英语听力：爱尔兰的故事—7

The murdered man from the Meath bog reveals something of how the Irish lived several hundreds years before Christ. Their gods were the gods of nature whom they appeased with sacrifice. They had developed a social organisation with kings at the pinnacle of power. Their artwork was delicate and distinctive. And they were already linked by trade to the cultures of classical world.

Clonycavan Man and his contemporaries left no written record. Our distant ancestors exist for us as tantalising shadows. And when the story of that ancient Irish world starts to be written, thenarrative is scripted for us by others.

The writers of the classical world conjured their own stories of Ireland. In the ninth century B.C., the Greek poet Homer described the whole of northwestern Europe as “a land of fog and gloom, beyond it is a sea of death where hell begins”.

But our first detailed account of Ireland comes long after classical Greece has been overtaken by an all-conquering new power.

750 years after Homer, the Romans invaded Britain. Julius Caesar landed here on the Kent coast in 55 B.C. Now given his restless ambition, it would have seemed natural for him to complete conquest the Britain and then move on to invade the neighbouring island. But in Caesar's mind, Ireland was a place of fearful myth. He called it Hibernia, the land of winter.