英語聽力：愛爾蘭的故事—9

It seems the Romans did briefly contemplate an invasion until trouble in Scotland called the legions away. And so Ireland was never subordinated to Roman law or government. But they didn't need to dispatch an army to exert an influence that extended well beyond trade into the realms of society and culture.

This is a small bronze figure of one of the minor Roman deities. It was found in the River Boyne at Navan.

So this is pre-Christian, this?

This is pagan Roman. It's a bit like if Ireland was on the edge of the European Community and you would expect that it would be trading with it. Ireland had cattle. Cattle would have been shipped over to Britain. Items like leather, the Roman army consumed vast amounts of leather. The cattle lords out on the central plains. They start getting notions of grandeur and they become important provincial kings of early medieval Ireland. They have the establishment of dynasties that continued in power for hundreds of years afterwards. But again they were looking to the Roman world to model themselves on the Roman emperors.

By the fourth century, some Irish outposts on the west coast of Britain had expanded into kingdoms as more settlers came. They desired to go eastwards, wrote an early Gaelic poet, into the broad long-distant sea. A medieval scholar would later write that the power of the Irish over the Britons was great. And there are some evidence that Irish traders were venturing into the heart of Roman Britain.

Here in the 1893 in the middle of the Home Counties, Victorian archaeologists excavating the Roman town of Silchester made a fascinating discovery. It was a fourth-century clue to the existence of a long-vanished Irishmen.