Saying Goodbye to the Romans

Saying Goodbye to the Romans

Saying Goodbye to the Romans

The day the Romans left
they marched their standards to their ships.
Most people ran out of their doors and cheered.
Some hotheads painted their cheeks with woad,
looted the mead in a tavern
and hanged a few collaborators in the woods.

That was, I suppose, to be expected.
After three hundred years of Roman oppression
it could have been worse, much worse.

It was so exhilarating – to be free!
No longer fearful of their swaggering soldiers
dragging us into their barracks
before the new proconsul did his rounds.

No longer paying tax to foreigners,
powerless to stop the worst of their merchants
enticing young girls behind the haystacks
with figs from Syria and wine from Gaul.

And no more cringing, in front of magistrates
who’d take such pleasure, such jovial pleasure
in asking how many of us could read or write
or build a level road before they came.

As if our worth as a people
could ever be judged by such things!

Good riddance to their arrogance I say.
Were we not happier, and more considerate
before the Romans came?

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Now there is work – real work ahead,
cutting their tariffs on our wheat and tin,
placing our people in the new institutions,
curbing the inrush of bordering clans
and luring tutors, from Rome and Greece
to teach our youth their baffling tongues,
their tricks of governance and money lore.

Panes of glass - in a turf-roofed hovel!

I go to bed exhilarated, but ill at ease.
How can we show dalesman and chief
that there is no going back to the tribe?
How can we persuade the wild young zealots
to stop harassing the Romans who’ve stayed
and help us build these things called towns?

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And so, in a way, I have begun to miss them.
Despite the cold abstractions of their speech
and their insufferable belief, that to advance
we’d have to take Rome into our hearts,
I have, I suppose, begun to miss them.

But why? I hear the iron-eyed rebels ask.
The people, scythes in hand at my door
that’s why – glaring at me as they complain
of empty plates and unworked fields,
of posts restricted to certain bloodlines
and sly injustices by petty officials.

As if an end to the Romans
could bring improvements to the soul!

Ha – even the druids. When they shake fists
at the loose behaviour in the settlements
and the mad expectation, burning the youth
that life should be better than in the past,
I miss, in a way, an old if bitter consolation.

I miss being able to shrug and say,
Not us, not us, the Romans are to blame.