The day Julius Caesar visited Castlefield and invented the pizza

It is a compelling thought and is the stuff that breaks orthodox historical accounts of the Romans, Manchester, and the pizza.

The Emperor Augustus …on the Via Fori Imperiali

But alas it is not so.  

Julius Caesar’s two explorative adventures across the Channel got no further than Kent, and while we know the Romans cooked flat bread, the combination of a dough smeared with tomato sauce had to wait till the tomato was brought back from the Americas in the 16th century.

Likewise, my picture of the Emperor Augustus is but a replica, and while some confuse Julius Caesar’s power grab as the start of the Imperial system of government it wasn’t.  He was a dictator, and it would be his nephew Octavian  who set the Principate up in 27 BC.

This we know because we can follow the historical sources, and as the years roll by more are revealed on every aspect of the past.

And these are the tools of the historian ….. not gossip, not guesses or imaginative speculation, but the words of past historians, along with all sorts of documents, diaries, and accounts which, and this is the important bit can be cross checked against other evidence as well as the archaeological record.

There will always be an element of doubt given that much has been lost, but enough remains to piece together a story, whether it be Caesar’s “day out” to Britain, the real Roman invasion in 43 AD, or the cultivation of the tomato by the peoples of Central and South America.

Of course, it is always be up to those of us who write the stuff to publish those sources, with links to where everyone else can read them, otherwise we are no more than purveyors of fantasies.

And today the internet offers a rich body of material which until relatively recently was only available to scholars in the know.

Many original works have sat for decades on dusty shelves in University libraries across the world, but can now be read as more and more of them are digitalized along with census records, wills, probates, and even the humble electoral register.

Neapolitan pizza, Varese, 2020

When my sisters researched our family in the 1970s, they were forced to travel across the east Highlands in search of burial records and gravestones.

Just a decade ago the same search was but the price of a subscription to a genealogical platform and a few hours at the computer.

The result can sometimes be quite surprising and alter what we thought about our family and by extension what ever piece of historical research is being undertaken.

All of which means history never sits still.  So, our knowledge will change with new discoveries and with it come new interpretations, making the study of the past messy but also very exciting.

It is after all a bit of a detective story and just like a detective we should never just accept what we are offered, but always question it, ask for verification and match it against what we already know.

Pictures; Emperor Augustus, Rome, 2008, and a Neapolitan pizza, 2020, from the collection of Andrew Simpson