There is a Roman Army and it is coming.

It is an army of red leather and brass.

It is a ship.

It is a whole thing. It is a monster. It has machines.

It is Roman…

Understand. The Romans are different. They are – (He gestures, trying to find the word. He fails. He tries again.) A nation. Nation. What? A great family. No. A people? No. They are one, huge thing.

His inability to find a way of identifying the implacable might of the Roman army, its facelessness, and its inevitability, creates a powerful image and anticipation. The action of the play involves three historical periods: 54BC, AD515, and 1980. Part One of the play centres on the second expedition of Julius Caesar to Britain. The action covers one day during Caesar’s campaign, and deals with a small grouping of Celts ruled over by a woman – the ‘Mother’. The issue is one, not of some petty and unimportant tribe, which is how Caesar sees it, but a matter of the rights of an ancient people, one established with both a hierarchy, a culture, and a religion. Brenton is intent on describing Celtic procedures, rather than condoning them. For in the world of the play, and of historical reality, the Celts are threatened by invaders. Not just the Romans, but also Belgaic tribes such as the Catuvellaunians and the Trinovantes, groups that are thought to have reached south-east Britain around 75BC. In Part Two, the threat is from the Saxons.

The play establishes the normality of the Celts in their own setting. Its laws are clear and rigorous. Thus the two renegade Irishmen, Conlag and Daui, who open the play are guilty of murder, and have been cursed by the priests. They are also invaders. It is therefore both moral and correct to destroy the impious. Daui is butchered and his blood tipped on the ground as a blessing. Conlag escapes. The matriarch arrives. She is under pressure from two Catuvellaunian envoys to form an alliance against the Roman army. She publicly rejects the advent of the Romans as a fantasy, but reveals privately that she has already made an alliance with the Trinovantes, who are in turn allied to Rome. She trusts neither of the Belgaic tribes, regarding them as foreign invaders. But as she orders that part of the harvest be hidden, a couple of Roman cohorts, separated from the main army, destroy most of the Mother’s group. It is in Scene Three that the violent invasion of one culture by another is presented with a power which is deliberately shocking. Three teenage Celtic boys come out of the trees upstage. They are naked, and wet from swimming. They lark about. It emerges that one of them, Marban, is in his third of 20 years’ training for the Druid priesthood. Caesar himself in his De Bello Gallico testifies to the supreme position held by the Druids. The priests were arbiters, judges, sentenced the guilty, determined penalties, and gave rewards. They were held in awe by other Celts, for they, in effect, carried and determined Celtic culture. It is this which is shattered, and its world with it, as three Roman soldiers arrive, desperate for a swim. The boys are in the way. The soldiers who destroy the Mother and her people are strays from the main army. So here, the three Romans are separate, but stand for the entire army.