My Spring 2024 MANCENT teaching

I'm repeating my Mancent online course on Screening Britannia from this January. Anybody who fancies joining, you can sign up through Eventbrite. Anyone who pays the full course fee will get the recordings. Alternatively, you can book for individual sessions here. 

I'm also doing a London mythology walk for MANCENT, going down Pall Mall and towards Victoria. 

And finally, another walk I'm doing for MANCENT is a visit to Roman Colchester. 

 MANCENT's full Spring 2024 prospectus can be found here.

Screening Britannia course update

I have delayed the start of my MANCENT course on Roman Britain on film for two weeks, due to health reasons. It will now run 18 September - 27 November. Tickets still available. All sessions recorded, so you don't have to attend live if it's inconvenient.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/screening-britannia-roman-britain-in-film-television-full-course-tickets-678280474157

Command structures of the Roman auxilia in the early Empire

Roman auxiliary infantry crossing a river, from Hadrian's Wall.

I’m currently studying a FutureLearn course on Hadrian’s Wall, brushing up my knowledge in hopeful anticipation of being able to teach Roman Britain again in the Fall semester. This week, however, I haven’t got much done, as I have fallen down a rabbit hole of the Roman auxilia, the auxiliary troops that sat beside the legions in the Roman military. The following essay is the result of that. I should make clear that, though I have taught the Roman army as part of various courses for twenty years now, and read quite a bit on the subject. I do not consider myself an expert in this field, so all of this has to be provisional, pending the arrival of the better-informed.

There are two misconceptions about the auxilia that I have come across over the years. The first is easily dealt with; that the auxiliaries were primarily a light-armed force, providing troops that the legions did not. Whilst the Auxilia undoubtedly included light-armed troops and skirmishers, as well as cavalry and specialist units such as archers, many, if not the majority of auxiliary infantry units, such as the Tungrians and Batavians that won the battle of Mons Graupius for the Romans,[1] fought as close-order heavy infantry.[2] They were equipped in a similar fashion to legionaries, though with some differences, such as the use of the oval, flat clipeus as a shield instead of the semi-cylindrical scutum.[3] This would limit their ability to carry out certain manoeuvres, such as the famous testudo (tortoise) formation. The use of the thrusting hasta (spear) rather than the thrown pilum (javelin) would also impose slightly different tactics. At the siege of Placentia in 69 CE (a prelude to the first Battle of Cremona), Tacitus talks about the ‘legions in a dense line, the auxiliaries spread out’.[4] Again, the use of the clipeus rather than the scutum might prevent the auxiliaries fighting in as close order as the legions, being less able to interlock their shields. But Tacitus is only talking about one battle here, not making a general statement.

It is also possible that the auxiliaries were less intensively trained than the legions, though the evidence here is unclear.[5] It is certain that, as (predominantly, at least until the mid-second century CE) non-citizens, the auxiliaries had less status that the legions.

The other idea that persists in a lot of modern sources is the assumption that somehow the auxiliary units were administratively part of the legions. This idea is particularly embraced by writers of fiction, and is expressed in designations such as ‘Fourth Gaulish Auxiliaries of the Second Legion’ (in Rosemary Sutcliff’s Eagle of the Ninth).[6] I know of no inscription in which an individual auxiliary unit is described in these terms.

There are, however, a few bits of evidence that might suggest links with the legions. Simon James in Rome & the Sword cites two passages of Tacitus.[7] The first comes from Annals 13.35, where Tacitus talks of the movement of a legion from Germany to Armenia with (in James’ translation) ‘its alae of cavalry and cohortes of foot.’[8] Unfortunately, Tacitus’ text is a little more equivocal here than James’ translation makes it. The Latin is ex Germania legio cum equitibus alariis et peditatu cohortium. There is no possessive pronoun in there. This doesn’t make James’ translation wrong – Latin doesn’t use possessive pronouns as much as English, and often prefers to indicate possession through implication. But the ambiguity means that this passage could be translated as ‘a legion from Germany, along with cavalry alae and infantry cohorts’, and nothing is explicit is being said about a link between the legion and the auxiliaries, other than that they have all come from Germany. This makes it difficult to base an argument on this excerpt.

James’ second passage, Tacitus Histories 1.59, is more significant. Here Tacitus speaks of ‘eight Batavian cohorts, the auxilia of XIV Legion, but which had, due to the strife of the time, separated from the legion.’[9] Additionally, in Gaius Caligula’s German campaign of 40 CE, legates (presumably of the legions) had responsibility for summoning auxiliary units.[10] There is also epigraphic evidence in which the formula legio … et auxilia eius appears, ‘x Legion and its auxilia’.[11] To this may be added inscriptions showing legionary centurions in (acting) command of auxiliary units.[12]

It must be noted that this sort of evidence is rare, and on that basis it seems safest to conclude with the likes of George Cheesman, Adrian Goldsworthy and Ian Haynes, that the auxilia were in general independent units.[13] The evidence from Tacitus and inscriptions would suggest that at times some auxiliary units were attached to legions, but it seems better to assume with Cheesman that these were ad hoc and impermanent arrangements, rather than the regular system.[14]

But this raises another question, one which isn’t as thoroughly discussed in the literature as might be hoped – to whom were the auxiliary units responsible? Obviously, those units specifically attached to a legion would be commanded by the legate of that legion. But more generally on campaign, the auxiliaries went alongside the legions and under the same commander, rather than be directed by legionary legates. In Britain in 55 BCE Julius Caesar seems to have treated his legates and auxiliary prefects on an equal footing.[15] At the battle of Mons Graupius, Agricola seems to have directed his auxiliary units without reference to any intermediate command structure.[16]

But what of peacetime? To whom did the prefect of a fort on Hadrian’s Wall report? Who decided it was time for I Tungrians to move on from Vindolanda and be replaced by IX Batavians? It has to be said that there is not a great deal of evidence. There are inscriptions that indicate auxiliary units could be brigaded together under a single officer.[17] But these arrangements may, like the attachments to legions, have been uncommon and temporary. It has been suggested that Hadrian’s Wall was controlled from the fort at Stanwix, on the grounds that this was the largest fort on the Wall, and housed the most prestigious auxiliary unit on the wall, the 1,000-strong Ala Petriana, the only ala millaria (‘thousand-strong ala’) in the whole of the province.[18] It is certainly true that the commander of that unit would be the most prestigious commander of an auxiliary unit on the Wall – indeed, in the province. But, as Breeze and Dobson point out, it doesn’t necessarily follow that he had overall command in the area. In any case, that only defers the question – to whom did the brigade commanders report?

Ultimately, of course, the auxiliary commanders were responsible to the governor in the province, who commanded all troops. But was there any intermediate level of command? In a modern army, we would expect so. As a consequence it has been argued, for instance by Laurence Keppie, that even if the auxiliary units were not formally attached to the administrative structure of the legions, nonetheless the legions had a degree of control over the auxiliary units around them.[19] 

The problem is, as Breeze and Dobson point out, there’s precious little evidence for legionary legates exercising such authority. If anything, the evidence is the other way, suggesting that auxiliary commanders communicated with provincial governors directly. A papyrus dated to 103 CE features the governor of Egypt writing directly to the commander of an auxiliary cohort.[20] One might also note an inscription from Rough Castle on the Antonine Wall in Scotland that reveals a legionary centurion in (presumably temporary) command of an auxiliary cohort.[21] The centurion has not come from the closest legion, VI Victrix at York, but from XX Legion at Chester.

In one of the Vindolanda tablets, Flavius Cerialis, commander of IX Batavians, writes to Crispinus to ask the latter to put in a good word for Cerialis with Marcellus, the provincial governor.[22] Unfortunately, apart from his being in a position to do Cerialis a favour, we know nothing more about Crispinus, or the position he held.

It seems likely to me that the command structure of an army on campaign, where the legions and auxiliaries were all independently responsible to the overall army commander, was replicated in peacetime, with the auxiliary prefects directly responsible to the provincial governor, in his role as commander of the army of the province.[23] The governor’s staff must have been considered sufficient for the bureaucratic and administrative needs of the auxiliary units in the province.

This does not mean that the legate of a legion could not order the commander of an auxiliary unit around. The legionary legate was a senator, of a higher social rank to the equestrians from which the auxiliary commanders were drawn, and appointed directly by the emperor.[24] It would be a brave auxiliary prefect who would refuse without very good reason a legionary legate’s reasonable request, e.g. to send a vexillation of troops. But this authority of the legionary legates over the prefects was rather more informal than it has sometimes been conceived as.

Of course, everything changed with the army and provincial reforms of the third and fourth centuries, but that is beyond the scope of this essay.

Works cited

Breeze, David J., and Dobson, Brian (2000), Hadrian’s Wall, 4^th edn, London: Penguin

Cheesman, George Leonard (1914), The Auxilia of the Roman Imperial Army, Oxford: Clarendon Press (pagination from 2018 edition, Frankfurt am Main: Outlook)

D’Amato, Raffaele (2012), Roman Centurions 31 BC–AD 500, Oxford: Osprey Publishing

Dobson, Brian, and Mann, J.C. (1973), ‘The Roman Army in Britain and Britons in the Roman Army’, Britannia 4, 191–205

Forty, Simon (2018), Hadrian’s Wall: From Construction to World Heritage Site. A Journey Along the Wall, and Back in Time, Yeovil: Haynes.

Goldsworthy, Adrian (2000 [2019]), Roman Warfare, London: Cassell & Co. (pagination from 2019 edn, New York: Basic Books)

Goldsworthy, Adrian (2003), The Complete Roman Army, London: Thames & Hudson

Haynes, Ian (2013), Blood of the Provinces: The Roman Auxilia and the Making of Provincial Society from Augustus to the Severans, Oxford: Oxford University Press

James, Simon (2011), Rome & the Sword: How Warriors & Weapons Shaped Roman History, London: Thames & Hudson

Keppie, Lawrence (1983), The Making of the Roman Army: From Republic to Empire, London: Batsford.

Sutcliff, Rosemary (1954 [1977]), The Eagle of the Ninth, Oxford: Oxford University Press (pagination from 1977 edn, London: Puffin)

---

My thanks to Eric Morse for sharing some thoughts with me on this topic.

[1] Tacitus, Agricola 36.1–2.

[2] Goldsworthy 2000 [2019], 113; Haynes 2013, 274.

[3] On auxiliary equipment, see Goldsworthy 2003, 136. I am oversimplifying here – as Haynes 2013, 239–249 argues, there would have been considerable variety in terms of equipment from auxiliary unit to auxiliary unit.

[4] Tacitus, Histories 2.22: densum legionum agmen, spara auxiliorum.

[5] The suggestion is made in Dobson and Mann 1973, 195.

[6] Sutcliff 1954 [1977], 17 (ch. 1: ‘Frontier Fort’).

[7] James 2011, 303 n. 32.

[8] Cavalry units in the auxilia were termed alae (singular ala), which can be translated as ‘wings’, though it’s more common to retain the Latin term. Infantry units were cohorts (singular cohors), usually anglicized as ‘cohorts’.

[9] octo Batavorum cohortes, quartae decimae legionis auxilia, tum discordia temporum a legione digressae.

[10] Suetonius, Life of Caligula 44.

[11] Cheesman 1914 [2018], 40 n. 146, cites three examples – CIL [Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum] 8.2637: legio III Augusta et auxilia eius, Lambaesis, 158 CE: CIL 13.8017: legio I Minervia pia fidelis Severiana Alexandriana cum auxilis, Bonn; CIL 3.3228: vexillationes legionum Germaniciarum et Brittanniciarum cum auxilis earum.

[12] E.g. CIL 3.1918, a centurion of III Legion in command of I Belgae; RIB [Roman Inscriptions of Britain] 2144, a centurion of XX Legion in command of VI Nervians at Rough Castle (to be discussed later). For further examples see D’Amato 2012, 6.

[13] Cheesman 1914 [2018], 29-31; Goldsworthy 2000 [2019], 112; Haynes 2013, 43.

[14] Cheesman 1914 [2018], 29, 30.

[15] Julius Caesar, Gallic Wars 4.22.

[16] Tacitus, Agricola 35–36. See Haynes 2013, 272, on issues with Tacitus’ account of Mons Graupius, which may affect the reliance we can place on it.

[17] E.g. CIL 11.6344, four cohorts under a single officer in Spain.

[18] E.g. Forty 2018, 114.

[19] Keppie 1983, 190.

[20] POxy 7.1022.

[21] RIB 2144.

[22] Vindolanda Tablet 225.

[23] This appears to be the conclusion of Haynes 2013, 325, though he is not explicit.

[24] Goldsworthy 2003, 60, 64.

2020 books #1-2

A couple of books reread in preparation for teaching Roman Britain.

Peter Salway, Roman Britain: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 2015

Does what it says on the tin - basically condenses Salway's History of Roman down to just over a hundred pages. There are aspects of Salway's approach that don't appeal - he's quite positivist in the way he approaches the evidence, and post-colonial readings of Britain as a province are clearly not for him. But I don't know of any other work that can give students an overview in an afternoon.

Richard Hobbs and Ralph Jackson, Roman Britain: Life at the edge of empire, London: British Museum Press, 2010

A nice introduction to the province. This is particularly good at using objects from the British Museum's collection to illustrate various points about the ways people lived.

Britannia, Season 1, Episode 2

Series created by Jez Butterworth, Tom Butterworth and James Richardson; directed by Sue Tully; screenplay by Tom Butterworth (Sky/Vertigo Films/Neal Street Productions).

Episode 2 of Britannia fills out more about the motivations of the characters. We discover why King Pellenor hates his daughter (her great-grandfather on her mother's side was a Roman). We see more of Zoë Wanamaker's Queen Antedia, who gets a nice joint scenery-chewing moment with David Morrissey's Aulus Plautius. We see more of her tribe, the Regni, and find that they make liberal use of woad and have lots of women warriors, so that's those two obligatory elements ticked off. We also find that she hates the Cantii because Pellenor's daughter castrated her son on their wedding night (which she demonstrates by having her son drop trou in front of Aulus). 

Morrissey as Aulus continues to chew the scenery wherever it is to be found. In this episode he orders crucifixions of prisoners, to show what a nasty man he is (but he doesn't have them nailed into position, so he can't be all that bad), and then traumatises a small child. Ian McDiarmid as Pellenor is starting to chew the scenery a bit himself, though internal political and family machinations at Crugdunon remain not terribly interesting.

Meanwhile, NotArya and NotTheHound have an Expository Walk. He then manages to get rid of her, and she ends up being chased by wolves. (Well, actually, she is chased by huskies, which is exactly the same except when they catch you they lick you to death.)

But some strange things are happening. In this episode Vespasian gets killed. I had assumed that this was the Vespasian, who was, after all, there in historical reality, but survived and nearly forty years later became emperor. So either this isn't the historical figure, but just someone of the same name (which seems odd, as it's a strange name to pick - Antonius, Brutus, I can see, but Vespasian?), or the Butterworths are going full Quentin Tarantino Inglorious Basterds alternate history on us, in which case, all bets are very definitely off. 

And right at the end of the episode, Aulus visits the DruidCave (it's not actually a cave, but it might as well be), and takes a trip (in many senses) to the Underworld. This show may be rather more intriguing and less predictable than I thought.

Link to all reviews of Britannia.

Britannia, Season 1, Episode 1

Series created by Jez Butterworth, Tom Butterworth and James Richardson; directed by Metin Hüseyin; screenplay by Jez Butterworth, Tom Butterworth (Sky/Amazon Prime Video/Vertigo Films/Neal Street Productions).

Okay, I should have caught up with this ages ago. But with the new season due next week, and my planning on really getting stuck into the 'Screening Britannia' project in November, it's time I did actually watch all this.

The first thing a viewer sees when watching Britannia is a caption that says:

IN 55 BC JULIUS CAESAR INVADED BRITANNIA

Then:

HE CAME FACE TO FACE WITH ANOTHER LEGEND ...

And the next caption says:

THE DRUIDS

Those of us of a certain age and disposition are probably expecting that the next caption will be 'NO-ONE KNOWS WHO THEY WERE OR WHAT THEY WERE DOING', and the dulcid tones of Spinal Tap's 'Stonehenge' will then be heard. But, of course Britannia isn't that sort of show at all - it's a serious drama. And then the titles play out to Donovan's 'Hurdy Gurdy Man', and you realise that maybe it is that sort of show after all.

When it was broadcast in early 2018, Britannia was accompanied by a lot of high expectations. After all, this was award-winning playwright Jez Butterworth, author of Jerusalem, wasn't it? Well, yes - but it's also Jez and Tom Butterworth, screenwriters for odd cod-Arthuriana The Last Legion, a movie deeply uncertain about its own identity.

Britannia does one very interesting thing. As Juliette Harrisson and I shall discuss in the book we're writing together, most cinematic and television versions of the Roman invasion of Britain are interested in Julius Caesar's invasion, not that of the emperor Claudius nearly ninety years later. And they are almost without exception, comedies (e.g. Carry on Cleo or Asterix in Britain). Britannia is very definitely about the Claudian invasion - the only other screen example of this I've been able to find is 'Pritain', the first episode of the 1974-1975 BBC series Churchill's People. And Britannia is certainly not sold as a comedy.

There's also something a bit odd going on in terms of diversity. The Romans are clearly the bad guys here - this is not to say that the Britons are necessarily the good guys, as they are too caught up in internecine murder, kidnapping and warfare for that, but the Romans are the imperialist invaders who massacre an entire village that was doing nothing more offensive than getting stoned at a massive Solstice party, so they are definitely bad. Yet it is among the Romans that one finds ethnic diversity, with black and Asian soldiers, and it is from these soldiers that the only significant working class voices emerge. Now, that is quite possibly true to the actual ethnic and class make-up of a Roman army, but one wonders what purpose it serves dramatically. Is the intention to elicit some sympathy for the Roman point of view?

The Britons, on the other hand, whilst beating the Romans in terms of gender diversity - there is a complete absence of female voices on the Roman side - are remarkably white and middle-class, occasional Irish person aside, such that one imagines that when not trying to bump each other off they sit round the hillforts doing Guardian crosswords and forbidding their children from watching ITV. This is epitomised by a somewhat careworn Julian Rhind-Tutt, who is just a bit ... well, a bit too Julian Rhind-Tutt to convince as an Iron Age Man of Kent.

These points of interest aside, Britannia is mostly cliché. There's a neat trick where the character set up to be one of the audience's points-of-view fails to make it out of the first episode, but even that's not all that original. Aside from that, the Romans are all gruff legionaries, the British villagers simple farmers with a close resemblance to the peasants of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the local Druids are like Native American Shamen, and purveyors of New Age Woo, whilst at a higher level they're rather more sinister, led by Mackenzie Crook's Veran, made up to look like a Batman villain.

Britannia's biggest weakness, of course, is what got it made in the first place - its potential to be the next Game of Thrones, and therefore its tendency to lean in the direction of HBO's series. So there is much swearing, though in a remarkable act of restraint, no female nudity until fifty-five minutes in (compare Troy: Fall of a City, which had boobies after only five minutes) [on rewatching, I see that there's a flash of bare breasts eighteen minutes in]. The Cantii's 'citadel' (rather than hillfort) of Crugdunon clearly went through several drafts where the designers were asked to make it more Game of Thrones-y, until the result doesn't look exactly like Winterfell, but would feel oddly familiar to any Starks visiting. And Nikolaj Lie Kaas' Outcast Druid and Eleanor Worthington-Cox's Cait, the pubescent girl he rescues from a massacre and is then contemptuous of, are so painfully NotArya and NotTheHound that it's slightly surprising legal action wasn't taken.

The problem that Britannia has which Game of Thrones didn't, of course, is that the audience knows the outcome. Whatever the various Britons may do, the Romans are here to stay, at least for the next four hundred years. The bad guys are going to win. (This may shed light on why the invasion is often treated as a comedy.)

The salvation of Britannia is that every ten or twenty minutes or so, David Morrissey as Roman commander Aulus Plautius turns up and chews every bit of scenery in sight, in a way that you have never seen him do before. This is not the nuanced Morrissey of Sense and Sensibility or The City and the City - this is full-on Alan-Rickman-as-the-Sheriff-of-Nottingham scenery chewing, as he flings his dead-mink [I think it's meant to be a wolf, but looks like a husky] decorated coat around his shoulders, advises legionaries to take a dump on the landscape, or say things like 'let's get on that fucking boat'. I have high hopes that he will be matched by Zoë Wanamaker's Queen Antedia, arriving as she does in a smoke cloud apparently of her own generation and sporting a wig that deserves its own star billing, but we haven't really seen enough of her yet. And Ian McDiarmid, as the improbably-named king Pellenor, seems to be keeping his scenery chewing in reserve for The Rise of Skywalker.

Still, this is only episode 1 - let's see what the next eight deliver.

My collaborator on 'Screening Britannia', Juliette Harrisson, has also reviewed the first episode.

Link to all reviews of Britannia.

Readers (if there are any left) forgive me, for I have sinned ...

... it has been nearly four months since I last posted anything here. As ever, in the middle of the year, other things appear which are more urgent, like teaching, and trying to finish research papers, and my spare time for anything else decreases dramatically. So apologies if I have not given full coverage to everything I should have this year. In particular, I owe an apology to Hugh Viney, director of this year's UCL Classics Play, who was expecting a review to appear here sometime. A full review, I am afraid, is not going to happen now. Which I do feel bad about, as it was an excellent production, with exactly the right level of irreverence towards text and audience. In particular, the use of music meant that this was one of the most imaginative Frog choruses that I've seen. I really enjoyed it, and I should have said so before now.

However, my blog has now been mentioned in CA News, in relation to my taking over as editor of that publication. So I probably need to provide some content again.

Right now I'm taking advantage of the Internet facilities at the University of Wales, Lampeter, where I'm attending a convention of Classical receptions in Children's literature. It's been an interesting conference so far - I particularly enjoyed a session this morning on fiction set in Roman Britain, which will help me finesse my own views on the tensions inherent in writing about the Roman occupation (basically, which side is the reader on, the Britons or the Romans?). My own paper went okay. I was talking about the Roman empire in the boys' adventure comic. I hadn't had time to do all the research I wanted to, but when I came to write the piece I realized that anything more than a short introduction to the subject wasn't possible in twenty minutes anyway. I may report again after the end of the conference.

A couple of discoveries

It's been a week for archaeological discoveries. and for once I'm not blogging them because I disagree with something that's been said about them,* simply because they're interesting.

First of all, a colossal head of a Roman imperial woman was found in Sagalassos in southern Turkey, in the same baths complex where last year the remains of a statue of Hadrian were found. My first thought was that this might be Hadrian's wife, Vibia Sabina. This also was the first thought of the excavators, but they soon realized that this doesn't look like most portraits of Sabina (that's a statue from Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli, like the Sagalassos head of Hadrian, currently in the British Museum's Hadrian: Empire and Conflict exhibition, which I will blog about - I'm going again tomorrow). Instead, they now think it's Faustina, wife of Hadrian's successor Antoninus Pius. David Meadows on Rogueclassicism kindly provides another example for comparison. I'm not absolutely sure I buy the ID, but it certainly isn't Sabina.

Accepting that it is Faustina, this doesn't mean it's not connected with the statue of Hadrian. Sagalassos was an important centre for the imperial cult (Hadrian had made it so), and what one could have here is part of a group of statues from the Antonine period, with the emperor's deified (adoptive) father, and his deified wife. The excavators suggest that the statues come from a Kaisersaal ('emperor's room') from within the baths complex. There's no word in the reports as to whether the female toes found last year, and thought at the time to be part of a stature of Sabina, go with the head, but it's surely plausible.

The other discovery, again with a Hadrianic connection, comes from Newcastle, where two Roman sarcophagi have been found. What's refreshing about this are some of the comments made by Richard Annis, in charge of the dig. I can't now find where these comments were made, so you'll have to take my word for it, but instead of saying "this completely changes our picture of Roman Newcastle", what he said was that the dig confirms what had always been thought to be the case. Just about every fort along Hadrian's Wall has produced evidence for a vicus or civilian settlement, with Vindolanda, Housesteads and Birdoswald merely being amongst the best known. It stands to reason, then, that the Roman fort at Pons Aelius (now under Newcastle Castle Keep) should have had something similar. These excavations, with the discovery of buildings and roads as well as the cemetery, now prove it.

* Well, apart from a comment about Vibia Sabina being "forced into a marriage with the homosexual emperor [Hadrian] at the age of 14", which is calculated to make the readers view the marriage of Sabina in twenty-first century cultural terms.

A Roman Tombstone

This is the tombstone of Insus, son of Vodullus. It was found in Lancaster in 2005, and a BBC news report last week (from which I have taken the photo) talked about plans for it to go on display in the Museum of Lancashire by the end of the year. The inscription reads:

DIS MANIBVS INSVS VODVLLI [ ]IVS CIVE TREVER EQVES ALAE AVG [ ] VICTORIS CVRATOR DOMITIA [ ]*

which means (filling in the gaps):

To the spirits of the departed. Insus, son of Vodullus, citizen of the Treveri, cavalryman of the Ala Augusta, curator [a junior officer] of the troop of Victor. Domitia [made this?].

But what I want to talk about is a comment by Stephen Bull, the Museum's curator of Military History and Archaeology. He says:

To depict him in such a dramatic and war-like position, when none of the other tombstones of this period show such a thing, makes it very likely that we are looking at something either real, or very similar to an event that happened.

I find that a very curious thing to say. Because this sort of image, of a cavalryman riding down a barbarian, is not uncommon on Roman tombstones. As it happens, I've been making student assignments on this sort of image over the weekend. This, for example, is the tombstone of Flavinus from Hexham Abbey:



Other examples I can think of are those of Longinus Sdapeze from Colchester, Rufus Sita from Gloucester, and Sextus Valerius Genialis from Cirencester. It's also found in non-funerary contexts. This is a detail from a distance slab put up by the II Legion Augusta on the Antonine Wall, found in Bridgeness and now in the National Museum of Scotland, where I was admiring it on Saturday:



According to this report, there are a dozen such reliefs that have been found in the UK. The beheading shown on the tombstone of Insus does appear to be unique. But is there any need to see this as anything more than a variation on a theme? Is it even necessary to connect it with Celtic head cults, as David Shotter does? Real events were sometimes depicted on tombstones, as, for example, when Tiberius Claudius Maximus depicted his encounter with the dying Dacian king Decebalus. But he also added a detailed text explaining the event. This is not the case with Insus.

Some of Bull's other comments (e.g. "The carving and inscription will add detail to what we know about the Roman auxiliary cavalry and its equipment.") seem perfectly sensible. What I think has happened here is that he has succumbed to the temptation to 'sex the story up' by suggesting that there is an actual event being depicted, rather than just generic imagery. It's the same motivation, to make things more concrete, that is behind suggesting that a Roman bust is of Julius Caesar when there isn't really any evidence.

But perhaps I'm being unfair. Perhaps Bull (an expert in 20th century military history and that of the English Civil War) has addressed these issues. He has written a pamphlet on the tombstone, which I'll be following up. If nothing else, I want to know what he thinks about Domitia. A lot of tombstones have text at the end suggesting that the soldier's heirs (usually fellow soldiers) set the tombstone up. Sometimes it's someone else. Here it's Domitia. Who was she? soldiers weren't officially allowed to marry, but often had common law wives. Is that who Domitia was?

* There's a nice picture of the inscription on this webpage, though their translation is a bit odd.

Headless Romans

I didn't watch tonight's Timewatch, 'The Mystery of the Headless Romans', as closely as I'd intended. I thought I was taping it to watch properly later, but unfortunately my video decided not to work properly, and this being BBC2 rather than BBC4, there's no quick repeat planned (though there might be a signed version in the wee small hours some time).

However, from what I did manage to catch, I wasn't too impressed. It seemed to be ploughing the common furrow of 'Weren't the Romans awful?' Now, I'm all for not romanticizing Rome, but I'm not keen on distorting the evidence to make them seem worse than they were. And this programme seemed to do this. For instance, it was stated that Septimius Severus pursued a scorched earth campaign in Scotland, and quoted something he said in support of this.

Let no one escape sheer destruction, no one our hands, not even the babe in the womb of the mother, if it be male; let it nevertheless not escape sheer destruction. [This is apparently a quotation from some literary work, but I don't know what it might be.]

Now, all well and good, except that our source for this, Cassius Dio 77.15.1, places this remark after Severus had returned from campaigning and was now south of Hadrian's Wall. He had made terms with the Caledonians and Maeatae, the tribes who lived in Scotland. When he had departed, in AD 210, the Maeatae revolted, and it was only then that Severus issued the instruction to kill everyone. It was not, as the programme implied, his policy from his first invasion of Scotland in AD 208.

Nor did I care for the depiction of the relationship between Severus' sons, Caracalla and Geta. Caracalla was portrayed as a nasty man, out to eliminate his brother to become sole ruler. Fine, I have no problem with that. What I have a problem with is the implication (by omission) that his brother Geta was somehow better. He has a better press, because he befriended the literary elite in Rome, but reading between the lines would suggest that he was almost as nasty and ambitious as his brother.

Finally we come to the very sensible Tony Birley's theory about who the headless Romans in York might be, enemies of Caracalla dispatched after Severus' death. That is not implausible, but the narration implied that these included prominent people such as Severus' chamberlain Castor and Caracalla's tutor Euodus. Well, yes, we know that Caracalla had these people killed, even before Geta's murder, though many more happened after. But we don't know that these executions took place in York, or even in Britain. All we can say is that Dio implies that they didn't take place in Rome. On the open2.net forum someone has rightly pointed out that the facts that none of these bodies were over forty, and some had been shackled for some time, do not sit easily with the what the narration implied about swift executions of Severus' secretariat. So it's wrong to say, as the programme does, that we know who these people in the graveyard were - we only have a theory about who they might have been.

The portrayal of the tutor Euodus is a bit perplexing. For a start, there's an implication that Euodus was executed for counselling reconciliation between Caracalla and Geta - but as far as I can tell, it was another tutor of Caracalla, the senator Lucius Fabius Cilo, who did that. I'm not sure what the evidence for Euodus being from North Africa is either, though since Septimius was from Libya himself, and tended to surround himself with others from that area, it's certainly possible. But the actor playing him is an African of sub-Saharan descent (as was a actor portraying an African soldier), and I'm not sure that's right at all. But here we get into the knotty problem of the inability to distinguish between northern and sub-Saharan Africa, which has led to Septimius Severus appearing on a list of great Black Britons (he was neither black nor British). Curiously, in this programme Septimius was portrayed as a white European, suggesting an ethnic divide between him and the tutor Euodus which, if the latter was from North Africa, was almost certainly not there.

Unfortunately I don't have access to Tony Birley's Septimius Severus: the African emperor. I suspect I need to have a look to see what he says about some of these matters.

Overall, not very impressive for the BBC's flagship history programme, and one where supposedly the Open University works in partnership, to produce something so indifferent to the order in which events actually occurred.

I can see our house from up here!

Just watched the episode 'The Romans in Britain' from The History of Britain from the Air (on Channel 5). I was pleased to see that I recognized most of the sites before we were told what they were, and some of the aerial views made me slightly regret not putting a tape in to record the programme. But the commentary was pretty dire - traditional and full of what we now know to be false, or at least misleading.

Britain A.D.

I finally caught the last episode of Francis Pryor's series Britain A.D. on The History Channel this lunchtime. I remain unconvinced by some of what Pryor is trying to argue.

At the core of Pryor's argument is the notion that the so-called 'Anglo-Saxon settlement' was nothing of the sort, that no more than a few bands of soldiers came across, and what actually happened was that a fashion for Germanic culture spread across the south and east of Britain. Much archaeological evidence for continuity of settlement is advanced, and the absence of clear unequivocal evidence for conquest noted.

Now, as I've said when I've discussed this issue before, I don't have a problem with rejecting the common picture of the Anglo-Saxons driving out the British root-and-branch. But Pryor goes too far for me for a couple of reasons.

Nobly, he doesn't shirk the question of the British adoption of the German language, and has a talking head argue that English looks to have been considerably influenced by attempts of Celtic-speakers to learn a Germanic language. But he never really answers why the British should have so totally taken up Germanic culture. They were 'realigning themselves according to the shifts in Europe after the collapse of Rome', he says. Yes, maybe, but why? One explanation would be the arrival of a new Germanic elite, through military conquest - but Pryor doesn't want to accept that. Yet he advances nothing much in its place. (Another archaeologist talking head says that just because she is wearing jeans doesn't make her American, which is true - but if you think that the spread of American culture through Britain is unconnected with America's military might, and the presence of American military forces in Britain, then you'd be wrong.)

The other concern I have is his attitude to the written sources. He is absolutely right that we should not accept without question what our histories tell us. That is naive. But Pryor seems to want to totally ignore the histories. The assumption seems to be that, once one has established that a historian has his own agenda, he can then be dismissed as having nothing to tell us. Pryor replaces the unquestioned primacy of the written sources with the equally unhelpful unquestioned primacy of archaeology.

At the end of the programme he talks about the way in which Britain after the Roman conquest never lost its own identity. But how can that be? He has spent the best part of an hour arguing that many of the national stories that make us who we think we are, are myths. In the end, I can't help thinking that Pryor's version of what happened after the Romans left Britain is as much an invention as the Arthurian romance and Anglo-Saxon conquest that he rails against.

Big Roman Dig - advance notice

Channel 4's Time Team is an archaeological programme that I broadly approve of. Between 26th June and 16th July they are conducting what they call the Big Roman Dig. You can find more details here - I shall be keeping an eye on this.

Battlefield Britain on Boudicca

(This post was originally written last August, in response to the first programme in the BBC's Battlefield Britain series, on the revolt of Boudicca.)

Very pretty CGI, but my god! What a load of rubbish! Dreadful simplistic nonsense in which Britons were good, and terribly oppressed by the nasty nasty Romans. The fact that many of the elite of the British tribes had been happily buying into Roman culture for a century before Claudius' legions was ignored. All the time we were being told about the 'Britons' in their revolt, yet it was only two tribes in east Anglia and the Midlands. All the others stayed loyal to Rome. In fact, the idea of 'the Britons' was a Roman invention - the people living on the island certainly didn't think of themselves as a single nation. The peoples of Kent and Sussex didn't seem particularly incensed by what was happening to the Druids.

As for the Druids, the programme presented a picture of nasty Roman legionaries butchering defenceless old priests. The fact that the one source suggests that the Druids commanded strong military forces gets overlooked, as was the suggestion that they indulged in human sacrifice. They wouldn't do that, you see - too nice. The one atrocity of the Iceni that was mentioned was qualified as 'probably propaganda' - yet every tabloid sensationalist tale of what the Romans did was repeated as fact, and even added to. We have no knowledge of the ages of Boudicca's daughters - you can't suggest, as this programme did, that they were mere children without any good reason.

It is sometimes assumed (and was again in this programme) that because the Roman governor Suetonius was off suppressing the Druids when the revolt happened, this was why the revolt happened; post hoc ergo propter hoc. There's not a shred of evidence for this hypothesis in either of the writers who give accounts of the revolt, both of whom see economic factors as being principally at work. (My own theory is that since the Druids appear to have been an independent power block within their society over which they could exercise no control, many British elites were glad to see the back of them.)

What is never done is for the revolt to be placed in the wider context of what is going on in the Roman empire at the time. We have a general collapse of the standards of provincial government in the reign of Nero. At the beginning of his reign, there were a number of trials of provincial governors for financial misconduct while in post, charges brought by provincials after the governor's term of office. In every one of these, the governor got off. About AD 60, these trials stopped, and it looks to me as if this is because the provincials just gave up using the legitimate mechanisms of complaint, as they no longer worked. Instead, they sought other avenues for protests, and it is then that we get not just the Boudiccan revolt, but also the great Jewish revolt, and the revolt of Julius Vindex in Gaul in AD 68, which, though directed at Nero personally, had definite nationalistic overtones.

The writers of Battlefield Britain hadn't done their homework properly - they stated that the IX Legion was destroyed, yet the same source that tells us the infantry were wiped out later says that it only took 2,000 legionaries from the Continent to bring the Legion back to its full strength of 5,000. And the Romans did not have 'flimsy sandals' on their feet. They had sandals with bloody great hobnails!

And the final statement that the Roman oppression drove the Britons into Wales and Scotland. Utter nonsense! The population of Britain under the Roman empire remained mostly people whose ancestors had been there before the Roman invasion. The driving of the language into the fringes of the island happened in the Anglo-Saxon period.

And the buggers can't count. 'Nearly a thousand years after Boudicca's revolt, new invaders are coming to Britain ...' Boudicca's revolt, AD 60. Battle of Hastings, 1066. When I went to school, that was not 'almost' a thousand years ...

(Subsequent editions were apparently less awful, but the only one I saw substantial parts of was the one on the Battle of Britain.)