About the original author
and why he created this site
(and why I brought it back)

This website was originally created way back in the late 1990's by a guy who went by the Roman name of Victius Maximus... I LOVED this website!! It had SO MUCH great info and I came to it a lot. Alas, the site has been gone for years now -- the last I had heard, Victius had said that he had some severe health problems and that a friend was hosting the site for him. I cannot, for the life of me, find him and really hope he has not passed on :-o If you know of him -- how to contact him or just news, please contact me. Victius has contacted me -- he lives!!! More to come on this great news!!!

So... I know this: this website had been dead for at least 3-4 years or more. This website is FULL of really great information and needs be out there. Fortunately, I had saved it for reference -- now it lives again! My name, by the way, is Decimus Mercatius Varianus, a Roman reenactor of Legio IX Hispana. I will just go by my Roman name for now. :-)

Fortunately, I had downloaded the website to use as a reference -- Lucky in that when I needed to look something up and found the site was GONE, all was not lost. :-o When I saw the site was gone, I was sad, but knew I had saved it... I just had to find the site and files. I did some severe hard drive searching and found the site files, as the site was back then. It needed work. It had been built with "frames," a website layout system, which while it was cutting edge and looked good in 1999, nowadays it does not. Hard to search, hard for search engines to index, hard to look at on today's bigge rmonitors... yeah, change! So, it has taken MANY hours to get this site into a modern template form (vs. the old "frames" layout -- spit! Hiss! Ick!) thus allowing some real update and modification. (Of course, saying that, "modern" is a relative, as I use a program that is about 6 years old (ancient in computerdom) called GoLive CS2 and it doesn't work well in Win 7 >:-o Many now use the latest thing, Adobe Dreamweaver... however, I detest Dreamweaver and it's clunkiness -- sorry, it's built for "Code Monkeys" and not designers. It is also hard to use, unlike GL which I can easily use and drag things around to fix/update, etc. However, you don't wish to hear me rant about Adobe's poor busines practices. I will just say that GL CS2 is running just fine on my Win 7 machine. Thanks Eric!!  :-)

We have been updating pages as we go with newer, better, more updated information. Better art/photos, etc. More to come, really! We learn more lost info about the Romans all the time.

So anyway, now, we're moving forward. Check back often and let us know what you think. For now, use this e-mail addy: varianus@romanobritain.org

Here is the info for Victius Maximus:

I am Victius Maximus the creator and author of this website. Born in Harrow - just north of London - in 1953 and 6' 2" tall, I now live in Welwyn Garden City, which is near St. Albans, the site of Verulamium, the third largest town in Roman times.

By profession, I am a freelance computer systems designer/analyst/programmer and have travelled to many far flung places in the world both for the government and private companies.