"OwenMEdwards-AShortHistoryOfWales" - читать интересную книгу автора (Edwards Owen M)

It is not a spirit of adventure and daring alone that makes a nation.
Rome rose to say that it must have the spirit of order and law too.
It rose in the path of the nations; it built the walls of its empire,
guarded by the camps of its legions, right across it. For four
hundred years the wandering of nations ceased; the nations stopped--
and they began to till the ground, to live in cities, to form states.
The hush of this peace did not last, but the memory of it remained in
the life of every nation that felt it. Unity and law tempered
freedom and change.

The name of Rome was made known, and made terrible, through Wales by
a great battle fought on the eastern slopes of the Berwyn. The
Romans had conquered the lands beyond the Severn, and had placed
themselves firmly near the banks of that river at Glevum and
Uriconium. Glevum is our Gloucester, and its streets are still as
the Roman architect planned them. Uriconium is the burnt and buried
city beyond Shrewsbury; the skulls found in it, and its implements of
industry, and the toys of its children, you can see in the Shrewsbury
Museum.

The British leader in the great battle was Caratacus, the general who
had fought the Romans step by step until he had come to the borders
of Wales, to summon the warlike Silures to save their country. We do
not know the site of the great battle, though the Roman historian
Tacitus gives a graphic description of it. The Britons were on a
hill side sloping down to a river, and the Romans could only attack
them in front. The enemy waded the river, however, and scaled the
wall on its further bank; and in the fierce lance and sword fight the
host of Caratacus lost the day. He fled, but was afterwards handed
over to the Romans, and taken to Rome, to grace the triumphal
procession of the victors.

The battle only roused the Silures to a more fierce resistance, and
it cost the Romans many lives, and it took them many years, to break
their power. The strangest sight that met the invaders was in
Anglesey, after they had crossed the Menai on horses or on rafts.
The druids tried to terrify them by the rites of their religion. The
dark groves, the women dressed in black and carrying flaming torches,
the aged priests--the sight paralysed the Roman soldiers, but only
for a moment.

Vespasian--it was he who sent his son Titus to besiege Jerusalem--
became emperor in 69. The war was carried on with great energy, and
by 78 Wales was entirely conquered.

Then Agricola, a wise ruler, came. The peace of Rome was left in the
land; and the Welshman took the Roman, not willingly at first, as his
teacher and ruler instead of as his enemy. Towns were built; the two
Chesters or Caerlleons (Castra Legionum), on the Dee and the Usk,