Under Another Sky (2 page)

This book is very far from a comprehensive account of Britain’s Roman remains. Instead, I wanted to see what I could learn from an encounter with them. Not to discover what being in Roman Britain was like – for I was convinced of the irrecoverability of the lives of people from the deep past, except as manifestations of the historical imaginations of those who described them. Rather, I wanted to think about what this period means, and has meant, to a British sense of history and identity. I wanted to discover the ways in which the idea of Roman Britain has resonated in British culture and still forms part of the texture of its landscape – not just through the sublime contours of the Northumberland hills, but in humbler urban and suburban tracts of territory.

My search brought me into the company of many fascinating minds from the past, from the great sixteenth-century humanist William Camden, author of
Britannia
, a masterly topographical and antiquarian survey of Britain, to the shadowy figure of Charles Bertram, who fooled luminaries such as Stukeley with one of British historiography’s most successful hoaxes. Through all this, it became clear how richly generative Roman Britain had been, how productive artistically and intellectually for those who had encountered it. There were stories by Thomas Hardy, poems by W. H. Auden and Wilfred Owen, music by Britten and Elgar, Joseph Conrad’s black musings on the Romans in Britain in
Heart of Darkness
, Howard Brenton’s even blacker play
The Romans in Britain
. Ideas about Roman Britain had been manipulated and metamorphosed into architecture, into song. It had changed people.

Troubling questions crowded in. How do we relate to Roman Britain now? How did this great span of time – the equivalent of the interval between Shakespeare’s lifetime and our own – affect Britain’s later history? Did the Romans in Britain mark the arrival of civilisation and
a sophisticated culture, or was it rather about violence visited on a host population by an exploitative imperial power? Is ‘Roman Britain’ essentially a kind of historical throat-clearing, before the real substance of ‘our island story’ sets in with the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons? Different eras and different people adumbrated, I discovered, very different answers to these questions; and there is an urgency in the way people are tackling them now. The study of Roman Britain is today intensely political, coloured by contemporary concerns about modern imperialism and warfare. On the other hand, with its cosmopolitan, Mediterranean-facing outlook, Roman Britain is also being claimed in some quarters as a kind of foundation myth for modern multiculturalism.

What makes Roman Britain, to me, such a rich place is that it was literate. People in Britain – certainly not a vast proportion of the population, but clearly plenty of them – read poems, and wrote letters, and recorded on stone their devotion to their gods, and their loved ones’ deaths. Because of the splendid preservative powers of the damp British sod, hundreds of letters, documents and memoranda written by perfectly ordinary Romans survive. We are lucky in our literary sources on Roman Britain: we have a first-hand account of two military expeditions by its would-be conqueror, Julius Caesar; and a biography of one of its most significant governors, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, written by his son-in-law Tacitus, perhaps the greatest of Roman historians. The writers of the classical world were the first to give Britain a literary existence. After the end of the empire in Britain, it would have no significant life in writing again until Bede wrote his
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
, over 300 years later. The Romans – for whom Britain was frequently a poetic metaphor for insular isolation and exciting, dangerous primitivism – transformed Britain into an idea: an idea that may not have reflected the reality of life there, but that was remarkably pervasive.

Some make the argument that the classical texts about Britain are severely limited in value, giving us only the conquerors’ view. That, of course, is true: no words written by Britons remain to tell us how they perceived themselves, or their place in the world, or their relationship with the invaders. The story must be completed by the evidence on the ground, the detritus of life, the objects that remain. These shards of life cannot lie in themselves, though in their
interpretations of objects and places, archaeologists are indelibly marked by the prejudices of their own times, just as are historians.

The history of Roman Britain is, like one of its shattered mosaics, reconstructed from its pieces by each successive generation; each generation makes a slightly different pattern from the fragments. ‘Britain’ was an idea for the Romans. For us, ‘Roman Britain’ is also an idea, as well as a time and a place. Because it has always been, from the first classical accounts, so slippery, open to so many contradictory interpretations, ‘Roman Britain’ has become an imaginative space in which some of our darkest anxieties and fantasies have been rehearsed. Fifteen centuries on, it is printed on our landscape, physical and imaginative. As Elizabeth Bowen wrote of Rome: ‘What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.’

Finis erat orbis ora Gallici litoris, nisi Brittania insula non qualibet amplitudine nomen paene orbis alterius mereretur.
(The shore of Gaul was the end of the world, unless the island of Britain, by reason of its size, deserves the name of almost another world.)

Solinus, third or fourth century ad

… this little world …

William Shakespeare,
c
.1595

CONLAG: Where the fuck are we?

Howard Brenton, 1980

If you stand at the end of the modernist concrete pier in the Kentish town of Deal, you can lean into the sea breeze, as fresh to the face as a dousing of cold water, and look back to the shoreline, where toffee-coloured waves crackle against the pebbled beach. It was between this point and Walmer, a few hundred metres south on Kent’s blunt, east-facing edge, that Julius Caesar is thought to have landed. And so, with its first securely dated and recorded event, the story of Britain slipped from prehistory into history.

There is no trace of this event to be seen now. Nor, in fact, is it certain that Caesar landed here. Rather, Deal beach is the spot around which an uncertain consensus has gathered, working from the general’s own account of his two incursions into Britain, in the summers of 55 and 54
BC
. Even without reading too closely between the lines of Caesar’s self-justifying narrative, it is clear that they were inglorious affairs. In 55, the troops were impeded by their heavy arms and armour
as they tried to disembark in swirling deep water. ‘Terrified by the situation, and completely inexperienced in this kind of warfare, they did not act with the same vigour and commitment as they usually did in battles on dry land,’ wrote Caesar in his
Commentaries on the Gallic War
. The standard bearer of the 10th Legion encouraged his hesitant fellow soldiers by leaping out of his ship, crying: ‘Jump out – unless you want to betray our eagle to the enemy – I at least will do my duty for the republic and my general.’ An indecisive battle on the beach was followed by a disaster for Caesar. As in 1588, when Spain sent warships against England, the weather came to the aid of the islanders: a storm destroyed the ships transporting the Roman cavalry, and badly damaged those lying at anchor off the Kentish shore. Eventually, after some danger that the invasion force would end up cut off from the continent, Caesar returned to Gaul. The following year’s expedition was a similar stalemate, ending with diplomatic hostage-taking and mutual face-saving rather than conquest.

The sole municipal recognition of these events (any physical traces of which, as the eighteenth-century antiquary William Stukeley pointed out, are ‘many ages since absorpt by the ocean’) is an inconspicuous plaque set into the grass near the lifeboat station at Walmer, with Caesar’s craggy profile rendered in concrete relief. As I examined it one sunny, cloud-scudded April morning, an elderly man walking his spittle-flecked Alsatian wandered up to see what I was doing. ‘Could do with a clean-up,’ he remarked – indeed, it was lichen-crusted and the inscription was almost illegible. But there were moves afoot to commemorate Caesar’s landings more forcefully. In a camera shop on the high street, the proprietor, Peter Jull, told me about his campaign to erect a memorial to the landings. He envisaged, he said, a complicated bronze assemblage, with Julius Caesar in the prow of his galley, the standard-bearer of the 10th about to leap, and the Britons, in their war chariots, poised to attack. ‘It would be high-profile, and photogenic,’ he said. ‘It would be good for tourism to the town. And as an event it ought to be better recorded, not just for Deal people but for people everywhere in the country.’ Jull also claimed he could trace his own ancestry back to the Kentish Queen Bertha, who welcomed St Augustine’s mission in
AD
597. Out on the seafront, I encountered a philosophical street-sweeper, catching the sun on a sheltered bench, his rubbish cart beside him, who said that he had found perfect
happiness by way of his job: ‘I wish I’d done it in 1956 when I left school.’ I asked him if he knew about the campaign for the sculpture of Caesar. ‘It’ll be between him and Norman Wisdom,’ he said drily. It turned out there was a rival campaign under way to memorialise the Deal-born comedian.

As holidaymakers bicycled along the promenade, and children queued for ice cream despite the chill wind, it was hard to imagine the English Channel as the implacable, terrifying barrier classical writers described. The Romans’ world was a generous sphere. The Mediterranean lapped comfortably at the shores of its more familiar regions, with Italy snug at its centre. Far, far away, where no civilised man ventured, roared the Ocean, girdling the world’s inhabitable regions – or so Homer had written, and so it was generally maintained. In this liminal realm between the Earth and the void, in this frighteningly distant zone, lay Britain. Here, even the laws of nature could not be relied upon. Tacitus, writing in the dying years of the first century
AD
about his father-in-law’s stint as governor of Britain, reported tales of curious gelatinous waves in the northern seas that were ‘sluggish and heavy to the oars, and not set in motion as much as other seas even by the winds’. If for Shakespeare the ‘silver sea’ around Britain served it ‘in the office of a wall’ or as ‘a moat defensive to a house’, then the Romans thought about it in not dissimilar vein – but as outsiders.

Caesar tried his hand at Britain after he had conquered his way through Gaul. According to his own account, taking the island was the natural extension of his gains on the continent, since (he claimed) the Britons had close links with their neighbours across the Channel; alongside this practical justification came the kudos attached to campaigning on the very fringes of the known world. Britain stayed on the Roman agenda, on and off: Caesar’s successor, the emperor Augustus, mooted, but never carried through, an invasion. As Britain crept into political focus for Rome, so it began to be harnessed as a literary metaphor for extremity and isolation. A poem by Catullus, a contemporary of Julius Caesar, is addressed to two friends, Furius and Aurelius, who are, says the poem, so loyal they would accompany the author even to India or Arabia, or to the steppes of Scythia, or Parthia, or Africa – or to the ‘Britons at the margins of the world’. In Latin, the phrase is ‘
ultimosque Britannos
’, and the word ‘
ultimosque
’ is split awkwardly between two
lines: these Britons drop over the world’s edge. The poet Virgil’s first
Eclogue
, composed during the civil wars that ended in 31
BC
with the accession of Augustus as emperor, is a pastoral set in a mythical landscape inhabited by shepherds and nymphs; Tennyson’s ‘the moan of doves in immemorial elms’ is inspired by one of its lines. But the poem also seems to have a demi-life in Virgil’s own turbulent era of civil strife, aristocratic power struggle and land confiscations. One of its characters has received the right to continue his bucolic existence; the other has been cast from his land and is forced into exile – perhaps, he says, he will be banished to the steppes of Scythia, perhaps to Britain ‘
toto divisos orbe
’, ‘quite cut off from the world’.