The Strange Case Of... Julius Caesar and the Wicker Man
Before there was Edward Woodward, there was Rome's most celebrated emperor.
From crossing the Rubicon to squiring Cleopatra, Julius Caesar lived a pretty full life. Such was the richness of his experiences that the man who lent his name to both a calendar and a birthing method must have found Britain drearier than most tourists. In conquering (parts of) the UK in 55 BC, the Roman emperor discovered a whole new sort of exoticism.
Amazing as it might seem to those suffering through a particularly grim January, Britain offered the Romans riches that were unavailable elsewhere in their empire. For one thing, the purest gold available to Caesar came not from Africa or continental Europe but from the Welsh valleys.
And then there were the pagan displays of worship which included a rite that's been chilling people to the bone ever since Julius Caesar first recorded it for posterity in his Commentary On The Gallic War.
In describing the horrific event, Caesar also made reference to those responsible for it, people we would now recognise as the druids. But while he would describe them as "men of learning, given to discussions of stars and their movements, the size of the universe and of the earth", Caesar saw little of educational value in the violence the caped figures wrought - "They create wooden figures of immense size whose limbs, woven out of twigs, they fill with living men and set on fire. The men perish in a sheet of flame."
Some 2,000 years following Caesar's death, the sight of an effigy packed with human sacrifices being set alight would petrify a whole new generation of mankind. As people ran in terror from Robin Hardy's horror masterpiece, one wonders whether many were aware that the first person to have been scared half to death by The Wicker Man was none other than Rome's most celebrated emperor.