Under Another Sky (17 page)

Though it is hard to synthesise Wood’s ideas – contradictory and mercurial as they are – another of his works,
The Origin of Building
, brings some of these notions into the realm of what he felt he was doing architecturally. Like many of the intellectuals, architects and artists of the early eighteenth century (including, for example, Stukeley), Wood was a Freemason. One of Freemasonry’s tenets was that the principles of true architecture had originated among the Jews. These principles, including the three classical orders, were then bequeathed to the Greeks. As Wood explained in
The Origin of Building
, it was the pillars of Moses’s tabernacle that ‘furnish’d the various Sorts of Building necessary for Man; as the Strong, the Mean, and the Delicate; and which, in Process of Time, were ranked under the Name of Order, with Grecian Names; to wit, Dorick, Jonick, and Corinthian’. In turn, according to the Freemasons, these principles passed to the Romans, and at length to the peoples whom the Romans had conquered. The Romans, wrote James Anderson in
The Constitutions of the Free-Masons
, ‘communicated their Cunning to the northern and western Parts of Europe, which had grown barbarous before the Roman conquest’. Thinking of Britain’s henges and standing stones, he also allowed that the ancient Britons might have produced ‘a few Remains of good Masonry’ before the Romans appeared. The keystone of Wood’s shaky argument was to take Anderson’s hint about ‘a few Remains of good Masonry’ and claim that the ancient Britons, in particular the Druids, had directly inherited true architecture from its Jewish source, bypassing the Greeks and Romans. ‘If we were to scrutinize all the Works of the Druids, we shou’d find them to have been copied from the Works of the Jews,’ he asserted. They ‘bespeak a Parent of more Antiquity than the Romans’.

How does this theorising manifest itself in the streets of Bath? In the vast spaces of the Circus, each facade is decorated with the three orders of classical architecture, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian – the orders that Wood believed had adorned Moses’s tabernacle, and had been disseminated by the Jews. The Circus is, very obviously, meant to be Bath’s Roman Colosseum. But it is also a stone circle, its form and dimensions echoing the measurements Wood took during his survey of Stanton Drew. The frieze of the Doric entablature is decorated with hundreds of pictorial emblems, some of which – a hand reaching from the clouds holding a pair of compasses, for example – are overtly Masonic. And so Wood’s masterpiece, generally supposed to contain all the neoclassical virtues of harmony, elegance and balance, is in fact a magnificently demented mingling of disparate thought-experiments, a glorious piece of architecture ‘built brilliantly on theoretical foundations of some absurdity’, as his biographers have put it. The Circus aims to re-create the glories of the Roman empire. But it also aims to be a specifically British, ancient architecture, echoing a megalithic monument and, in turn, casting back to Solomon’s temple itself.

When I visited the Roman baths, I spoke to Romans. This was the claim: that history would ‘come to life’. At the side of the great open-air pool now lurk costumed interpreters – each named for a real character mentioned on one of the Roman inscriptions found here. I met Flavia Tiberina: the wife, she said, of Gaius from the procurator’s office in Londinium. She was wearing a high halo of a Flavian-period hairdo, just like the coiffure of one of the most striking carved heads from the museum. We talked about make-up, the plucking of her underarm hair (‘Do you know, I actually think the slave enjoyed it’) and the farewell dinner she was expected to enjoy that evening (‘There will be dormice’). The interpreter was very good at what she did, and I enjoyed talking to her. The exercise seemed to be about finding that we had things in common. Beauty routines, dinner – if not the minutiae of the methods or the specifics of the menu. I was being invited to believe not only that the costumed interpreters were behaving like Romans – but that Romans behaved like costumed interpreters: friendly, unthreatening, familiar. I couldn’t help feeling, as Flavia Tiberina and I chatted, that there were other stories that might be
buried in the stones at Bath, stranger and more frightening ones. God knows what religious observances, rituals and sacrifices took place here. We did not discuss L. Marcius Memor, up to his elbows in animal gore. Nor the uncanny tin mask of a man’s bearded face found in the sacred spring, perhaps (who knows) an emblem carried aloft in some ritual procession.

The sacred spring has borne many secrets. In 1978, a young girl died of amoebic meningitis after swimming in the waters. In the ensuing investigation, the pools were all drained, including the King’s Bath – the medieval structure, topped with a seventeenth-century balustrade and statue of Bladud, that can be seen during a visit to the Pump Room or Roman baths today. Archaeologist Barry Cunliffe took the opportunity to excavate beneath the medieval bath, down into the Romans’ sacred spring. As well as a number of beautiful carved intaglios from rings, his team found seventy-eight curse tablets. These are small, unprepossessing sheets of lead, many of which had been rolled into little sausages, just a few centimetres long, before being cast into the spring. They are incised with writing so faint and fragmentary that the untrained eye could easily miss it: it is indecipherable except by those expert in the sloping strokes of the hands known as old and new Roman cursive. The texts are appeals to the goddess of the spring to punish those who have done you wrong – the person who has stolen your blanket, your ring, your cloak, your money. The thing to do was to get the wording just right, as in a legal contract, so the goddess could not catch you out on a technicality. One tablet asks for the return of six silver coins from whomever has stolen them, ‘whether pagan or Christian, whosoever, whether man or woman, whether boy or girl, whether slave or free’. No loopholes. This is the first occurrence of the word ‘Christian’ in any British inscription. The petitioner, Annianus, helpfully provided a list of suspects, a poem in itself: ‘Postumianus, Pisso, Locinna, Alauna, Materna, Gunsula, Candidina, Euticius, Peregrinus, Latinus, Senicianus, Avitianus, Victor, Scotius, Aessicunia, Paltucca, Calliopis, Celerianus.’

Another tablet is on the subject of the theft of a cloak: ‘To Minerva the goddess Sulis I have given the thief who has stolen my hooded cloak, whether slave or free, whether man or woman. He is not to buy back this gift unless with his own blood.’ Sometimes the curses were brutal: the theft of one unknown object caused the petitioner
to demand that the perpetrator, and his family, be prevented from eating, drinking, defecating or urinating. There is one tablet that is thought to have been written in British Celtic – using the Latin alphabet – which makes it unique, but untranslatable, without some kind of Rosetta Stone to unlock this usually unwritten language. Sometimes the curses were written right to left, as if to increase the magic, or the secrecy. There are a number of ‘illiterate’ tablets, random scratches on the lead, that those hurling them into the seething spring might have thought contained the enchanted power of writing. Dr Roger Tomlin, the scholar who has undertaken the delicate task of transcribing and interpreting the spidery, slippery handwriting of the tablets, thinks the curses may be the dark obverse of the goddess’s power. If she can heal, then she can also debilitate; if she can help, she can also hurt, wielding that black strength from deep beneath the earth. He also thinks the curses worked: that is, sufficiently well for people to continue flinging them into the springs for two centuries.

Some of the curse tablets had turned up before Cunliffe’s excavations. In 1904, Edward Williams Byron Nicholson, Bodley’s librarian at the University of Oxford, settled on a very particular vacation project. He took with him on a Scottish holiday photographs of a tiny lead tablet, incised on both sides with what had hitherto been regarded as indecipherable letters. Roger Tomlin has written vividly of Nicholson: he was known to his deputy at the library as ‘
diabolus bibliothecae
’, the devil of the library; to others he was simply ‘Old Nick’. Two of his board of curators, according to Tomlin, committed suicide under the strain of working with him. The sleeves of his voluminous gown used to dash the papers off desks as he swept like a tornado through the reading rooms. Among his many and varied interests, he attended spiritualist meetings, wrote on animal rights and was an antivivisectionist. He campaigned against plans to use the beautiful Jacobean entrance hall of the Bodleian Library as a bike shed. One of his many money-making schemes was an idea for selling biscuits imprinted with images of British beauty spots.

Nicholson’s Scottish holiday was not idly spent. On his return, he published a pamphlet with a translation of the tablet’s text:

Vinisius to Nigra: (? The grace) of the Lord Jesus Christ to thine also. (Thy) husband’s faults Vinisia has related to Vilius’s Similis. (? Do thou
be strong in Jesus and) with all thy strength (? in thee go counter). Unless in just conflicts (lit. arenas) (? avoid jealousies more abundantly). Christ’s enemy has sent Biliconus from Viriconium that ye may take (him) in the sheepfold, although a dog of Arius. Do thou pray Christ for light. A(p)ulicus carries these sheets.’

This was sensational stuff. One of the great teases of Romano-British history was then, and continues to be, precisely how widespread Christianity was under Roman rule before Britain was subsumed by the pagan Saxons. (Augustine’s mission in 597 is the conventional date for Christianity’s official introduction to Britain, though in its original Roman form it survived in the west and Ireland, whence it was later reintroduced to Iona and then Lindisfarne and the north-east of England.) As Nicholson put it in his pamphlet: ‘Everybody … is aware how very little we know of the history of Christianity in Britain during the Roman occupation, and how scanty are its literary relics. There are the texts of some writings of Pelagius in the early fifth century, a blundered copy of the signatures of five British ecclesiastics at the Council of Arles in 314, a few stones, rings, &c., with a Christian monogram or motto – but that, I think, is the entire literary legacy known to have been left by the British Christianity of that period: there is not even a Christian inscription on a British tombstone which can safely be ascribed to the first four centuries. Consequently more than ordinary interest attaches to the fact that there exists in the Pump Room at Bath a complete fourth-century Latin letter written by a Christian man in Britain to a Christian woman in Britain.’

Nicholson’s lead tablet referred not only to Christianity, but even to the question of the Arian heresy, a non-Trinitarian position that contended that God’s divinity was stronger than that of Jesus, which was debated at the First Council of Nicaea in
AD
325. The same controversy was mentioned in one of the very few near-contemporary literary sources on the end of Roman rule in Britain, a polemical text by the sixth-century cleric Gildas. In his
On the Destruction of Britain
, he called the Arian heresy ‘fatal as a serpent and vomiting its poison from beyond the sea’.

Amid this paucity of evidence, Nicholson’s reading threatened to revolutionise knowledge of Christianity in Roman Britain. His translation was widely, and mostly warmly, covered in the newspapers. The
Scotsman
was one of the few publications to express scepticism. ‘In deciphering such ancient writings there is not a little danger of error,’ wrote the paper’s correspondent. ‘Possibly the next interpreter may tell us that Vinisius and Vinisia, Nigra and her husband, Biliconus and Similis and Vilius, and Apulicus, the unfortunate postman who carried letters of lead from Viriconium to Aquae Sulis, are but shadows in the imagination of Bodley’s Librarian. In the meantime we may accept his tale.’

Unfortunately for Nicholson, he had made one crucial error. He had read the tablet upside down. Tomlin turned the photographs over (the original sheet of lead is lost) and started again drawing his own copies of the text. He ended up with the following translation:

Whether (they be) boy or girl, whether man or woman, forgiveness is not to be given to the person who has stolen this unless […] innocence. Forgiveness is not to be given to him/her, nor shall he/she sleep, except on condition that Euticia (?) sell a bushel of cloud, a bushel of smoke.

As Tomlin himself has pointed out, the text – while falling into the familiar formulae of the curse tablet – remains rather eccentric, with its bushels of smoke and cloud. You might even ask, why should we let Tomlin’s reading pass without challenge? He himself would be the first to argue that deeply specialised palaeography of this kind is an insecure and provisional business. But what haunts me in this story is that Nicholson did not intend to deceive. He stared into the mirror of that dulled metal, and he conjured up visions, visions that were only reflections of himself. His Roman Britain was the purest, most perfect fantasy.