Decline of the Roman death cult. Source

TL: DR

• 'The Romans' were fabricated from the physical artifacts, memories and customs left by the Holy Roman Empire.
• 17th and 18th century England's links to this more recent Rome are passed off as 'the Augustan Age'.

No first-hand accounts of the Roman Empire survive.

So when Edward Gibbon's editor wrote in 1835:

This vast design of Gibbon... will... render “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” an unapproachable subject to the future historian.

what he really meant was:

If anyone questions our new narrative, hit them over the head with this.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_era:

The term Augustan literature is often used for Augustan drama, Augustan poetry and Augustan prose in the period 1700–1740s.

The term 'Augustan' refers to the acknowledgement of the influence of Latin literature from the ancient Roman Republic.[3]

Reference [3] is to Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England, Roger D. Lund, (Ashgate, 2013), ch. 1.

And let's not forget Latin music. On his 18th century travels around England, John Byng noted Italian operettas everywhere, including the few remaining church services. Describing a Lincoln Cathedral service in Tour into Lincolnshire, 1791, p. 346 John Byng says:

the Litany was chanted in the middle isle by two lay-vicars with voices like bulls. When this duty is well done, it becomes the best spiritual concert; better than those at which you are overwhelmed by fiddlers, and Italian singers.

Operetta offended John Byng's German sensibilities. Source: In The Night Garden - Daisy's Big Loud Sing Song

From Augustan Drama (Wikipedia) again:

opera, which had crossed over to England in the Restoration, experienced an enormous surge in popularity with Italian grand opera in England in the 1710s and 1720s.

Maybe. But as we shall see, Italian culture dominated England long before the 18th century. That is, England - and presumably Britain - had been under rulers that were culturally 'Roman'.

For example:

From An Analysis of Shakespeare's 'Antony and Cleopatra’ in Historical Context, Glen Rix:

James VI (1566 - 1625) of Scotland [became]James I of England in 1603 [and] presented himself as a universal peacemaker, drawing parallels between himself and Augustus Caesar, the first Roman Emperor

and

An example of James’s self-image as the new Augustus is a coronation medal which was minted for distribution to his new subjects, depicting James ‘wearing a laurel leaf, while a Latin inscription proclaimed him Caesar Augustus of Britain, Caesar the heir of the Caesars’

James I's 1603 coronation medal proclaims him Caesar. Source

James II (1603 - 1701) also presented as Roman. A scaly-chested Roman:

James II, Trafalgar Square. Source

James II also granted Nova Caesara to George Carteret and John Berkeley. Nova Caesara is now part of New Jersey.

Credit to Fawkes and BusyBaci for evidencing the two James's as Romans.

So, an alternative explanation for operetta's alleged rise as pop art is that England's recently freed slaves were making cargo cults of the entertainment their former masters had enjoyed so much.

Perhaps that's why England's new 'Hannoverian' king pretended to be Roman. Like the 20th century Saxe-Coburgs pretended to be Windsors, you gotta be in with the crowd.

Again from Augustan Drama (Wikipedia):

King George I (1660 - 1727) referred to himself as "Augustus,"

Augustan drama has a reputation as an era of decline.

King George I was indeed escaping 'decline'. From King George I (Wikipedia):

Georg Ludwig... was... ruler of the Duchy and Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg (Hanover) within the Holy Roman Empire (Wikipedia).

Orthodox history tells us Augustan literature began to change in just the same way long-gone Roman literature had changed. From Augustan Drama (Wikipedia) on Roman Empire literature:

the literature of Rome during Augustus moved from historical and didactic poetry to the poetry of highly finished and sophisticated epics and satire.

And from the same Wikipedia page on Augustan literature:

the early 18th century was an age of satire and public verse, and in prose, it was an age of the developing novel.

Recently, orthodox history has begun to acknowledge that England had already absorbed 'Italian' culture long before King Georg Ludwig Augustus I of England immigrated.

From Shakespeare's Knowledge of Italy:

Italian culture and literature permeated all of Elizabethan literature and drama (not just Shakespeare) to a much greater extent than anybody realized a century ago;

They mean Italian 'scaffold' - sorry: 'stage' - theatre (Ie, lethal mimic plays, Punch, Harlequin, etc) but they won't say that. So they try to explain it in other ways.

From Shakespeare and Italy: A literary love affair

Italian settings were fashionable for writers of 17th century Britain, partly just because the country was exotic as a foreign location, but Italy captured the imagination far more than any of Britain's other European neighbours.

Italians were thought to be particularly passionate, charismatic and devious, making them perfect characters both for lofty tragedies set at court, and for comedies.

But that seems an odd thing to say given that England and the English were ravaged in the 16th and 17th centuries while fighting to rid themselves of Holy Roman Catholic 'culture'.

Shakespeare has been called a propagandist for Italy because about 30% of the Shakespearean dramas are set there. But the political objectives for sanitising Italy have never been adequately explained and the claim remains controversial.

Perhaps a real propaganda objective for the Shakespeare project was to lead English culture away from its continuing cargo cult of Roman stage savagery. And to create a new, friendly Italy following the real, final defeat of the original Roman Empire.

That's all a bit high-falutin'. Let's bring it down to earth again, where we find physical evidence mistakenly being dated as 1,600 year old Roman remains.

Roman skeletons, for example, seem to resist decomposition remarkably well:

Praetorium excavation scene from Time Team: Castor (2011) not Shallow Grave (1994). Source: Time Team Castor S16 Ep08

These people died in a catastrophic disaster.

Before the disaster, was the difficult issue of what happened in praetoriums:

Payment in kind at the Praetorium. Source

Praetoriums became Guildhalls. Called 'Tollbooths' in Scotland. They were - and often still are - tax offices.

Payment was made in kind.

Are these 1,600 year old Roman remains, or are they 600 year old medieval remains, asks another Time Team episode:

You say Roman, I say Norman. Source: Time Team: Piercebridge episode

Peter Hill was a stonemason and former Clerk of Works at Lincoln Cathedral, England. Hill died on 19 March 2022.

From Peter Hill's obituary:

he appeared on the Time Team programme based in Wickenby, where he had to inform the locals that the columns that many presumed were of Roman date actually belonged to the 18th century.

Dating 17th and 18th century artifacts to Roman times seems to be a common mistake. From A few Brief Notices on the Old Tolbooth at the Cross of Glasgow, Removed in 1814, &c, Gabriel Neil, 1857-11-02, Proceedings of the Glasgow Archaeological Society:

It is said to be stated in old document that before the Reformation there stood at the north-east corner of the Trongate a building named the "Praetorium," which seems to have included within its walls a town hall or court-house, and prison.

So... Glasgow's 'Old Tolbooth' kept its Roman name for 1,200 years - through several invasions - only changing with the Reformation - when Europe's Holy Roman Empire began to decline.

Or from Wikipedia's description of landmarks on Lincoln High Street:

The Stonebow and Guildhall... replaced an earlier gate, possibly Norman, but conceivably the south gate of the Roman city.

Some researchers have simply come out with it and said: Rome's invasion of England is a literary fraud:

• Timothy Taylor's Time Warp article

• The three UNZ chronology articles mirrored on Stolen History.net:

  • How Fake is Roman Antiquity?
  • How Fake is Church History?
  • How Long Was the First Millennium?

• Rome was Rommeswael, destroyed in the St Felix floods of 1530.. Wikipedia: Reimerswaal.

• Andreas Churilov, author of The Last Day of Pompeii The Story of the Eruption of Vesuvius and the Death of Pompeii.

• Jef Demolder - Pompeii Destroyed in 1631

• George Cornewell Lewis: An Inquiry Into the Credibility of the Early Roman History - Vol I, 1855, and Vol II, 1855.

If the map at the top does show the cleansing of north west Europe of the Holy Romans, then perhaps it also helps date this:

• Why is a Roman viaduct in Germany buried beneath lignite and sediment? Part 1, and Part 2

• And this observation from Tealby, the Taifali, and the end of Roman Lincolnshire, Lincolnshire History and Archaeology Vol. 46, 2011, Thomas Green:

the general archaeological ‘invisibility’ of the Britons of the post-Roman period,

And, possibly, this:

Map of Urnfield Culture. Source: An Urnfield Culture at Rennes-Les-Bains and Beyond?

Although - gratitude where gratitude is due - some slaves were given a break:

Another Roman villa bites the dust. Source: Westworld S01 Ep04

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