Christopher Kelly

Once​ upon a time – and certainly before the Roman conquest – Britain was ruled by good King Lud. According to the utterly unreliable History of the Kings of Britain by the 12th-century Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, Lud rebuilt the walls of London, ‘encircling it with countless towers. He also commanded the citizens to construct houses … so that no city in all...

In November​ 361, after the sudden death of the emperor Constantius II, his cousin Flavius Claudius Iulianus became the undisputed ruler of the Roman world. Twenty months later, Julian himself lay dying. In early April 363, 100,000 Roman troops had crossed the frontier and marched eastwards through Mesopotamia. The campaign was a disaster, dogged by bad luck, incompetence and a failure to...

Sometime​ in the late 430s, the pious nun Melania recalled a vision she and her husband had shared thirty years before in Rome when they were young and very rich:

One night we went to sleep, greatly upset, and we saw ourselves, both of us, passing through a very narrow crack in the wall. We were gripped with panic by the cramped space, so that it seemed as if we were about to die. When we...

The history of Roman Britain has always been – perhaps predictably – more about Britain than about Rome. For those committed to our island story, the Romans, after all, are something of an embarrassment, as invaders and occupiers who brutally suppressed native independence movements. Even if conquest can be glossed with more comfortable ideas of civilisation, there is still the...

Between 1896 and 1907, the Oxford Egyptologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt spent six seasons digging the low, sandy mounds surrounding the village of el-Behnesa, a hundred miles south of Cairo and ten miles west of the Nile. In concentrating on the ancient town of Oxyrhynchos (literally, ‘city of the sharp-nosed fish’), they were not aiming to uncover another set of...