Introduction
Geoffrey of Monmouth (?-1155) was residing in Oxford when, in the 1130s, he wrote his majestic History of the Kings of Britain, in which he entrances us with tales of Merlin and Arthur. He also seized on a throwaway remark in the ninth-century chronicle History of the Britons, that ‘The island of Britain derives its name from Brutus, a Roman consul’, to romance the following tale.
BRUTUS was a prince of Italy, and the great-grandson of Aeneas, the hero of Troy.* Before he was born, it was prophesied that he would travel far away and come to the highest pitch of glory, but not before he had slain his own parents. And so it happened. For his mother died in childbirth, and when he was fifteen, Brutus shot his own father in a hunting accident. Banished from Italy for this crime, he fled to Greece.
There he distinguished himself as a man of courage and integrity, and when it was discovered that he was of Trojan descent, other Trojans flocked to him, and appealed to him to deliver them from their long subjection to the Greeks. So he gathered the Trojans in fortresses lent to him by a sympathetic Greek named Assaraeus, and despatched to King Pandrasus a letter demanding either liberty, or safe passage to some land of their own.
Pandrasus chose to fight; but the generalship and courage of Brutus were too much for him. Not only did Brutus have the victory, but took the king’s daughter Ignoge to wife; yet he was still resolved to leave Greece and establish a kingdom of Trojans.
The story of Aeneas’s adventures after the Fall of Troy was told in the epic poem Aeneid (19 BC) by Roman poet Virgil, in order to provide a heroic backstory for the founding of the City of Rome. This helps us to date Geoffrey’s improbable tale. The ten years of the Trojan War were assigned by ancient historian Eratosthenes (who assumed it was a historical event) to 1194–1184 BC. Geoffrey now linked Brutus’s conquest of the British Isles to the reign of Aeneas’s grandson Sylvius Aeneas, Brutus’s uncle, as King of Italy, a reign which according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus lasted from 1110 to 1079 BC. Geoffrey also dates Brutus’s settlement in the British Isles to the time of Eli, the priest who brought up Samuel (?1070-?1012) and died of grief when the Ark of the Covenant was taken by the Philistines. So the events described here are supposed to have happened early in the eleventh century BC.
Précis
According to mediaeval chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, the first King of Britain was named Brutus. Banished from his birthplace in Italy after accidentally killing his father, Brutus fled to Greece. There he helped other men of Trojan descent (Brutus was Aeneas’s great-grandson) overthrow their oppressive king, Pandrasus, before striking out with his companions to found a kingdom of his own. (60 / 60 words)
According to mediaeval chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, the first King of Britain was named Brutus. Banished from his birthplace in Italy after accidentally killing his father, Brutus fled to Greece. There he helped other men of Trojan descent (Brutus was Aeneas’s great-grandson) overthrow their oppressive king, Pandrasus, before striking out with his companions to found a kingdom of his own.
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