ROMAN EMPIRE’S GLORY.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4798, 12 January 1925, Page 1

ROMAN EMPIRE’S GLORY.

OCCUPATION OF BRITAIN.

SOME REMARKABLE RUINS.

To tlie east of Folkstonc, on the summit of a clifij west of the famous “Warren,” .a discovery has been made of a very remarkable Roman ruin. Taken togethei’ with the discoveries at Richborough, it bids fair very greatly to enlarge the existing views of the Roman occupation of Great Britain. Mr Harold Spender, who recently spent some hours on this cliff, expresses the opinion in the “Daily Ch’-onicle” that the Folkestone diggers have hit upon a very momentous find.

The diggers seem to have come accidentally on the remains of an important Roman naval centre, guarding the shore between Dover and Folkestone. The bases of the v.alls alone remain, but the outline is very clear. In the centre is a Roman mosaic pavement, and at the edge of the cliff sedward are the. remains of a Roman bath—that indispensable accompaniment of a Roman settlementIt would seem that this uath, at a later time, was used as a Christian church by the Roman sailors, for there is an apse, and the building has been reconstructed. But the full machinery of the bath still survives—the elaborate hypocaust, such as is seen at Bath, for creating the warming r,oom, and the skilful drainage arrangements for bringing the water and taking it away. Those Roman sailors must have taken across the seas’ the deep-seated passion of .their race for hot baths. But it would seem algo that they felt England’s cold climate very sorely, for beneath all the little barrack rooms, buidt round the central mosaic hall, there are also hypocausts.

ROMANS’ “WHITE MAN'S BURDEN.”

The Americans themselves do not warm their rooms more elaborately than tnose Romans who left the British shores 1500 years ago. It was clearly a large settlement, for there are a numuer of rooms; and the inscription, “Claiss : Brit.,” seems to show that the Romans possessed a de Unite branch of their fleet devoted to the defence of Britain— perhaps manned by British sailors.

“Of what kind,” asks Mr Spender, “was the Rohan occupation of Great Britain during the three centuries or so that they held on to us ? The analogy of our own hold on India naturally occurs, for here was a country held by a race used to a different climate, unable to settle or breed in large number, but gifted, at the height of tlieir power, with much the same genius for Empire as ourselves.. We were their white man’s burfien. They established great camps of Legionaries ; they ran roads and ; built bridges ; and now we are finding that they possessed these elaborate naval stations.' We are only at the beginning of this great research. Professor Haverfield did a great deal to throw light, but he died with his work unfinished. MANY VANISHED TOWNS. “Did the Romans affect our language or our habit? ? Latin words have been found scribbled by children on the raised walls of old Roman uuildings—vulgar words, such as seem to show that the people talked Latin. But .it could not have gons very deep. Antonine’s Itinerary shows 300 Roman townships, but within a century or so they had all disappeared, buried beneath the wave of barbarism that followed. “India pursues us in this absorbing study. Then, as in. India now, there were British nationalists who wanted the Romans to go. But When the sack of Rome caused the Romans to depart 'in a consuming hurry—then there was woe in Great Britain I Gildais’ book shows that British deputations flocked to Rome, imploring the Italians to return. They could not. They were wanted for grim work much nearer home. So the Britons had to fend for themselves, and -what they did for themselves was to sink into an abyss of anarchy and civil war for .the next three centuries.

THE BUGLE CALL FROM HOME.! “The result has been that all that old Romano-British civilisation has disappeared off the face of the earth ais completely as any other old civilisation in the world. We are' only mow' getting down to a few fragments. And yet Roman Britain was one of the jewels of the Roman Empire ; one of the strongest of her military centres ; one of the wealthiest in trade and agriculture. “Splendid paved roads ran from end bt end of the kingdom. Towns like Sdchester, York, and Bath were centres of Roman society. Between the .towns rose beautiful Roman villas and splendid estates worked by British jslaves. Life seemed very secure. Yes, life seemed secure, Then, at that bugle call from Rome, the soldiers left, and all that glory departed. That civilisation disappeared .almost as quickly as it arose. ’ Great Britain went back into dark night, and only now, as at Folkestone, are we dredging up a few dim relics of that ‘Power that was Rome.’ ”