ABSTRACT
IF THE DETAILS OF THE origins, rise and demise of Carausius are scarce, those for Allectus are nearly non-existent; as a result his career is seen as a mere adjunct to that of his leader. There is also an historiographic problem which has clouded the study of Allectus and so obscured consideration of him as a person in his own right. The implicit attitudes of modern scholars towards the protagonists scarcely vary from those expressed by Stukeley in the eighteenth century. The tendency is to see in Carausius a big, bold and brazen leaderfounder of ‘the queen’s navee’, an heroic figure. On the other hand Allectus has been relegated to the position of the villain of the tale, whose function was simply to put an end to the life of the bluff sailor hero and then to wait, supinely, to be extinguished by another heroic figure in British history, Constantius, the father of Constantine the Great.
