CLASSICAL CORNER

FORTEANA FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD

BARRY BALDWIN

271: NOT ARTHUR DALEY This is the tale of a Roman military officer mentioned in no Græco-Roman literary sources, who is often marketed as the prototype of King Arthur, who probably never existed. In cause is Lucius Artorius Castus. The Arthurian link has most recently been raised in Graham Robb’s The Debatable Land: The Lost World Between Scotland and England (2017), adumbrated thus by Hugh Thomson in The Spectator (2 Feb 2018): “The King Arthur of legend was a Roman centurion called Artorius, who led resistance to a powerful Scottish invasion around 180 AD. As described by the chronicler Cassius Dio, this was the biggest war fought anywhere in the Roman Empire during that time, and for a while a near catastrophe for the Romans – the Scottish got as…

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Fortean Times (Digital) - 1 Issue, 419

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