Böcker av Patricia Southern

The walls of Rome provide an ever-renewed palimpsest of the Empire's history, from the 8th century BC to the fall of the Western Empire and beyond.

With parallels to today, a significant new account of the Roman empire as a place of migration, diversity and commerce, as well as its traditional image as a military power.

A monumental new life of Ancient Rome's most illustrious complex and legendary leader - Julius Caesar.

Hadrian's Wall is a major World Heritage site, set in stunning countryside in Cumbria and Northumberland, where the Wall and its forts are the most visited Roman remains in Britain. It runs through the narrow gap across the Pennines between the Solway Estuary in the west to the appropriately named Wallsend on the River Tyne in the east. For much of its length it is still visible, especially in the central sector where it runs along the north-facing cliff known as Whin Sill. Building started around AD 122 after the Emperor Hadrian visited the north of Britain and inspected sites in person to mark out the line of his new frontier. Hundreds of Roman legionaries from Chester, Caerleon and York marched north to quarry the stone and build the Wall, which took several years to complete. This book tells the story of how the Wall was built and manned by Roman soldiers, what life was like on the frontier and what happened to it when the Romans left.

The only up-to-date narrative account of the greatest empire the world has ever known from its earliest origins to its disintegration in AD 476.

For nearly four centuries, from AD 43 to 410, Britain was a small province on the north-western edge of the vast Roman Empire. Though it was small, it was not insignificant. There were more Roman soldiers in Britain than there were in the provinces of North Africa, and the governors who were appointed by the Emperor were among the most prominent men of their day, at the peak of their careers. People from all classes of Roman Britain's multi-cultural and varied society can still speak to us, indirectly via the works of ancient historians, annalists and biographers, and directly from building inscriptions, religious dedications, gravestones, graffiti, leaden curse tablets, artefacts and coins. But perhaps the most vivid source is the corpus of letters from the fort at Vindolanda in Northumberland, where named individuals talk about birthday parties and complain about the terrible state of the roads. This book uses a variety of sources to document the military, political, and social history of Roman Britain, from Julius Caesar's brief invasions in the first century BC to the fifth century AD when Imperial government came to an end.

Stonehenge is the best-known but least understood prehistoric monument in the British Isles. Other stone circles are impressive and atmospheric, but none approach the sophistication of Stonehenge. The stones visible today represent the final phase of a monument that was begun about 5,000 years ago, and altered several times during the next fifteen centuries, before it was finally abandoned. The site may have been a sacred place for at least 10,000 years, reaching back to about 8,000 BC, when people of the Mesolithic era began to set up pine totem poles, the holes for which were found in excavations close to the circle. Patricia Southern's new history considers the conflicting theories around how it was built with such precision and why. Did the stones arrive at Stonehenge by human hands, or were they transported there by glaciers long before the first monument was built? Was it a religious centre for unknown rites and ceremonies? Did it function as an observatory for the sun and the moon, a sort of stone calendar to mark the seasons and the appropriate festivals? One thing it never was is a Druid temple. It was built, used, and abandoned long before the ancient Druids came on the scene, but their modern counterparts have claimed it, so in that sense it is still a temple, just as it can be for any other visitors to this important World Heritage Site.