Ah they and welcome to emperors of Rome a podcast about the rulers of the

ancient Roman Empire I'm your host Matt Smith and with me as always is Dr.

Rianna Evans, a lecturer in ancient Mediterranean studies at Latrobe University.

In this episode and where we're going we don't need numbers you ask some

well-composed and thoughtful questions about Rome I butcher your names in the

process of reading them out and Rianen provides the answers. So question one comes from Owen O'Donnell, who is in

Glasgow. Why did the Romans not invade Ireland and what did the Irish and Romans know about each other?

The Romans did know about Ireland and they thought they knew things about the Irish or the people

who lived in what we call Ireland now, they called it Hibernia.

They didn't invade Ireland probably because it was a step too far. The invasion of

Britain and also conquests on right on the other side of Empire in the Middle East kind of

stretched the empire really far.

What the Romans thought they knew about the Irish, the earliest text I know comes from

Straibo, who's a Greek geographer who's living around the time of Augustus and Tiberius. Remember this is before the Romans

of invaded Britain even. He says that Britain's not really worth invading. Julius Caesar went

there but there's nothing really there, which is often seen as a way of

excusing why Caesar didn't invade and indeed Augustus didn't invade after that and

he says there's another island out beyond Britannia and it's a place of kind of monstrous beings.

He says that they marry their mothers and they eat other humans, so they're man eaters and they commit incest. So it's clearly a case,

you know, Streboe didn't know and he hadn't been there or talked to anyone who had been there,

but this is so far beyond the Roman

imagination that that's the place where these strange goings on happen.

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