The Empire reflects back: Rome’s lasting influence on British culture

The English, like the Romans and Russians, once thought they were the descendants of the Trojans.

In his Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), Geoffrey of Monmouth recounts the story of Brutus, son of Iulus (therefore grandson of Aeneas), who was banished from Alba Longa because a soothsayer had prophesied that he would kill his father and mother. Thus begins a kind of odyssey; Brutus survives the Sirens, fights against the Gauls, asks the goddess Artemis where he can end his wanderings and is ordered to land on an island to the west of Gaul, inhabited by giants. Brutus and his Trojans defeat the giants and found Britannia.

The story is obviously a fantasy; yet Britannia is still the female personification of the country today. She is a Roman goddess-like woman, armed with a trident, helmet and shield, flanked by a lion. And recently two films have welded the mythical birth of England to the last heroic acts of the Romans.

King Arthur, a film made in 2004, returns to the idea of Arthur being a commander of legions with mixed Roman and British blood who is fighting alongside his warriors, from Lancelot to Gawain, against the invading Saxons, just as the empire is falling and the Romans are retreating. And after encountering love — Guinevere, of course, a beautiful Pictish warrior, extremely thin as she’s portrayed by Keira Knightley — he becomes the new ruler of Britannia.

The Last Legion, one of the last films produced by Dino De Laurentiis, filmed in 2007 and based on the novel by Valerio Massimo Manfredi, imagines instead that Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor of the West, manages to escape from Italy with his tutor Ambrosius, of Celtic origin, taking with him a mythical sword that once belonged to Julius Caesar. In Britain he meets the last legion of the empire, which has laid down its arms to settle as farmers but will pick them up again to defend the emperor from the barbarians. Ambrosius once more assumes his Celtic name, Merlin; Romulus Augustulus, tired of wars, sets his sword in stone and names his son Arthur.

The coronation of the English king certainly followed the ceremonial of the Holy Roman Empire, itself derived from ancient Rome. The French influence led to the drafting, in Latin, of the Liber regalis, with a ceremony divided into four stages: the presentation of the sovereign to the people, the oath before God and the subjects, the anointing with holy oil, and the investiture with the handing over of the sword and the globe.

Latin remained the language of the coronation until Elizabeth I, who imposed English as the national element in opposition to the pope and the Catholics (even though she loved Latin, to the point of translating the first book of the Annals by Tacitus, one of the most complex writers, because his crude expressions imply all sorts of meanings). 

When a German king, George I, who did not speak English well, came to the throne in 1714, he requested — and was granted — that his coronation ceremony be conducted in Latin, a custom that has remained to this day. When signing her name, Elizabeth II often wrote the letter R for Regina (Queen) after her name; while her son Charles III has claimed the title of Rex (king).

Latin was the language of the learned and was used for writing treatises on jurisprudence, geography, physics, botany, and in official documents. Indeed, the parish register of Stratford-upon-Avon reports that on 26 April 1564, “Gulielmus, filius Johannes Shakespeare” was baptised.

Ancient Roman monument of the Emperor Trajan London UK

John Shakespeare’s son William set his first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, in imperial Rome. The character is fictional, a general who finds himself at the center of a murky story of human sacrifice, rape, sacrilegious banquets, and mutilation. At one point, Titus’ favorite daughter, Lavinia, whose hands and tongue have been cut off, writes the names of the culprits in the sand, clutching a stick with her mouth and stumps. Today it is certainly not considered Shakespeare’s masterpiece, but it was a resounding success at the time for its truculence, as well as for the fascination of its setting.

So Shakespeare, who had never been to Italy in his life, returned there for his second tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, and then for his third, Julius Caesar. The real protagonist, however, is not Caesar but Brutus, with his passion for freedom and his eternal uncertainty, counterbalanced by the strength and decisiveness of Mark Antony. It is Antony who incites the crowd against Brutus with his famous speech, yet it is also Antony who praises him, recalling over his dead body that Brutus killed Caesar not out of hatred but for the love for his country.

Not by chance, Antony is the most memorable character of the films inspired by Shakespeare’s play, not least because he is played by Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz in 1953; and by Charlton Heston in Stuart Burge’s Julius Caesar in 1970, also starring a young and handsome Richard Chamberlain in the role of Octavian. The last to bring the tragedy to the screen were the brothers Paolo and Emilio Taviani with Caesar Must Die, entrusted to the inmates of the Roman prison of Rebibbia and winning a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

Towards the end of his life, Shakespeare wrote two more tragedies set in ancient Rome. Coriolanus is one of his most political texts; the protagonist is at the head of the aristocratic faction, and when the people contest his election as consul, he becomes enraged, comparing the plebeians who attack the patricians to crows pecking at eagles. Exiled, he places himself at the head of an enemy people, the Volsci, and marches on Rome, but he is stopped by his mother. This double betrayal, first of the Romans, and then the Volsci, will cost him his life when the Volsci kill him.

The most famous Coriolanus in the history of modern theatre was played by Laurence Olivier, thanks also to the special effects with which his death was staged at the Old Vic theater; Olivier let himself fall backwards off the stage and is then hung upside down — a clear allusion to the end of Mussolini. More recently, a great Coriolanus was played by Ralph Fiennes, Joseph’s brother, who starred as the author himself in a film imbued with poetry, Shakespeare in Love.

Lastly, Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra, in which Cleopatra is obviously the protagonist. Enobarbus, Antony’s lieutenant, says of her: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety; other women cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry where most she satisfies; for vilest things become themselves in her, that the holy priests bless her when she is riggish.” More prosaically, a soothsayer warns Antony: “If you play with her at any game, you are sure to lose.” And Antony will lose everything; even his honor.

Cleopatra’s fleet flees in front of Octavian at Actium, and Antony’s fleet follows her. He is furious but willing to be reconciled: “Give me a kiss, and all will be forgiven.” But then Shakespeare describes a second battle, in which Antony is about to take revenge but is once again betrayed and defeated. This time Cleopatra realizes that the only way to be forgiven by him is to let Antony believe she has taken her own life, but he cannot bear the news, and instead of rushing to her, he commits suicide.

This tragedy inspired one of the most famous films in cinema history. Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra, together with Richard Burton’s Antony, gave a second life to this love story and would cause the Egyptian queen of centuries earlier — at the Egyptian court — to blush.

The British Empire is perhaps the one that has competed most directly with the Roman Empire: for the scope of its expansion, and thus for the distance from its centre to the periphery; for the heterogeneity of the peoples governed; for the limited number of troops available to hold immense territories; and for the need to have foreign soldiers fighting alongside them, sometimes against their own people.

In all this, the British were masters. They imposed their language, but not their religion or political system. They always endeavored to separate their enemies and prevent them from ganging up against London. They established a client relationship with local rulers, starting with the Indian rajas. They exerted a vast influence with their culture, but they also absorbed much from the lands they conquered, and not only in terms of gastronomy.

English hegemony was first and foremost commercial, and only later became military and political. And like the Romans, the British could lose a battle but not a war. They were defeated by the Mahdi in Sudan, by the Zulus at Isandlwana, by Rommel at Tobruk, but they always ended up winning.

Yet even the British Empire, like the Roman Empire, did not withstand the impact of history. It collapsed due to internal and external pressures. It did not resist the protests of the working class, more interested in laboring under better conditions than in fighting for the glory of the crown; and it surrendered to the independence movements championed in Asia and Africa by men who had studied in England, and who very often learned Latin.

And even though the title “Invictus” is posthumous, it is imperative to mention its splendid verses by William Ernest Henley, the Victorian poet who suffered several amputations due to a form of tuberculosis of the bones and who also inspired his friend Stevenson to create Long John Silver, the wooden-legged pirate from Treasure Island. Henley’s lines were Nelson Mandela’s favorite reading during the twenty-seven years he spent in South African prisons, and provided the title for a wonderful film by Clint Eastwood, starring Morgan Freeman: “It matters not how strait the gate / How charged with punishments the scroll, / I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul.”