Roman Britain: How Multicultural Was It?

The row started with a children’s cartoon, said Rachael Revesz in The Independent.

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The BBC recently released an educational animation about life in Roman Britain that featured a high ranking Roman officer with dark skin. This infuriated one right-wing commentator, who tweeted: “Thank God the BBC is portraying Roman Britain as ethnically diverse. I mean, who cares about historical accuracy, right?” The Cambridge classicist Mary Beard replied: “This is indeed pretty accurate, there’s plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain.” Beard then found herself in the midst of a Twitter storm: she received what she called “a torrent of aggressive insults”, some of them from the risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Ta