and to-day, though two, perhaps three, thousand years have passed since it first gave security to the primitive Winchester settlement below, the great camp still remains, keeping watch over the modern city like a sentinel forgotten, but still under orders, whom no change of guard has relieved. One other inheritance, besides these piled-up ramparts, these first Winchester burghers have left us, and that is a name. Cær Gwent, the Celtic name, first Romanized into Venta Belgarum, passed in Saxon days into Vintan-ceastir, or Venta the fortified, and so on by a natural transition has become the Winchester of to-day. What the name means is a venerable antiquarian puzzle, on which we prefer to hazard no opinion, nor indeed does it greatly matter. The name, like the city itself, is venerable in antiquity, and its origin, like that of the city itself, is lost in the mists of the past. And as we look round about us from this hill-top, and direct our eye up and down this valley, we begin to realize what it is that has made Winchester what it has been in the past, and what it is now: not merely the accident of circumstance, the flotsam and jetsam of human migratory tribes, floated fortuitously hither on the tidal waters of our southern estuaries and here casually deposited, but a natural centre in a great continuous stream of humanity, in which Celt and Belgan, Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Norman have all pushed forward, each eager to bear his part in the building of that great national polity, the England of to-day. CHAPTER III THE ROMAN OCCUPATION Foursquare to all the winds. The part played by physical causes, outlined above, is illustrated by the successive stages in the Roman occupation. The two first invasions by Julius Caesar were little more than desultory raids; the next, under Aulus Plautius and Vespasian in A.D. 43, had important and permanent results. Pevensey (_Anderida_), Portchester (_Portus Magnus_), and Southampton (_Clausentum_) were all occupied in turn; up the Itchen valley the invaders came, and its strategic position made them choose Venta Belgarum as their military base in the south of England. History is silent as to the actual occupation of Venta, but Bede and others mention the occupation of the Isle of Wight, and the silence of Roman writers on this point merely makes it clear that little resistance was encountered here. Nor does Roman literature give us any account of Venta; the only mention of it is in the Antonine Itineraries, the great road-book of the Roman Empire, dating probably from about 320 A.D.; but its importance in Roman days is to be inferred from the remains the Romans have left behind, as well as from Bede and other indirect evidence.