irish Sea. On Paulinus’s command, the legionnaires surged forward and annihilated the druids.
On behalf of his emperor, Nero, he sought to exterminate this “refuge for fugitives”, which also happened to be the greatest stronghold of Druidism in Britain.Īs the flat-bottomed boats carrying Paulinus’s army arrived along Anglesey’s shore, they were met by a mass of druids, arms outstretched, roaring such “dreadful imprecations” into the heavens above that the Romans were “paralysed” with fear. In AD 60, less than two decades after the Roman conquest of Celtic Britain, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, governor of the new province, marched on the sacred Welsh island of Mona, now known as Anglesey, with an army of perhaps 20,000 legionaries. Despite never conquering the Emerald Isle, their influence is profound
0 kommentar(er)
