In 84 AD, the Roman legions, commanded by the governor of Britain Gnaeus Julius Agricola, marched towards the north of the island to put an end once and for all to the resistance of the Caledonians

 

 

In 84 AD, the Roman legions, commanded by the governor of Britain Gnaeus Julius Agricola, marched towards the north of the island to put an end once and for all to the resistance of the Caledonians

The Romans, followed by the fleet, arrived near the “Mons Graupius” (located in Scotland) where the enemy awaited them. Tacitus tells us that the rebels were led by Calgacus, “the most distinguished for valor and nobility among the various leaders,” who launched into a speech full of pathos to encourage his men: “Whenever I think of the situation in which we find ourselves, I nourish the great hope that this day will be the beginning of freedom for all of Britain. For for all of you who are here and who do not know what servitude means, there is no other land beyond this and not even the sea is safe, since the Roman fleet looms over us. But after us there are no more tribes, but only rocks and waves and an even worse scourge, the Romans, against whose arrogance not even submission and humility serve as a defense. Raiders of the world, now that their thirst for plunder has exhausted the land, they also search the sea: greedy if the enemy is rich, arrogant if he is poor, neither the east nor the west satiates them.” Then Calgacus said a phrase that went down in history: “Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium, atque, ubi faciunt solitudinem, pacem appellant”. Translated: “They steal, they massacre, they rob and, under a false name, they call it empire. They make a desert, and they call it peace”.

Calgacus’ denunciation of Roman imperialism could not be more explicit, but for all we know, those were probably also the last words of the Caledonian general. The Romans reached the enemy positions and inflicted a crushing defeat on the Britons.


https://extremelyinterestingfacts.quora.com/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In Ancient Rome, Gladiators Rarely Fought to the Death

Image
Kyle Hoekstra 20 Aug 2024 Website Twitter   Image Credit: Those About to Die / NBCU While the bloodshed on film and TV adaptations might persuade us otherwise, leading speaker on  gladiatorial  life and historical consultant Alexander Mariotti insists that death in the ancient Roman arena was “an absolute rarity”. Joining Tristan Hughes on The Ancients, the consultant on Ridley Scott’s  Gladiator  and Amazon Prime’s  Those About to Die  (in which he even has a cameo) explains that deaths, when they happened, more often followed later from injuries. “Combat sports were very violent,” says Mariotti. “And gladiatorial combat is part of that pantheon of sports.” However the use of weapons made it particularly dangerous. “One of the reasons they don’t wear tunics is because the linen or the wool getting stuck in a wound would kill you [from] an infection.” Those About to Die Image Credit: Those About to Die / NBCU “But what we do find from modern forensics ...
Read more

Ginger and Cancer, Osaka University: Starves Tumor Cells

Image
  Medicine Study Finds Compound in Asian Ginger Stops Tumors by Sabotaging Cellular Fat Production Instead of Glycolysis Gianluca Riccio 12th June 2025 Share In traditional Asian medicine, kencur is said to be a “prayer for health.” Now modern science is discovering that it may not have been just a metaphor. The Japanese study on ginger and cancer revealed that this tropical relative of the common ginger has a unique mechanism of action against tumors. Its active ingredient, ethyl p-methoxycinnamate, does more than slow tumor growth; it creates metabolic confusion in cancer cells, causing them to expend energy inefficiently and eventually weaken. Kencur is not the ginger you know Kencur (Kaempferia galanga) belongs to the same family as common ginger, but grows exclusively in the tropical regions of Southeast Asia. Associate Professor  Akiko Kojima Yuasa  and his team of Osaka Metropolitan University  They focused on this exotic relative for a reason: it contains hig...
Read more

Psychology and God

Image
Religion and implicit and explicit language Matthew Follow 12 min read · Mar 14, 2025 Many of the great psychologists have come to the conclusion that religions are true. Not in a literal sense, since this could hardly be proved or disproved by a psychologist, but true in a heuristic sense: in many people, religious belief is a psychologically integrating phenomenon. This should make a lot of sense, the symbols of religion are only “made up” in the sense that they are cultural symbols that emerge in every society in the history of behavioural modernity, and so they reflect the psychology, conscious and unconscious, from which they come. If we take Richard Dawkins’ claim that religions are simply “memes,” it seems also logical to connect their success or failure with their ability to function as — with another term of Dawkins’ — a kind of extended phenotype, something that provides societal cohesion, individual ordering of experience, and integration between the two. Through the lens of...
Read more