Colors of time

The history of a place is not painted in one broad brush-stroke of color, is almost never the tale of one people arriving and adapting in some empty, virgin land. Few if any peoples can truly say they have always been in the place they now call home. (Some fancy word that I cannot now remember describes such a phenomenon -- I want to say ichthyonous or erechthonous or something.)

Most often, the pigments of history blend together: Britons, Angles and Saxons clashing and then finally melding, in the British Isles; Arabs and Copts forming the modern nation of Egypt.

Other times, the colors never meet on the canvas. How much history passed away in the Americas, how many peoples rose and fell from the Aleutians to Patagonia, before ever Christopher Columbus' boot pressed into the New World sand! Some experts are beginning to think that what most of the early Europeans saw in the New World was just a shadow of what had been -- a once vast and teeming multitude of peoples almost totally annihilated by European diseases, within just a few decades.

Tonight I have begun to read the next author in my chronological project: the Roman historian Tacitus. He begins his Annals of Roman History with a brief mention of Augustus Caesar, then of Tiberius and a mutiny in Pannonia.

That caught my attention. Pannonia was the northeast border of the Empire, the land that is today called Hungary. It intrigues me to think of those Roman troops, in their tents, in that land, scheming and cussing and playing dice, doing whatever it is that soldiers do, seven hundred years before Magyars ever rode out of Eurasia to settle in that beautiful place.

The Romans were long gone by then. The two peoples drank from the same Danube (relatively speaking), ascended the same hills, perhaps even sought shade under some of the same venerable old trees, but never knew each other and never met.

Today, now and then, Hungarians still dig up buried Roman coins, and of course, in Budapest are the famous ruins of Aquincum, a Roman settlement.

It's just intriguing to me.