16
The British Islands
methods of hunting and fishing, of agriculture, of sheep and cow breeding, were much better; their trade with their brothers in France was far greater. Before they, in their turn, were conquered, they had found out the use of iron for tools and weapons. Flint had gone down before bronze; so now bronze, which is a soft metal and takes time to make, rapidly went down before the cheap and hard grey iron. He who has the best tools will win in the fight with Nature; he who has the best weapons will beat his fellow men in battle.
Growth of empires in distant lands.Meanwhile, far away in the East, great empires had been growing up and decaying for six or seven thousand years. Each contributed something to civilization, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece; each in turn made a bid for conquering and civilizing the ‘known world’. But the world that they knew stretched little beyond the warm and tideless Mediterranean Sea. Rome.After all these arose the mighty empire of Rome, the heiress and conqueror of all these civilizations and empires. Rome brought to her task a genius for war and government which none of them had known. The Roman armies had passed in conquest into Spain, into France, and from France they passed to Britain. Caesar's Invasion of Britain, 55, 54 B.C.The greatest of Roman soldiers, Caius Julius Caesar, who was conquering the Celts in France, landed somewhere in Kent, about fifty years before Christ's birth. He found it a tough job to struggle up to the Thames, which he crossed a little above London; tough, almost as much because of the forests as because of the valiant Britons, although in the open field these were no match for the disciplined Roman regiments called ‘legions’. It is this Caesar who wrote the first account of our island and our people which has come down to us.