David Stuttard, co-author of AD 410: The Year that Shook Rome

As we enter the period of Lent, it is perhaps as good a time as any to consider the impact of Christianity on the Roman world in the years leading up to the momentous events of AD 410. And as good a place as any to witness the growing influence of the new religion is in England, just south of the M25 corridor in Kent, at a Roman country house now called Lullingstone villa.

For much of its three-hundred-year life span, Lullingstone villa was relatively unremarkable. It was probably built around AD 100, one of a number of well appointed and comfortable mansions, each with its own estate, which dotted the fertile Darent Valley, within easy distance of the province’s new capital Londinium and the estuary of the River Thames. Indeed, its owners seem to have valued the fecundity of their valley to such an extent that they later built a shrine, apparently to the local water nymphs, whose walls they painted with graceful representations of the goddesses. (more…)

David Stuttard

Our book, AD410 The Year That Shook Rome, will be published by the British Museum Press in March 2010.  It  celebrates (if that’s the right word) a hotly debated event, whose 1600th anniversary is being marked this year: the sack of Rome by Alaric and his Goths.

In this blog, we hope to follow the story of the anniversary year as it unfolds for us, including, as it will, not only our own book’s publication, but conferences and events in the UK (to mark the simultaneous 1600th anniversary of the Roman army leaving Britain), and further real-time reflections on the doomed and chaotic events as they happened month by month in AD410.  We shall even be blogging direct from Rome on 24th August, the date of Alaric’s sack.

In the week which sees the launch of the British Museum’s excellent series for BBC Radio 4, A History of the World in 100 Objects, it’s salutary to remember that objects and artefacts, while contributing so much to our knowledge of antiquity, call tell only part of the story.

If our book succeeds at all, it will be in good part down to the different backgrounds from which Sam and I approached the subject.  Sam’s background is principally that of an archaeologist and numismatist (at the British Museum), while I am a classicist with a fair experience of translating, adapting and staging ancient Greek drama.  Together, then, we bring to the story not only a rigorously scholarly approach, but – as importantly – an understanding of the human dimension. (more…)