OK - here it is:
I have a slightly empty glass of tawny port in my hand and a thought has drizzled into my lazy mind. Why do I haunt this Late Roman period? Why do I drift as an addict in need of the next fix - be it an obscure source or the latest piece of research? Why THIS period and not that glittering epoch of Roman legions and marble columns festooned with Senators? Or the epics of Virgil? The Histories of Tacitus and Polybius?
Why do I wander like a vagabond in these twilight atriums, as it were?
And then I realised that I am not alone. That beside me here in these ruins of Empire wander other vagabonds, other vagrants - and that we all seem drawn to this strange period where shadows echo old glories and the tattered remnants of hallowed standards are raised aloft often in vain but never with timidity - and then I wondered on you all, all you whispering ghosts who drift here among the ruins and the unstitched tapestries, what drives you to haunt these dying days of Rome, of Empire, and finally of Legend?
I visit daily this forum and view often with marvel the posts and the debates and the nervous and sometimes fraught discussions about this period we all are drawn to so much - and wonder that we strive - for strive it is - among the details and the debates which obsess us. We raise questions and reveal points, sometimes with an authority who thunders behind us like a god, and always we fall into questions of this and that about the epoch we are drawn to -
And yet this damned port in my hand has made me realise that really perhaps we do not know yet among ourselves what it is that draws us here like moths to a flame . . .
We, in a sense, spark among ourselves but have yet to see the flame which burns among all of us . . .
We are a embattled group, to be sure, we that dwell in this dying period - not for us the debates about the hastati, the Marian reforms, the granting of Roman citizenship to all the inhabitants of the Empire, and so forth . . . To us, is that unglittering epoch of the unwritten and the least known. We are an outcast brethren perhaps - drawn to - what, I wonder?
So, my sloshing mind has this mad idea - that we introduce ourselves! Oh I am not talking about whether we feel Roman cavalry did this or that in the Late Roman period, or whether these barbarians, or those barbarians, did this or why, but simply why we are here at all!
Did I mention port is in my hand? I did? Then of course you will forgive my emotional tone - even if I confess this port is of course metaphorical and not actual in any real sense. I write as if. Nothing more.
So I want to open a very specific thread here and now. A thread where we actually introduce ourselves as the vagabonds we are.
So I suggest the following: a single post from each and every member who haunts these forums and also hunts in this period for what little scraps there actually are - a confession, if you will! A stepping into a little light and offering what it is we are and not what we are debating. I may be naive but perhaps we do not yet know ourselves.
I will begin of course - a single post now - I will add nothing later and I will not debate other posts. This is a confessio nothing more. An introduction, actually, glass in hand.
Will any of you join me, I wonder? Let's be honest. We are an odd Companye are we not? Driven to fall in amongst eachother around a campfire of shadows and half-forgotten tales?
A single post then - nothing more. No debate. No follow up. No discussion. Just a declaration. A confession.
And for myself? It is simple really. I live in a country which fell from Rome and was savagely inundated as a result. My myths are screwed into that sundering. Out of it came King Arthur. Out of it came the idea of a lost cause. That brought me into the later Roman period and those legions which fate now never names.
Little men strive harder for they have more to gain and lose.
Out of that simple and perhaps naive poetic rose my great love for this period - read my AARs and that is all you will find in them.
That is why I will always be here in this forum.
I will wake up in the morning and rue this perhaps as the metaphorical headache thunders through my head like the drums of the Alemanni marching to face Julian at Argentoratum - or will I?
Like all vagrants, it is always secretly heart-warming to meet a fellow on the least-trodden path - even if we spit at eachother like snakes!
A single post then - no follow up. No comment. No debate. An introduction, nothing more.
And as with all confessions, the act is far more important than the matter, is it not?