It rose in the path of the nations; it built the walls of its empire,
guarded by the camps of its legions, right across it. For four
hundred years the wandering of nations ceased; the nations stopped--
and they began to till the ground, to live in cities, to form states.
The hush of this peace did not last, but the memory of it remained in
the life of every nation that felt it. Unity and law tempered
freedom and change.
The name of Rome was made known, and made terrible, through Wales by
a great battle fought on the eastern slopes of the Berwyn. The
Romans had conquered the lands beyond the Severn, and had placed
themselves firmly near the banks of that river at Glevum and
Uriconium. Glevum is our Gloucester, and its streets are still as
the Roman architect planned them. Uriconium is the burnt and buried
city beyond Shrewsbury; the skulls found in it, and its implements of
industry, and the toys of its children, you can see in the Shrewsbury
Museum.
The British leader in the great battle was Caratacus, the general who
had fought the Romans step by step until he had come to the borders
of Wales, to summon the warlike Silures to save their country. We do
not know the site of the great battle, though the Roman historian
Tacitus gives a graphic description of it.
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