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    Journey to Britannia: From the Heart of Rome to Hadrian's Wall, AD 130
    Unavailable
    Journey to Britannia: From the Heart of Rome to Hadrian's Wall, AD 130
    Unavailable
    Journey to Britannia: From the Heart of Rome to Hadrian's Wall, AD 130
    Ebook483 pages3 hours

    Journey to Britannia: From the Heart of Rome to Hadrian's Wall, AD 130

    By Bronwen Riley

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    'An erudite and fascinating work' Jan Morris, New York Times

    'An artful combination of history, archaeology and the imagination' Mary Beard, New York Review of Books

    'Riley manages to bring multi-faceted, polygot and multi-cultural Roman Britain to vibrant life for specialists and generalists' Country Life

    It is AD 130. Rome is the dazzling heart of a vast empire and Hadrian its most complex and compelling ruler. Faraway Britannia is one of the Romans' most troublesome provinces: here the sun is seldom seen and 'the atmosphere in the country is always gloomy'.

    What awaits the traveller to Britannia? How will you get there? What do you need to pack? What language will you speak? How does London compare to Rome? Are there any tourist attractions? And what dangers lurk behind Hadrian’s new Wall?

    Combining an extensive range of Greek and Latin sources with a sound understanding of archaeology, Bronwen Riley describes an epic journey from Rome to Hadrian's Wall at Britannia's – and the empire's – northwestern frontier. In this strikingly original snapshot of Roman Britain, she brings vividly to life the smells, sounds, colours and textures of travel in the second century AD.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHead of Zeus
    Release dateAug 1, 2015
    ISBN9781781852675
    Unavailable
    Journey to Britannia: From the Heart of Rome to Hadrian's Wall, AD 130
    Author

    Bronwen Riley

    Bronwen Riley is a writer, lecturer and editor with a special interest in the Classical world. Her books include Journey to Britannia, Transylvania and Great Yarmouth Row Houses and Greyfriars' Cloister. She writes regularly on country houses, antiques, gardens, collections and heritage for publications such as Country Life, Gardens Illustrated and BBC History Magazine. She also devises literary and historical journeys in Britain, the Balkans and beyond and is director of the Transylvanian Book Festival. Bronwen read Classics at Oxford and Byzantine Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She lives in the Lake District.

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    Reviews for Journey to Britannia

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      There seems to be a trend in history books these days that I'm all for, which is to de-emphasize the date-focused tradition of battles and emperors to instead "paint a portrait" of what daily life in those days must've been like for the average citizen; take Bronwen Riley's The Edge of the Empire, for example, which examines the Roman Empire's far-flung colony of Brittannia (or modern-day Great Britain) by picturing what the trip there must've been like for its newly appointed governor in 120 AD, Sextus Julius Severus, as he made his way with his retinue from the center of Rome itself all the way to the northern wasteland of Hadrian's Wall. This then gives Riley an excuse to look at all kinds of interesting topics that would relate to such a trip, from the roadways and shipping lanes that had been established by then, to how such traveling groups kept themselves fed and housed over such a long distance, the way the countryside's culture changed as you traveled farther and farther away from Italy, what exactly was built by the Romans in these far-off spots and what was co-opted from the pagans who were already there, what kinds of things were valuable enough in those locations to be imported back to people in Rome, and what kinds of things needed to be exported from Rome out to them. It's a surprisingly short book, only 200 pages once you remove the bibliography and notes; and this lets it move at the lively pace of a contemporary novel, certainly not a book for serious academes but a perfect volume for armchair historians like you and me. For those who are interested in learning more about this endlessly fascinating period of human history, but don't feel like trudging their way through a thousand pages of "Caesar This" defeating "Minor That," this comes strongly recommended, a brisk and fact-filled look at what European travel was like in an age before jetliners, ocean cruisers or even paved roads.Out of 10: 8.8, or 9.3 for amateur history buffs