Triads[1] treat it as one of the Three Silver Hosts led out of Britain, leaving it a prey to its foes: in fact, Elen's host is virtually to be equated with St. Ursula's host of 11,000 virgins, whom the Euhemerists wish to treat as brides intended for Maximus and his men. These virgins may be compared with the smaller suite of the heroine of an Irish romance to be mentioned shortly; but for those who tried to translate myth into history, they were hosts of armed men; so it became necessary to face the question, who the tyrant was who led those troops abroad, and the choice very naturally fell on Maximus, the Maxen of the Welsh Dream with which you are now acquainted. For history speaks[2] of his revolt in Britain, of his landing on the continent with the troops he could muster here, of his success in acquiring possession of Gaul and Spain, of the flight and death of the Emperor Gratian in the year 383. This, I take it, together with national vanity, was the cause that led to the substitution of Maxen for Emrys, and it supplies the key to a puzzle in the Nennian Genealogies,[3] which make Maxen descend from Constantine the Great: this was because Emrys is commonly represented as the son of Constantine.
- ↑ i. 40 = ij. 5.
- ↑ See Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1881), iij. 358—362. Gibbon is seldom detected napping, but I cannot help finding somewhat too much of the myth in his statement about Maximus (p. 360), that 'the youth of the island crowded to his standard, and he invaded Gaul with a fleet and army which were long afterwards remembered as the emigration of a considerable part of the British nation.'
- ↑ The British Museum MS. Harl. 3859, fol. 193b: see also the Annales Cambriæ, Preface, p. x.
