BIBLIOGRAPHY


A complete Bibliography of Roman Britain would be wholly beyond the
scope of the present work. Much of the most valuable material, indeed,
has never been published in book form, and must be sought out in the
articles of the 'Antiquary,' 'Hermes,' etc., and the reports of the
many local Archaeological Societies. All that is here attempted is to
indicate some of the more valuable of the many scores of sources to
which my pages are indebted.

To begin with the ancient authorities. These range through upwards of
a thousand years; from Herodotus in the 5th century before Christ, to
Gildas in the 6th century after. From about 100 A.D. onwards we find
that almost every known classical authority makes more or less mention
of Britain. A list of over a hundred such authors is given in the
'Monumenta Historica Britannica'; and upwards of fifty are quoted
in this present work. Historians, poets, geographers, naturalists,
statesmen, ecclesiastics, all give touches which help out our
delineation of Roman Britain.

Amongst the historians the most important are--Caesar, who tells his
own tale; Tacitus, to whom we owe our main knowledge of the Conquest,
with the later stages of which he was contemporary; Dion Cassius, who
wrote his history in the next century, the 2nd A.D.;[3] the various
Imperial biographers of the 3rd century; the Imperial panegyrists of
the 4th, along with Ammianus Marcellinus, who towards the close of
that century connects and supplements their stories; Claudian, the
poet-historian of the 5th century, whose verses throw a lurid gleam
on his own disastrous age, when Roman authority in Britain was at its