Archive for September, 2007
In the fourth century BC, Pytheas of Massilia wrote of a notable temple and a city, both sacred to Apollo, that he had seen in Britain. His point of reference for what constituted “a notable temple of Apollo” would have been a stone structure with uprights and lintels somewhere in the Mediterranean, but I believe that we can be far more specific than this.
If we can reasonably single out an individual building that Pytheas was aware of when he saw his famous temple, then we can be more certain still that the structure he described was Stonehenge and that the City of Apollo he mentioned twice was the giant Iron Age earthwork we now know as Vespasian’s Camp. I believe that the magnificent circular building reconstructed in the drawing above figured prominently in the thoughts of Pytheas when he encountered the temple of Apollo in Britain, but to understand why, we have to recreate another voyage undertaken by Pytheas at some point in the fourth century BC.
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The Long and Winding Road
12:02 amSeptember the Third
10:59 pm
On September 3rd, 1650, Oliver Cromwell defeated a Scottish army at the Battle of Dunbar. On September 3rd 1651, he defeated another Royalist army at Worcester and there’s evidence that Cromwell deliberately waited so that the battle would take place on a day he considered auspicious for him.
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