The Last Legion: A Novel

Most of us, I think, have a vague notion that Britain's King Arthur is a product of the dying, perhaps recently stone cold dead (at least in Britain), Western Roman Empire. Professor Valerio Massimo Manfredi's novel THE LAST LEGION (2002) imagines how Arthur might have been the son of Romulus Augustus, the last (western) Roman Emperor. And Manfredi firmly locates the future King Arthur's coming field of operations in southern Scotland and Northern England rather than, say, the earlier more popular Cornwall.

Deposed in 476 by a barbarian Gothic general Odoacer, young Romulus and his tutor Ambrosinus are exiled to Capri and guarded by Gothic warriors. A handful of legionaries loyal to the idea of non-Barbarian Rome, hastily thrown together by troubled, amnesiac Aurelianus Ambrosius Ventidius, aided by a woman warrior who is one of the founders of Venice, free both teen-age emperor and tutor and move together to Hadrian's wall on the border of today's Scotland and England. Pursued by Gothic warriors of Odoacer who had also co-opted a war band of Saxons, the emperor's few followers make contact with veterans of aa long disbanded Roman legion once stationed at Hadrian's wall.

In a decisive battle at the wall, the Romans fight off the Goths and Saxons, aided by veterans of the old legion, decked out in their long obsolete armor. That legion's banner still existed and displayed a red dragon. Romulus's tutor, whom we have long known to be a British Druid, resumes his non-Roman name of Myrdin, soon corrupted by local Britons to Merlin. Romulus, now using the name Pendragon, "son of the Dragon," became King of the Britons. After marrying the Celtic Ygraine, Romulus/Pendragon became father of the future King Arthur. The entire story is narrated by Merlin. At story's end young Arthur is five years old. His name came from "Arcturus," "born under the sign of the bear."

In his lonely wanderings during his captivity in the Emperor Trajan's ancient palace on Capri, young Romulus had found Julius Caesar's sword, the finest ever made. Its name would later be corrupted from a time-blurred Latin inscription on its blade (CAI.IUL.CAES.ENSIS CALIBURNUS) to Excalibur. At the end of his friends' great victory against Goths and Saxons at Mount Badon, young Romulus shouted "No more war! no more blood!" He then walked to a nearby lake, carrying Julius Caesar's mighty sword, "still dripping blood." "He hurled the sword far into the lake. Excalibur "plunged like a meteor into the heart of the moss-covered stone that rose at the center of the lake" (Ch. 37).

The final words of the tale are Merlin's: "Here my story ends. Here, perhaps, a legend is born."

Not a bad preparation for reading this excellent fictional evocation of the last days of the Western Roman Empire and the first days of Medieval Britain would be to watch the 2007 film derived from the novel. Styled, like its original, THE LAST LEGION, this arguably too compressed and simplified film is available in DVD. It stars Colin Firth (Aurelianus), Ben Kingsley (Ambrosinus/Merlin) and 1994 Miss Universe Aishwarya Rai as a warrior maiden serving the Eastern Roman Emperor. There is, indeed, a warrior woman in the novel, but she is Livia, a Roman survivor not an East Indian.

The film is not at all bad.

The novel is great. It successfully shows how the collapsing Empire might have looked to a handful of legionaries and to the post-Roman little people, mainly Celts, among whom they moved. The author is a scholar of the period and has also written a fictional trilogy on Alexander the Great. -OOO-