What is truly appalling is the casual manner of the killing. Their victims are, after all, only ‘wogs’ (as the First Soldier describes them), of no apparent importance, merely annoyingly between them and the river. Brac is stabbed in the stomach, and left to scream for the rest of the scene. Viridio powerfully curses the soldiers, and is efficiently dispatched. And Marban, the trainee priest, is the victim of an attempted rape by the Third Soldier. Marban’s piles defeat him. But what is done is done to a teenager, and to what that teenager represents. He is invaded, as is his way of life and status with no more thought than the need for gratification and a swim. The actual contains the symbolic. The Second Soldier expands the context, as he says to the semi-conscious boy: ‘Persia? The other side of the world? … World? … Empire?’ And talks of being a free man on his discharge from the army. He is amazed to find that Marban speaks some Latin: ‘This nig nog talks Latin!’

The brutality of the attempted rape, especially on the stage of the largest auditorium of the National Theatre, is expressly designed to shock an audience into a realization of the horrors of war. Yet because the image of attempted rape in the play was as it was, the first production suffered from the ‘novelty’ of the route taken by Brenton to bring all abuse home by modifying the means of expressing it. A parallel is with the scene in Edward Bond’s Saved (1965), in which a group of young men stone a baby in a pram to death. Thus the impact of one scene in Saved, and one scene in Romans distorted the overall structure of each play at first viewing.

The casual and deliberate brutality of occupying armies is brilliantly demonstrated as the soldiers take Marban to Caesar, whose ‘ancestral mother is Venus, Goddess of love’. Caesar tells the Celt, now with a Venus pendant tied tightly around his neck that ‘there are new Gods now. Do you understand? The old Gods are dead. Yes, you understand. We are both religious men’. And he irritably pulls an aching tooth from his mouth. It is of more importance than the squalid state of wretched Celts.

The defiled Marban prophesies about the effects of invasion, and the response:

Generation after generation, cataracts of terror in the eyes of your children. And in the eyes of husband for wife and wife for husband, hatred of the suffering that is bound to come again …

We must have nothing to do with them. Nothing.

Abandon the life we know.

Change ourselves into animals. The cat. No, an animal not yet heard of. Deadly, watching, ready in the forest. Something not human.

At the end of Part One, the play wonderfully pivots into 1980 with the sound of an approaching helicopter: ‘From the back the Roman Army advances in British Army uniforms’. Its commander is Julius Caesar, in a jeep with other British Army officers. A slave is killed throwing a stone: ‘Fucking bogshitting mick!’ The play is now in Ireland.