Empire: World History - 384. The Roman Invasion: Gods on Hadrian’s Wall (Ep 2)

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

The Roman Conquest of Britain. The furthest western point of the empire. How did life change for ordinary people after the invasion? Why do Middle Eastern gods end up on Hadrian’s Wall in Northern England? And how does the famous gorgon face carved into stone in Bath blend Celtic and Roman spiritual beliefs? In Episode 2 of this series, William Dalrymple and Anita Anand are joined by Dr Eleanor Barraclough, author of Beyond the Walls: In Search of the Celts, to discuss how the arrival of the Romans altered the gods of these isles. Try Attio for free at attio.com/empire Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over.   For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mptopuuk.com. This episode is brought to you by Atio, the CRM of the new way of going to the market. On our show, we trace how people, power and ideas move through history. Often, what changes the story is not ambitious alone, but the system behind it. For businesses, a CRM has long kept a simple record, who you spoke to, what was said, and where things stood. Atio is the only agent-native CRM, built for teams and AI agents to work together across every customer relationship.

Revenue teams now have signals coming from everywhere, but signals only matter if you can act on them. You can ask Atio to prepare a meeting, draft outreach or surface the next step. So your team can move with speed, scale and quality without losing the judgment that good customer relationships require. Try Atio for free at A-T-I-O.com slash Empire. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Drupal. Coming up in this episode, the Romans arrive in the British Isles and merge the gods of their empire with the gods of the Celts. Persian deities arrive on Hadrian's wall.

We're going to be visiting the Cotswold Spa of the ancient world. And we discuss the first ever Christians in Britain. And we have with us the fabulous historian author Eleanor Baraklough to take us through. This is a rip-roaring story. Thank you so much for having me back. It was slight chaos last time, so I'm amazed you let me back on. Slight chaos is what we do. Anyway, the idea behind this series came last summer when, just after seeing you, Eleanor, in York,

Olive and I started doing a walk along Hadrian's wall, which I hadn't done since my 20s. And what really struck me was those museums at Vindalanda, which I know you filmed at, but also the museum I'd never been to before, the great. North Museum in Newcastle. And the sheer religious variety of all these Roman altars put up by guys in and around the wall, but also the continuity, because in the last episode, we had the Romans burning the druids and massacring them all in Anglesea, and whether or not that actually happened, that was what, is it Tacitus says? And what you seem to see in Hadrian's wall is the opposite. You have lots of Romans worshipping.

Celtic gods. So how do we square all that? I think the key to understanding it is whatever happens on Anglesey, it's not so much about religion. So it's not that they mind different religions in any way. It's the fact that the druids represent, as far as we can tell, and I'm sure this is very much what you were talking about, it's not clear because we only really have Roman sources. So they're very biased. But what the Romans don't like about the druids is this idea that they're a political institution. So they're organized, they're this indigenous network with the power to coordinate resistance to Roman rule. And that's certainly true in Gaul. And Julius Caesar has particular

problems with that. But that seems to be possibly what's going on on the Western extremities of Britain. Are there like a kind of Celtic version of the Islamic Republic of Iran with the sort of Mueller network running stuff? This is the possibility that they would have viewed it like that. Yeah. And the other problem potentially is that what the druids, whether or not, what this actually looks like, what is, as far as the Romans are concerned, the real problem with the druids in terms of their religious practice is that they practice human sacrifice. Romans are fine with other sorts of sacrifice. Human sacrifice has most definitely been outlawed. And this is something they really, really don't like. Can I ask a question about human sacrifice?

Because, you know, in the films, you know, we've seen depictions of, you know, children being banned. Normally children. I don't know whether this is held up by any kind of fact. But I mean, who was sacrificed? Do we know anything more about the sacrifices? I think it's hard to tell because we're really reliant on Julius Caesar. We see it sort of perpetuating down the Roman sources, this idea of bloody, sacred groves where the bodies are hanging up and everything's very nasty. But then again, you also see that, for example, Battle of Tewterberg in, what is it, 9C.E. These are Germanic tribes. They're not sort of what we might think of as Celtic tribes. But once again, what the Romans are saying, when these three legions get wiped out beyond the northern borders of the Roman Empire, they're saying, yep, they hung up the Roman soldiers in groves, they sacrificed them.

So it's this gory. And I mean, it's fair enough, you say it's a kind of film, it's a cinematic version of something. It's not to say nothing like this happened, but certainly they are painting it in these technicolor. In the worst possible propaganda. Yeah, I mean, it's going to scare. So this is where the paradox comes in for me, Eleanor, and maybe you can sort this out for me, because Rome didn't like the druids, you know, they were hostile to the druids. You've got them in Gaul, you know, being suppressed and, you know, you've got in Britain a banning of druidic practice.

You've got Cetonius, as you just mentioned, marching to Anglesea to destroy the druidic order. But then you also do have, and this is where I get confused, legionaries on Hadrian's wall, making offerings. to local Celtic deities, which is something that the druids would have done too. So what's that all about? This is it. So it's not about the gods themselves. The gods themselves, I think as far the Romans are concerned, are actually quite a big deal. And this is something that we see more widely as well. It's more about, it's this, I think it's interpretatio Romana, this idea of the Roman interpretation of foreign deities. So as they're going through the world, you encounter a local gods. You often identify it with its nearest Roman equivalent. You give it a dual name. And then, the worship can continue, but it can now be legitimized by its association with the Roman divine order. So it's actually quite an inclusive theology more than we might expect from what we think about when we think of the Romans versus the Druids. How does it work in practice at an everyday level if you're on Hadrian's Wall? Yeah. So it's this, I think it is this starting point that divine

powers can be worshipped under different names, different versions of them, but they're fundamentally, as far as the Romans are concerned, the same powers. So you've got Jupiter in Rome. You've got Zeus in Greece. You've got Taroni, possibly, although the etymology is slightly different there among the Celts. But this idea of the Diu-Petor, the sky god, the supreme deity,

sometimes sort of allied with the thunder god. Dupater is Sanskrit, isn't it? Yeah. And it becomes Jupiter when it gets west. Exactly. And obviously I've got to get a shout out. shout out to my Vikings here because we've got the version there, which is tier, tier, once again is that same word. So it keeps on reiterate, it keeps on coming back in all these

different forms. And this polytheism is the most important thing we have to remember because the gods, as we say, are everywhere. It's not just, these are gods, it's our way or the highway. It's, oh, nice to meet your version of this god. Let's see what we can do here. Let's see how we can honor them within a context that is local and fitting. Right. So I'm always really struck by this. You know, first of all, the ability to suck in every local, you know, kind of belief system so that you don't feel so foreign to the people that you've invaded and you've conquered. Is it more political or is it genuinely theistic where they think, you know, we've got loads of gods, plenty of room on this bench, move over, we can pull a few more in or repurpose them. I mean, what is the thinking? It's like, come on everyone, in you come? We don't know. Possibly a bit of both.

Definitely, it sort of, it helps if you have the locals inside. But what's interesting is that when we see, for example, altars being put up on Hadrian's wall by, well, all sorts, but say Roman soldiers particularly, but sort of the community generally, they are putting up of their own, as far as we can tell, volition. They're putting up altars to local gods a lot of the time. They don't have to do that. There's plenty of their own gods.

they can choose from. And what we have to remember there is that, and maybe we can talk a bit more about the context, because here I'm thinking about Hadrian's World particularly, but when the Romans come in, they're not all coming in from, say, Italy, you know, they're not, they're coming in from all over the place. So it's already this very interesting mix of different cultures. And that's very much there in that Newcastle Museum. But you've got, we're going to come to this at the end of the program, but we've got Mithras and all these very, very foreign at least in gods as one of the Celtic gods. Yeah, very, very much that.

I think it's much more, hey, we've got a long bench. Everyone's welcome, squeeze it up, here you go, and maybe you'll find a friend that you didn't realize you're related to on that bench of gods. Is it remarkable that we've got such detailed records of this? I mean, because it was such a long time ago. And as you say, it's sort of clash of civilizations. One is the conqueror. Normally conquerors obliterate, everything that they've taken over.

But we have records. We have relics. We have real tangible evidence of religious devotion in this kind of mishmash patchwork kind of way. Yeah, exactly. And I think sometimes we forget how lucky we are to have that. And Britain actually is particularly well evidenced as far as this is concerned. Partly because of, it's not just the wall. I mean, Hadrian's wall is really important.

But you have these concentrations. And Hadrian's wall is an extraordinary example of that of military votive activity in one place. and you also find it in the urban centres in different parts of the Roman province, as it were. But there's also this wonderful thing, which is the condition, because I love that there's two extremes, because you get something similar going on in Egypt for exactly the opposite reasons. In Britain, it's cold and it's wet and it's boggy. And that often creates anaerobic conditions. Anorobic is nothing to do with keep fit.

No, it is not. It's a lack of oxygen. It's a lack of oxygen. Yeah. So things don't decay. And of course, the reason I love the kind of bookends of Britain on one hand of the empire and then you've got Egypt is because it's very, very dry and hot. So it does the same thing, but for the opposite reasons.

And so what this means is we've got all sorts of wonderful organic material, but we've also got the stones and the metal and everything else. Thousands of inscriptions, hundreds of altars, all sorts of little objects like figurines and votive tablets and little curse little... We can talk a bit more about the cursed tablets. from Bath because those are fabulous. Well, that's where we're going next.

Let's go. Let's go to Bath because I think that was certainly where I first came across this as a school kid going round the baths. And then you've got, as you say, these little curses. And at the middle of it, you've got that big Gorgon figure who is Sulis, who's kind of half classical, but also a bit Celtic with a kind of mustache. And he looks like the sort of guy you might meet in a pub in sort of sky or somewhere. Well, I mean, and we should say that Bath, you know, was Aquasoulis, is what it was known as they wouldn't have,

because the Romans would not have called it Bath or Bath. They would have called it Aquasulus. So, yes, talk a little bit about that because likewise, my children is the one place that they were transfixed when I tracked them around the country to try and improve them. They actually helped in Bath. They were quite into it. I have to say, one year I actually made my now husband a birthday cake

in the shape of the Roman baths. And, you know, we put this jelly beans, you know, there was another year who did Hadrian's Wall. You know, I mean, we're committed. to this historical cause in this family, I'm going to say. But the lovely thing about Bath, and I think the reason that it's so, yeah, so enduring, it's so fascinating is, well, let's start with the landscape, because there is nothing quite like Bath.

And before the Romans arrived, you've already got these hot springs, and they seem to have been very important in some way, religiously speaking. But of course, the question always is the evidence, and we don't have much evidence for it. It's not the only geothermal set of springs in England or in Britain, but it is remarkable for the concentration and the temperature. So it produces, I think it's like a million litres of water a day, something like that. The temperature is about 46 degrees Celsius. You would not want to be diving into that. And you've got to imagine it bubbling up from the earth. It's steaming. It's red. It's full of iron. It's apparently inexhaustible. It just keeps coming. It keeps coming. And so, for the pre-Roman Celtic-speaking inhabitants of the area. And I want to say the Duboni, I think I'm right, but you will get the emails if I'm wrong, or you can check afterwards.

But we've got the likelihood that this is then a divine presence. It's this idea the other world is almost sort of reaching up and through. And again, you were talking about bog buddies with Ronald. You think it's that sort of divine space between worlds. Well, we've got it here, except it's moving. It's alive. It's steaming. There's something really otherworldly about it that makes it incredibly important.

Now, we think that the deity involved there is Seulis. And you mentioned the fact that it's Seulis Minerva when the Romans come in, and it's this sense, it seems, of these two goddesses here being conjoined. And so that's why we think it's Seulis. We don't have pre-Roman evidence that it is. In terms of Stulus as a name, possibly it's connected to a sort of proto-Celtic root, meaning something like sun. There's also, I think there's an old Irish cognate. Solis, I mean, sort of. Yeah, exactly.

Solis. It's there. You know, Sol Invictus, I think we'll probably come back to later if we go. So this, it's important, this sense of the heat and the light and the, I wonder whether that's what's going on. Well, there's also, I mean, look, this is very happy to open a new branch of scholarship, but Sulis also sounds like Suria, you know, Sanskrit word for the sun. Syria. So, you know, there's sort of that, you know, Indo-European thing going on.

I always find that really tantalized when I hear echoes of it. And human sacrifice in Hinduism, too, until the 19th century. We've got to say there's nothing new under the sun, pun entirely intended, right? Under the Syria, Suez. I mean, you know, the beauty of Bath is that the earth seems to have given so much to this place. But it was there before the Romans arrived. So the people who were there before the Romans, before they got their grout and tiling out,

did they also treat it as a holy place? We think so. We think that there is, you've got to sort of, you're having to compare it with how it works elsewhere because really in terms of the archaeological record, we're dealing with the Romans. But yeah, it looks like, partly because the Romans are linking it to Minerva,

that there is definitely this sort of religious associations with it beforehand. It's interesting as well that they link Seulis to Minerva. So we're not talking about Venus or Juno or Mars, anything like that, and we do see those elsewhere. Minerva is the goddess of wisdom and healing and craftsmanship. And so that identification possibly tells us something about how Sulis was understood by that. As a god of healing. Exactly, exactly.

So she's there already and we can possibly extrapolate. And that maybe also tells us something about how she's... And Sulis as a girl? Yeah, yeah. Suleas, again, because she's linked to Minerva, that and because we then have this fabulous, the very famous, is it bronze? What's it made of that incredible heads that they found in a sewer in the early modern period that looks like it is, Sula's Minerva, this incredibly sort of...

She's so... She's fabulous. She's fabulous. Fabulous, isn't she? But she is Seulis Minerva. She's not Minerva. And that's really, really important. And that takes us back to your curses.

Well, no, let's think about the Gorgans first, because you mentioned the Gorgon. So we think Gorgon, we think woman, right? That's, you know, anyone who's clutch of the Titans, all the rest of it, we've got a female gorgon figure. He's most definitely male. He has an enormous beard. And it's been suggested that he may, it's hard to know what's going on with him, but he seems to encapsulate that whole.

religious syncretism and the tension that's sort of held and embodied within that because the idea of a Gorgon's head on a temple is totally standard Roman practice, that's fine. But then there's something really Britonic, sort of Celtic, we might say, this wild hair and the moustache and this like glaring. I mean, I'm sure I need to, when you took your children, your children are just there staring at it. They love to be terrified by it.

But when I looked at it, it sort of reminded me a bit of the green man. that you see stretching back into early British folklore as well, that kind of sort of hair that could be alive like grass or, you know, that kind of thing. That's such a good point. I've never thought of that. What I would love to see is because what people are now able to do this, there's these wonderful research projects where they use spectroscopy to find out what colors these now grey pieces of carved stone would have been painted.

There was a great show at the Met in New York last year with all these classical statues in these sort of bright, I mean, it wasn't very nice to look at, but it was fascinating to know what they... I don't like it. I like my statues white and grey. It just really throws me, throws me when they get lips and, you know, blush and stuff. I don't like it. I wonder if we've got, I have no idea, but any sense of what the Gorgon would initially have been painted. So, yeah, would he have been more of a fertility figure? Would he, would his hair have been green or would it being blue, is he something to do with sort of Neptune-Pasidon-type sea god, which also would fit the context. So, who knows? But, yeah. Okay. Well, Willie mentioned cursed

cursed tablets. Now, tell us a little bit about that, because that really is a fascinating thing about Bath. The cursed tablets are absolutely amazing. So they are written in Latin, for the most part, but they do actually have some Celtic names or Britonic names, you might say, as well, both in terms of the thieves and the victims. And so these are ordinary people of Roman Britain. They're literate enough to write Latin, but as I say, some Roman names, some Celtic names, and they are carrying their grievances to a sort of Romano-British goddess, Sulis Minerva, in the temple. And we've got to think about the sorts of things that it's like, you know, someone stole my cloak, someone stole my shoes, someone stole my pants. And you can see, again, because they're bathing there,

It's not just a religious outfit. They go there to get clean. And they're in the baths, having a lovely time. You know, eating there. I don't know if you remember, there's this wonderful depression in a line outside the main bath where people were queuing up for their oysters. So they're saying they're eating their oysters, throwing them in a pile, having a lovely time in the water. They come back and someone stole in their pants. And so they write a first tab, and they're like, where are my pants?

Give me back my pants. Just imagining all these Roman Britons walking home, through the streets of bath dripping wet and naked. These are, you know, sort of curses, but they're not saying, I want you to kill the person with my pants. That's not what they're asking, right? It's more like, may this person not sleep. They may they not have any rest until my pants are returned. And there's other versions of that. There's one where it's someone stolen a ring. This is not one of the cursed tablets. It's from elsewhere in Britain. But it's very much like, again, may he not sleep, may he not eat until this person whose name I'm just going to slip in here because I definitely know who it was who did it,

has returned my ring to me. Thank you very much. And you get these things widely, but at Bath, it's just this wonderful concentration that gives you a sense of the texture of everyday life in this city.

Back at the wall again. Now, we've moved from Bath up to Northumberland. We're on the edge of the Caledonia with the kind of picks, making dirty faces and throwing insults over the moorland. What are the Celtic gods

that the people there are absorbing into their panthe in. Yes. So we've got all stored. It's in some ways you might think of it as a microcosm of the whole religious Roman world, sort of broadly beyond Britain as well, because you've got the Roman state cult. You've got the worship of the emperors, for example. But you've also got mystery religions incorporated from the east. You've got local deities.

So it's just this bubbling, boiling, melting pot of all these different religious ideas. is coming together. We've got some really wonderful ones. I was up there looking. It was basically in one field. You find this wonderful goddess Coventina, and she is, or seems to be, an incredible native goddess from Roman Britain, but she's particularly associated with a sacred spring at Corabra Fort, which the Romans would have called brocolitia. And I cannot say that without saying broccoli. So I'm very proud of myself right now if I've got that. But she's very local. She's not even local to the wall.

She seems to be local to one part of the wall, but she's very popular there. There's a very good little, little museum there, isn't there? We went to last year. Yeah, it's full of her stuff. I love that. I love, because I always feel a bit sad when you see, and I understand what it happens, but religious, sort of artefacts that have been placed somewhere so carefully that have been removed in the modern day from where they were.

because for me that feels like they've been removed from their whole context. The reason they were there, I always imagine the local gods just sitting there. Oh, they're taking my coins away. Oh, okay, never mind you. But this one is quite nice because at least they all left it together. Thousands of coins she's got and altars dedicated to her by Roman soldiers. And there's this one very famous one, this extraordinary relief. And it's three women.

And they're sort of separated, but they're together. and they're pouring out from these vessels, the waters of what seem to be her sacred springs. It looks like she's the one in the middle because she's dressed differently. She's almost got, it almost looks like armour, but I'm not saying it is armour, but she's dressed differently. Possibly the two on either side of her attendants, maybe they're nymphs of some sort. They like to do three of anything, don't they, the Celts? There's lots of three goddesses. Yes, this sort of triple aspect idea. And we've got other examples of that. I was going to ask you about another local deity.

I hope I say, right, Antonocyticus. Did I run at it? So glad you said that, not me. Antenocytic. I also say, the trick is, Eleanor, you run at great speed and hope not to get concussed. So let's talk about Antonaciticus, which I've now nailed. I mean, he sort of reminds me a little bit, and this is what I also find interesting, of a Mr. Tumannis type of creature, you know, that curly hair, two little horns.

You know, it just shows that we have a collective memory that gets passed on one way, or the other. Tell us about Antonestheticus, what is he for and who is he local to? Right. So, yeah, exactly as you say, imagine a little cute Mr. Tomna's type figure possibly. He's from, well, it looks like slightly further east along the wall. So he's known from the fort at Benwell. He seems to be a very local deity because there's this one temple at Benwell, or Conducarum, as the look at you running up to the name and hopefully. Fast and hard. That's what you need to do. Okay. So we can locate him somewhere near Newcastle.

He's basically one of the Geordie gods. He's been described as, which I love. He's got a flat cap. Yeah, he's great. He's such a... So he's associated with one temple, and I think it's like three altars and a sculpture of him, exactly as you say, I need it.

He's got this beautiful, these locks of hair, and then these two locks that just come round. And it's like, horns, not horns, but they do look quite horn-like, exactly as you say. There is a nice. one, and if you see again the sculpture of him, he absolutely looks similar. From a little further away, the fort at Binchester, he was found in this ancient rubbish dump in this midden. Someone put him there. And here, again, he's got these two little pokey horn hair bits, and he's also got this talk around

his neck. And we might remember sort of the most famous talk wearer, Budaker. You know, it's Cassius Dio, quite a lot later, who says that she wears this talk. But we know from other sort of Britonic hordes, for example, we've got this kind of talk. this kind of golden, often big, thick, heavy necklace going around. And he seems to have one of these. So he's already sort of signaling Britonic, local, indigenous through this Celtic, we might say. So is this idea here that he's a local god, he's worshipped locally, he's absorbed into this Roman-British framework, Romano-British framework, because he's there being worshipped at the fort by the soldiers.

So in India, you have, in a sense, two tiers of gods to this day. You have the big universal gods like Lord Shiva and Lord Vishnu and Mardurga who are all over the place. But you also get the little gods who have their particular hillock or their tree clump or their ferric waters bubbling up red or something. Is the same thing happening in Newcastle or what would have been the site of Newcastle centuries later? Yeah, I think potentially so, just given that there are local ones and they are definitely there. But then we also have ones that we might recognise their names of because they're not local in that way. And there's, if we sort of come off the wall for a bit, if we go south, we've got a really good example of this. Mars Nodens and obviously everyone knows Mars as a god. So this is someone where we've got that we've got potentially the local pairing with the not local. You have that pairing in Lidney in Gloucestershire, which I know very, very well actually. It's a beautiful place, yeah. You and your fancy Cotswild holidays. I have a very fancy friend

in Lidney. Yes, who's got a very lovely place there. So tell us about that pairing. Who's Nodens? And because there is a kind of, there's a very exciting link to Tolkien with Nodens, which I want you to tell me about. We've got C.S. Nuis and Tolkien in this episode already. Well, I was going to say, I should really, explain. I said Mr. Tuminous as if everybody knows the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Mr. Tummanus as if he's our accountant, the podcast accountant. He's a fawn character in a book.

He may not have read called The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But tell us about Mars Nodens. He would, by the way, totally have been an accountant. We would have nailed it. So, Mars Nodens is wonderful, exactly as you say. So he's linked to Lidney in Blastershire, and we've got to think a little bit about the context in which his

temple there. Or a temple complex. This is, there's big stuff going on here. It's basically like a spa, a health resort, something like that. It looks like... In the Cotswills, it's perfect. It's the chipping Norton set from the first century. And this promontory that it's up on, oh, it's a lovely view. It's, it's overlooking the seven estuary, and we've got to think as well, you know, the seven estuary has that incredible tidal bore wave event that happens. So it's already this place that, again, we think of, you know, Sulis Minerva. Same sort of thing here. It's associated with the place. where we've got unusual landscape features,

things go to the power of the natural world that you can actually see there. So, Nodens is very much a British deity. He seems to have been associated with maybe hunting and healing and water. And also, interestingly, dogs, there's lots of little dog statuettes that are found there. And it's been suggested this is because dogs

are associated with healing in the classical world because, you know, they can lick wounds. So there's this kind of curative aspect to their presence there. And the idea is that this Lindley Sanctuary, this Cotswold Spa, lovely place, is a place of healing. People come to sleep, to maybe receive visions. So it's not all physical healing, but very much it's this sense that they can heal their bodies and their minds in the context of this religious deity. And the temple has this long hall. It's designed for maybe a guest house.

It's got bugs. It's even got a little amphitheatre. And so we've got this sense of Nodens as a healer, as a visionary, paired with Mars, because in the Roman world, he has his own healing aspects. And so it's this coherent theological matching, we might say there. And as you say, Tolkien wrote a paper on him. Tolkien loved him. He was really young. This is way pre-Lord of the Rings.

1932. 1932, exactly. So I think sometimes we forget that Tolkien was a serious scholar. He's a professor of Old English at Oxford. And within this context of him being, you know, this very serious scholarly don't, he writes a philological appendix, which I don't think is quite as exciting as what he writes later on. But sort of, you know, let's go with it. Well, look, we've talked about the pairing. We've talked about absorption. But what happens to, you know, the Celtic religions, fully formed religions? We'll find out after the break. Welcome back. So, Eleanor, you know, the Celtic religions, a Celtic tradition, poetry, art, it stands proudly different and in of itself.

You know, you know, when you're looking at a Celtic cross or a Celtic, you know, sort of a piece of ephemera. Is that also the same with religion that it is distinct, stubbornly so, and no Romano-British nonsense is going to get in the way? I think this is a story very much of adaptation, and where the resistance, that stubbornness happens, that's where we get the friction. But where we see, I think the Celtic art is a really interesting one, because what we think of when we say Celtic art is sort of Latin style.

We should explain that term because it's an important one. Aten is a place in Switzerland, which is not somewhere we normally associate with Celts if we're thinking of sort of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. But this art style begins in central Europe. Exactly. And that reminds us that when we're talking about these sort of Celtic-speaking cultures, they are very much connected. We're here in Britain and Ireland. We're out on the fringe of that. But that's part of the reason that it survives so long.

And when we think of Celtic art, specifically maybe the Latene style, it's flowing pattern. Trumpic spirals and... We see that often in, say, you know, iron age deposit cultures, ritual cultures, if we're thinking about religion... Battersea Shield. Battersea shield, exactly, thrown into the Thames, Hlin Keredigbach over on Anglesea, all these places where we see this distinctive style, exactly. What's really interesting is that we know the Roman style is different. It's essentially naturalistic. It's more about the accurate representation of bodies and things.

But what we see in Britain is this co-mingling of these two styles in all sorts of extraordinary ways. And I was up on Hadrian's wall. You mentioned Vindalanda and I was making a programme up there about Celtic influences there. I mean, it is an incredible place. There's nothing quite like that. One of my favourite places is everything you want from Northumberland in one sort of concentrated burst. That's it. That's exactly.

And an excellent cafe as well, I have to say. A very good cafe with excellent coffee, yeah. So what makes this place so special? Why do you love it so much? Oh, other than the cafe? Well, these broaches, so these broaches were found within the context of the Roman fort, the garrison, you know, the whole sort of military establishment there. But there's one, for example, it was this dragonesque brooch.

It was inlaid with coloured enamel, very gaudy. And I remember Andrew describing it as a fusion fashion item, which is, I think, an excellent. phrase because it very much is based on the indigenous art forms that there was another one. It was a little silver one. It had open lattice work. We should say that there's often more in common than we imagine. But you mentioned not work, Anita. But those Roman pavements have exactly the same knots that you later see on Celtic crosses.

This is it. And I think that's it. There is often a lot more that is recognizable as we move between culture, because we don't have those hard lines between them. A really good example of that, actually, because one has just been discovered, sort of a couple of months ago, they announced it. There are these incredible vessels that we find dotted around.

There's some in Britain, I think there's a couple in France, a couple in Spain, and the Spanish one's just been found. And they're basically, they look like they might be retirement gifts, their souvenirs that come from Hadron's wall, but you see on them again, this fusion of styles. you often have the little turrets, the square lines of Hadrian's wool with the stones, but then you have this amazing swirling mass of sort of Latene style artwork on there too. And I think that's conscious.

It's saying, look, I was here at this lovely exotic place and look at this lovely artefacts I got when I retired. I mean, it's completely appropriate that a knot should, you know, tie together to different cultures. I think that's wonderful. But, I mean, I just, I'm interested to know how the Roman religions influence back. you know, so how much do we find, you know, Zeus and Mars and Minerva in Scotland or Wales or Ireland? Do we have that sort of bounce back as well? Yeah, that's a really interesting one.

I think it's hard to tell. Part of the reason is because when we move outside the Roman centres, we don't know how much they are really being influenced by Rome that's come in and sort of imposed its socio-political sort of program on it. So basically, if you are, everyday stuff, like, you know, coming in from the hinterland and selling goods, you are going to have that. But if we're getting out from there, it's hard to tell. In the case of Wales, for example, Wales is very much part of that Roman province, for the most part. Lydney is very close to the Welsh border, for example. So, yeah, it looks like there is that movement between.

So about 100 miles north of Hadrian's will, we have the short-lived Antonine Wall, which is sort of the Firth to the Clyde line. Rough Castle. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and Bearsden, where they, oh, we won't get into that because I was reading recently this amazing study of the poo that was found in the latrines from Bearsden. Well, actually, it is relevant. It was showing you what the Roman soldiers were eating and how much of it was imported versus local. And so in this poo, you have a microcosm, I think, of the religious situation up there as well, this movement between cultures.

The altars there are very mixed, religiously speaking, but beyond the Antonine Wall, where you don't have that same sense of settlement. You have incursions, you have invasions, but you don't have... You have massacres on a big scale. You got massacres. Yeah, exactly. And very famously, Caligas's speech saying, you know, you make a desert and you call it civilisation, you call it an empire, you know. But here, there's the possibility that they are taking Roman artefacts, things like coins, and using them as well. votive deposits. So like, for example, when they're building, what, new buildings, they're putting

brooches and bronzes in these ritual context as deposits. But it's harder to tell beyond that. Ireland, obviously, they don't conquer Ireland in the same way, but Roman material certainly does appear in Irish contexts, religious context specifically. Can we talk about the thing I know that Williams obsessed with, and that is Mithras and the presence of Mithras, who, is a Persian far eastern deity, but you do find him in this sort of porridge of belief that you're describing. And quite prominent, a Mithraim on Hadrian's wall and another one in Inverask near the Antonine Wall. Yes, so these are really important, and I should just say, porridge of belief has to be the title for this series. That is excellent.

I am totally with you. Mithras is just fascinating. So we have to remember how sort of cosmopolitan the legionaries stationed on the wall really were. So, you know, we've got North Africans, we've got Syrians, we've got Gauls, Spaniards, all sorts. Stations. Yeah, this is it. And so they are bringing all these incredible gods with them. It's the things that travel with them in their minds.

And writing home for woolly underpants. Exactly. So, Mithraism is one of the great enigmas of religious history. And I think those who worshipped Mithras would have been extremely pleased about that because that was the whole idea. It's a mystery religion. The central teachings were revealed only to initiates. They weren't written down for outsiders. And so we don't really know very much.

What we know, as far as we can tell, is that Mithras is this divinity. He is possibly born in a cosmic egg. I think there's one at the Great North Museum way he's there. There is. He comes, pops out of an egg, like a little sort of, you know, David Attenborough. of starling or something. He kills a sacred bull in a cave and then possibly from the bull's blood,

the life of the world sort of springs forth. So it's very much this sort of rooted deep time cosmology. Now, in terms of those who worshipped Mithras, there's seven grades, which I think are linked to the seven planetary spheres, and they move through these seven grades. And it's very hierarchical. You know, there's feasting and there's ordeal. It's almost mason-like.

I think that's probably the nearest thing. And the Mithraa, these temples to Mithras, are underground or they resemble caves. And it's where mostly, or I think exclusively, really men, gets together. It's particularly popular with soldiers and merchants. Is it because it's very, I was going to say, testicular, but sort of kind of manly and men associated with men. I mean, is that why the soldiers love it? they do. Could be the hierarchy class, I suppose. They're like, yeah, I know what this is. I know what a regiment is. I know how that works. I recognize that. Exactly. And certainly,

again, I'm not saying they're like masons, but there's something in that sort of sense of, okay, so we know who to look to, we know who we have to keep on side. You know, there's that sense of wheels within wheels, which works very well. So we, I mean, look, we, into this porridge, we should sprinkle some raisins of Christianity now, shouldn't we? Because, you know, it is the, you know, it is the newest religion on the block. How does that get sucked in? And where do we start seeing it? Yes. So Christianity, the raisins of Christianity arrive, probably sort of we can see them start to arrive in the second century. And it's the same channels that bring Mithraism and other Eastern religions there. So it's soldiers and merchants and, you know, it's the ordinary movement of people

across the empire. And that's what we have to remember. This is a really fluid place. By the late second, early third century, there are hints of Christian communities in Britain, but it's really important to remember we have very little evidence for this. We do have, so St. Albans, you know, so what was very elamium, one of the places that Rudiker attacks back in 60, 61C, we see there some of the earliest evidence for organised Christian communities because Alban himself is martyred there. The problem is we've got a whole range of dates to play with. This can be anything from 209, possibly up to 304. So the dates are disputed, but the point is the tradition is old,

and it reflects some sort of real event. And you begin to get those lovely villas in East Anglia with Chiro and the beardless Christ, the stuff in the British Museum. Exactly. And that Chiro is very important because we've got the Emperor Constantine associated with that. He's a critical figure, but he's also a very British Emperor because he's proclaimed emperor at York in 306. So the legionaries have just watched his father die, and they proclaim him emperor,

and then there's all this fighting, and then this culminates with his victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312, and this is where he's said to have seen this chiro figure in the sky and, like, words saying, you know, By this sign I will conquer. Exactly, by this sign I will conquer. And what follows is Christianity up to this point has been a persecuted religion, or a legal religion, subversive, in quite a similar way to when we were talking about the druids, that same sorts of political subversion that the Romans really don't like. But suddenly we've got the edict of Milan in 313, which legalises Christianity.

We've got the Council of Nicaea in 325. Story goes there that St. Nicholas, who's basically Father Christmas, punches a heretic. We've got a lovely mug that says, St. Nicholas, punching heretics since 325 in our cover. But the point is that Christianity is becoming sort of very linked to the imperial machine. And eventually it becomes the state religion. Well, what is interesting to me is that even though you have it as a state religion, we saw an echo of this when we did our Egypt series where you suddenly had someone deciding

that we're not going to worship the gods anymore, we're just going to do the art and the sun disk. And everyone goes, yeah, no, no, we definitely will. But they will keep their shrines secretly at home. Is that what happens with Christianity? You know, the heralding of this new religion and everyone goes, no, no, this is terrific, but we'll just keep our stuff going the way we would have. Mars knowans.

Yeah. I think this is something that, again, we see over and over and over again when Christianity comes in because the issue with Christianity is that it's saying, one God, you worship this and nothing else. And most religions outside that tradition are polytheistic. And they're like, well, I mean, he can join the party. He can sit on the bench.

But, I mean, we're not getting rid of the bench. So it looks like, yes, there's something like that going on. We've got, I mean, there are examples even of, you know, there's pagan votive activity at sort of rural shrines in the same locations that you have villas with sort of Christian altars, for example. So you've got this sense that, I mean, even within the same household, maybe it's the same individuals who are sort of swinging both ways. Maybe it's different individuals within the household. Maybe there are tensions as a result of that.

You know, I'm not saying it's necessarily easy, but certainly it's not like everyone wakes up one day and say, oh, well, I guess we're all Christian now. And, you know, we can just push that bench out the door. So we're going next to the conversion of Ireland, St. Patrick, who's born in Britain and takes Christianity with them. That's going to be in our next episode. But as we see, when you come back, Eleanor, later of the series, this isn't the end of paganism. There's a whole new chapter of paganism waiting to unfold. So anyway, lots more porridge and many more raisins to come. Porridge for everyone. Anyway, listen, thank you very much. Well, you'll be back. And of course, if you want to listen to that, if you want to get early access to things, extra bonus episodes,

join our club, EmpirePodukuk.com. Empirepodukuk.com. Until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Durempal. Want to talk ETS with the people behind them? Join me, Etienne Jean-Cabouchard on the Upside Ticker Talk. We dive into what's moving markets with timely analysis, trends, and answers to ETF questions you've actually been thinking about. Hit play on the upside ticker talk and elevate your ETF investing IQ.