As Britain crept into political focus for Rome, so it began to be harnessed as a literary metaphor for extremity and isolation. A poem by Catullus, a contemporary of Julius Caesar, is addressed to two friends, Furius and Aurelius, who are, says the poem, so loyal they would accompany the author even to India or Arabia, or to the steppes of Scythia, or Parthia, or Africa – or to the ‘Britons at the margins of the world’. In Latin, the phrase is ‘ultimosque Britannos’, and the word ‘ultimosque’ is split awkwardly between two lines: these Britons drop over the world’s edge. The poet Virgil’s first Eclogue, composed during the civil wars that ended in 31 BC with the accession of Augustus as emperor, is a pastoral set in a mythical landscape inhabited by shepherds and nymphs; Tennyson’s ‘the moan of doves in immemorial elms’ is inspired by one of its lines. But the poem also seems to have a demi-life in Virgil’s own turbulent era of civil strife, aristocratic power struggle and land confiscations. One of its characters has received the right to continue his bucolic existence; the other has been cast from his land and is forced into exile – perhaps, he says, he will be banished to the steppes of Scythia, perhaps to Britain ‘toto divisos orbe’, ‘quite cut off from the world’.
Charlotte Higgins, Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain
