Arcturus Rex, Romanus
King Arthur
Dr dear Dr: Is there any basis in history for the Story of King Arthur?
When the medieval legends of a King Arthur first came out, in the 1100s and 1200s and 1300s, it was assumed that these legends were simple stand alone spiritual guides for young knights in Britain and France and Wales and that the basis in history for these stories, The Queste for the Holy Grail, La Morte d'Arthur, The Knights of the Round Table, The Life of Merlin and so on, lay in some proximate past around the time of the knights of the then solemn era. Nobody thought that the source of the legends was located far back in history in the time of the transition of the Romans around 420 to 480 AD, as is now generally accepted by Arthurian scholars, namely that the legends of Arthur or Arcturus Rex are as the name suggests were hoary with antiquity and arise from the Roman period as such, at least nobody until the ground breaking research of Geoffrey Ashe, historian.
According to these researches, a Roman knight, arose in the time of the great withdrawal of the Roman legionaries from Britain after 410 AD who united all the tribes of the Roman Britains and fought against the incoming invaders of the Jutes and Angles and barbarians generally, as he united the country behind him and became the legend of story and myth-making much like Cassiobellinus many centuries before, but above all and beyond the indicators, this was a Roman legend in history, as the name suggests, and moreover it was one more legend arising from the stories of the legionaries themselves, since a whole series of great Roman generals had arisen over time, from 500 BC to 1500 AD who formed early archetypes for the legend of Arthur the Romano-British King. Having spoken to a real and genuine expert, such legendary Roman generals one can name on one's fingers:
Scipio Africanus,
Sulla,
Crassus,
Pompey,
Julius Caesar,
Agricola,
Vespasian,
Titus,
Julius Nepos,
Aetius, and
Belisarius,
and so on, but especially in the extraordinary life of Agricola. All these great Roman generals held the unwavering devotion of the legionaries under them and many stories circulated about them.
It is out of this kind of thing that the legends of the Roman knight Arcturus Rex arose, the round table, the knights of Sarmatia, the stories of Hadrian's Wall, the story of the magical sword Excalibur, and the story of the druid Merlin, all such legends were typical of the time for Roman generals too. Even the sword in the stone story has its basis in history as the legionaries often would plunge the hilt of their swords into the stone fixtures of temples of Neptune before undertaking river and water crossings at that time. So it is all there in history if one cares to look and study the genre. Even Hollywood now accepts this line of thinking, with its swashbuckling roman epic, King Arthur, featuring Clive Owen and Keira Knightley. A nice Romano-British romp. Historians of the period of the announcement of the end of the Roman occupation of Britain under the decree in 410 AD of Emperor Honorius, such as Nennius and Gildas, detailing the chaos resulting can also be found nowadays and their harrowing works can be located in an Amazon book search. Very nice indeed. So yes, it seems there is some understandable basis in history for such later medieval write-ups of the original Roman legends.