The Roman Invasion: Gods on Hadrian’s Wall (Ep 2)

The Romans massacred the Druids on Anglesey—yet decades later, legionaries on Hadrian’s Wall were dedicating altars to local Celtic gods. This apparent contradiction is the puzzle at the heart of this episode. Historian Eleanor Barraclough joins hosts Anita Anand and William Dalrymple to explain how Roman religious policy worked in practice, and why the empire’s approach to foreign deities was far more inclusive than the Druid episode suggests.

The Druid Problem Was Political, Not Theological

The key to understanding the paradox, Barraclough explains, is that the Roman hostility toward Druids was never about the gods they worshipped. What the Romans found threatening was that the Druids were a political institution—an organized indigenous network capable of coordinating resistance to Roman rule. Julius Caesar had encountered this problem in Gaul, and the same dynamic likely played out on Anglesey. The Druids also practiced human sacrifice, which the Romans outlawed even as they accepted animal sacrifice. But the sources for Druidic human sacrifice come almost entirely from Roman writers like Caesar, who had every incentive to paint the practice in the most lurid colors possible. As Barraclough notes, the accounts of "bloody sacred groves where the bodies are hanging up" are propaganda as much as reportage—"cinematic,"