Under Another Sky (26 page)

An avalanche of outrage descended on the article’s comments thread. ‘More mult-cult propaganda and lies,’ wrote Oppenheimer, of
Dartford. Derrick, from Nottingham, described the research as ‘insidious, neo-Marxist, multicultist [sic] propaganda’. David, from Nottinghamshire, thought it was a ‘desperate attempt to fool us into thinking we’ve always had a multi-racial society’. Sylvia, from Kent, warned feverishly that the ivory bangle lady would inevitably have been a slave owner and that ‘in those days the native population were the slaves of the Romans … and had their blonde hair pulled out to make blonde wigs for the Romans’. John, in France, wondered whether the researchers were ‘from the same university as the “climate change” mob’. Chillingly, Middlesbrough’s Ste felt that one good thing had come out of the article: it showed that ‘if we were multicultural once and managed to reverse it, we can do it again’.

Only a few voices dissented from the prevailing tone. Ali, from London, was cheerfully impressed that ‘some of my ancestors were actually here (and as socialites) in the fourth century’. Maggie, from London, made an astute remark: ‘She wouldn’t be the first military wife to find herself somewhere random, and she won’t be the last. We army wives have been doing this for centuries.’ Reader comments on the article were disabled. ‘But within a day or two,’ according to Andrew Morrison, chief curator at the Yorkshire Museum, ‘the piece seemed to have been picked up by right-wing organisations in America. Then we started getting email at the museum. I’ve never encountered a story about the interpretation of an archaeological object that’s been reacted to like that. We were accused of promoting black culture; of making the research up; of rewriting history to lever black people into it.’

It was an unpleasant episode; but if nothing else, it threw up, and not for the first time, troubling questions about the significance of the Romans in Britain, and the place of Britain’s Roman period in the sweep of its history. In the early twenty-first century, when immigration is a political flashpoint, when selective historical precedent is – naively or perniciously – sometimes drawn on to defend a specifically northern European identity for Britain, the suggestion that Roman Eboracum was more ethnically diverse than modern York was clearly deeply threatening to some people’s sense of Britishness. At the same time, the idea of Roman Britain as ethnically diverse is precisely that aspect of the period that is being harnessed by museums, including the Yorkshire Museum, to lend this potentially dusty corner of history relevance to contemporary British life. In the Yorkshire Museum the
skull and grave-goods of the ‘ivory bangle lady’ are accompanied by an artist’s impression of her face that – dispensing with the tentative ifs and buts of academic discourse – depicts her as black.

Who were the Romans in Britain? And what have they to do with us, in the twenty-first century? I found myself remembering an article that the novelist Robin Yassin-Kassab had written after he and his family had visited Hadrian’s Wall from their home in southern Scotland. They had been surprised to find traces of ancient Syrians there. ‘Castle Douglas, our damp little town, seems very monocultural, and my family, being multicultural – my wife is Syrian, from Damascus and perhaps originally Palmyra, and I am an Anglo-Syrian mix – seem correspondingly out of place,’ he wrote. ‘Yet all those centuries ago there had been Syrians here, and north Africans, and Europeans of all descriptions.’ Seeing their traces, he wrote, made him and his family feel that they were ‘not alone’.

One of the artefacts that Yassin-Kassab saw was at Arbeia, a fort at the mouth of the Tyne in South Shields. It was a tombstone: a carved relief of a woman sitting in a high-backed wicker chair, beneath a little classical folly of Corinthian columns topped by a pediment. It is nicely preserved, except that she has no face. In her lap she holds a distaff and spindle, and by her left foot sits a basket containing balls of yarn. With her right hand she opens a chest with a lock – perhaps a jewellery casket. She wears a long, flowing, deeply draped dress, and on each wrist is a bracelet. Beneath her, in clear-cut letters, is the inscription:

DM REGINA LIBERTA ET CONIUGE BARATES
PALMYRENUS NATIONE CATUALLAUNA AN XXX

Or:

To the shades of the dead: Barates the Palmyrene [set this up] to Regina, his freedwoman and wife, of the nation of the Catuvellauni, aged 30.

She had a Latin name – Regina, which means queen – but she came from the important British tribe of the Catuvellauni, whose homeland
was roughly where Hertfordshire is now. She had become a slave – we can only speculate as to how. At some point Barates, a man from Syria, had bought her, then freed and married her. It is a reminder that the membrane between slavery and non-slavery could, for some people in the Roman world, be fine. Scribes, doctors, teachers – many of the jobs that we in the modern world would regard as high-status – were often undertaken by slaves. Some former slaves, such as those who had belonged to, and been favoured by, emperors, could earn vast wealth, such as Claudius’s Pallas, who was given the honours equivalent to the high political rank of praetor and voted a fortune by the Senate. Ordinary people – such as Regina – could spend part of their lives as slaves, and end up manumitted. At any rate, Regina had died, a free woman, aged thirty, far from her homeland in south-east England. And her husband, a Syrian from precisely the opposite end of the Roman empire, had chosen to depict her on her tomb as the quintessential Roman matron – spinning her own wool, as the emperor Augustus’s wife Livia was said to have done as a self-conscious act of traditional womanly virtue.

Underneath the Latin inscription is another line of text, which to the untrained eye is simply a series of squiggles. It is in Palmyrene, the version of Aramaic spoken in the Syrian city of Palmyra. The fluency and accuracy with which it is incised suggests that either Barates himself, or another native speaker, carved it. Translated, it reads: ‘Regina, the freedwoman of Barates, alas.’ There is in existence a tombstone to a Barates – perhaps this same man – that was found thirty miles away, in Corbridge. It records his death aged sixty-eight, and obscurely describes him as a ‘
vexillarius
’, which usually means a standard-bearer, but since no army unit is recorded, it is thought that he may rather have been some kind of trader or merchant. Here, then, were two lives intertwined. Here were grief, and love, and pride.

In Roman Britain, you do not have to look far to find traces of people sprung from every corner of the empire. Because of the Romans’ insatiable desire to memorialise their lives and deaths, they left their mark. Some fell in love, had children, stayed. Many, no doubt, were brief visitors, posted to Britannia and then off to the next job, in Tunisia, perhaps, or Hungary, or Spain. In the Yorkshire Museum is an inscription made by a man called Nicomedes, an imperial freedman and probably Greek, to go by his name. He placed an altar
to the tutelary spirit of the province – ‘
Britanniae sanctae
’, sacred Britannia. Also in York, a man called Demetrius erected two inscriptions in his native Greek – one to Oceanus and Tethys, the old Titan spirits of the sea; the other to the gods that presided over the governor’s headquarters. The Roman empire was multicultural in the sense that it absorbed people of multiple ethnicities, geographical origins and religions. But Roman-ness – becoming Roman, living as a Roman – also involved particular and distinctive habits, architecture, food, ways of thinking, language, things that Romans held in common whether they were living in York or Gaza. At the same time, Romanness, and the Roman empire, survived so long because of its very impurity; because of its willingness to incorporate all but the most threatening foreign influences and cults. (The problem with Christianity, for example, was that it valued an exclusive relationship with God above allegiance to the Roman state gods and emperor.) And although the Romans, as we have seen, were not short of prejudices about the nature of the uncivilised peoples beyond the imperial borders, they do not appear to have differentiated between people based on the colour of their skin. Emperors were Italian, Spanish; later African, German, Arabian, Gaulish (if not British).

Every age has had its own answers to the question of what the Romans in Britain have to do with ‘us’. For Camden, setting out on his tour of the counties of Britain in the 1580s, his humanist project was to gather information from the landscape, buildings, inscriptions and artefacts that he encountered, using them, and his knowledge of ancient texts, as a way of discovering the truth about a past lost through the ‘negligence of writers and credulitie of the common sort’. It was, he wrote, a process of ‘recovery’ – Britain’s history was to be wrenched back from the grip of the mythographers and subjected to proper scholarship. His attitude to the Roman invaders was ambivalent. The occupying military, he wrote, ‘alwaies with terror were ready to command the Inhabitants’, and the tax-collectors, ‘that is to say, greedy cormorants and horsleeches … confiscated their goods and exacted tributes in the name of the dead’. But in the end, Camden wrote, the Romans ‘governed [the Britons] with their lawes, and framed them to good maners and behaviour, so as in their diet and apparell they were not inferior to any other provinces’. Importantly for Camden, the Romans introduced ‘that healthsome light of Jesus Christ’ that
‘shone withal upon the Britans’. Ultimately, the ‘brightnesse of that most glorious Empire … chased away all savage barbarisme from the Britans minds’.

That the Romans had civilised the untutored, primitive natives was to become a strong thread in later discussions of their influence on Britain. And for those inhabiting the borderlands of Roman influence – the Scottish Lowlands – these discussions seem to have been especially heavily freighted. Sir John Clerk of Penicuik was sure of a line of inheritance from his beloved Romans to the (Lowland) Scottish present. With his friends and correspondents, Clerk was a member of a short-lived club-within-a-club of the Society of Antiquaries, known as the Equites Romani, or Roman Knights. Each member took a classically inflected, usually rather revealing nickname. Clerk called himself Agricola, the governor who had briefly conquered all Britain – appropriately for a commissioner for the Act of Union. William Stukeley was Chyndonax, after a supposed Druid whose tomb had been discovered in France in the sixteenth century. Alexander Gordon, a protégé of Clerk’s, gave himself the name Galcagus – or Calgacus – after the heroic but doomed Caledonian chieftain of Tacitus’s account of Mons Graupius.

In his work on the antiquities of Scotland,
Itinerarium Septentrionale
, Gordon took patriotic delight in the Romans’ failure to keep lasting control of his homeland. The very existence of Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall, he decided, were ‘Proof of the Scots never having been conquered’. He argued passionately against the view that it had simply not been worth the Romans’ while to hang on to Scotland. If it had been ‘so despicable a Country in the Eyes of the Romans’, he wrote, ‘can it be reasonable to suppose that Julius Agricola would have spent seven whole Years in that Country, and that his Army should be so eager to penetrate to the utmost Bounds thereof, which in all that Time they never could?’

Indeed, Gordon argued, Scotland’s terrain was a blessing – and here he was paraphrasing Calgacus’s Tacitean speech at Mons Graupius – since ‘these very Mountains seem by Nature to have been placed as so many Bulwarks, for the better defending their Independancy and Freedom, and preserving them from the griping Tallons of the grand Plunderers of the World’. Clerk clearly found this Scottish patriotism an embarrassment. In a letter to Roger Gale (in the Roman Knights
Venutius, named for Cartimandua of the Brigantes’ divorced husband) he wrote: ‘Mr Gordon’s high respect for his countrey hath carryed him too far, & made him commit a sort of laudable fault … I am, I confesse, of the opinion of some learned men that it is a reproach to a nation to have resisted the humanity which the Romans laboured to introduce.’ Rome’s history of intervention in Scotland could, it seemed, be co-opted both as evidence for the country’s fierce and long-lasting independence, and for the graciousness of its enlightened eighteenth-century capital. Clerk regarded himself as an inheritor of the ‘humanity’ that he believed the Romans had implanted in the Lowlands. (‘Humanity’ is also the Scots word for Latin; such that the professor of Latin at the University of Glasgow, for example, is traditionally known as the professor of humanity.)

Gordon’s entertainingly written work was soon superseded, in 1732, by the magisterial
Britannia Romana
, by John Horsley. The meticulousness and accuracy of his recording of Britain’s Roman remains caused the work to be regarded as authoritative well into the nineteenth century. For him, the Romans had provided not so much a literal inheritance, as Sibbald had suggested, but rather, a set of moral lessons: ‘no doubt a great many things may be learned from those antique monuments, which are both instructive and useful. At least there is nothing, that can give us a more affecting sense of the vanity of this world, and of all that is in it. Such vast works, suitable to so powerful and extensive an empire, all laid in desolation!
Ipsae periere ruinae!
[The very ruins perish!] What surprising revolutions and catastrophes may we read not only in history, but in these very monuments! How many men rais’d on a sudden, and then more suddenly cast down again, disgrac’d and murder’d!’ It is as if within the stones are the traces of human stories of tragedy and reversal; they are a repository of narratives of Shakespearean grandeur. The Latin words ‘
ipsae periere ruinae
’ come from Lucan’s
Pharsalia
, an epic poem written in the reign of Nero. The scene is Troy and Julius Caesar is visiting the stage of the events of the Homeric age – a little like Aeneas’s visit to the site of the future Rome in the
Aeneid
. Troy’s glories are forgotten and gone; the scene is savagely comic. Caesar tramples over the tomb of Hector, not knowing what it is.