Under Another Sky (30 page)

Another of the coins is inscribed with the words ‘
renovat(or) Roman(orum)
’ – ‘the restorer of the Romans’. The image is of a she-wolf, suckling two infants – Romulus and Remus. The appeal is, again, to the old brew of history and mythology that created the very idea of Rome. Beneath are the initials R.S.R. The letters appear on many of the precious-metal issues of Carausius, and have been interpreted as standing for the name of a mint, though they do not suggest any known town or city; or for the words ‘
rationalis summae rei
’, meaning ‘financial minister’, though they do not match the standard abbreviation for the phrase. Neither of these speculations has ever seemed completely satisfactory as a way of explaining R.S.R.

These letters are not the only enigmatic initials, unknown in the coinage of other reigns, to crop up on Carausius’s issues. In 1931, a young boy brought to the British Museum a medallion, given to him by his grandfather but otherwise of unknown origin. One day in the spring of 2012, I visited the British Museum coin department, where curator Richard Abdy brought it out for me to look at. He let me pick it up; it felt heavy and clumpy in my palm. On the obverse was an image of Carausius in a consular toga. That was a piece of fiction: Carausius awarded himself the title. On the reverse was Victory in a chariot, with the legend ‘
victoria Carausi Aug(usti)
’ – ‘victory of Carausius Augustus’. Below the image were the letters I.N.P.C.D.A. Generations of scholars were baffled by this bizarre string of initials: no one could work out what they might mean, or stand for. Until one day a historian and author called Guy de la Bédoyère saw the solution staring him in the face.

When I wrote to de la Bédoyère to ask him how he had solved the mystery of the letters R.S.R. and I.N.P.C.D.A., he gave me a rather surprising answer. In the early 1990s, he said, he had become bored by his study of Roman Britain, and had put it to one side in order to concentrate on something entirely unrelated: the seventeenth-century diary and correspondence of John Evelyn. In doing so, he wrote, he ‘became used to ploughing through endless Latin texts to trace [the] unattributed quotes and asides’ that the diarist, with the learned ease of his age, had used quite freely and naturally. ‘But one day in, I think, 1997 I picked up a Roman coin book and looked at the coins of Carausius and those mysterious exergue legends. I remember quite distinctly thinking, “Well, everyone knows that Carausius alluded to
Virgilian imagery on his coins so I expect those initials represent some Virgilian text.”

‘Then I had to run the bath for the kids. While the water was running I decided to skim through Virgil as I had done for all of Evelyn’s quotes. But first of all I thought the easy thing to do would be to skim through the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
. I had an old 1950s copy (which I still possess) and scanned through what they had. On page 557 column (a) I found I.N.P.C.D.A.

‘I can still recall the skin crawling on the back of my neck when I saw it. I returned to the bath and stopped the taps. Then I remembered R.S.R. and I hardly dared look at the book. My eyes slowly drifted up and there was R.S.R … So I never even had to look up Virgil properly … In short I had done nothing clever. I know a bit about coins, a bit about Carausius and a bit about the classics and I hadn’t been tied by an academic post only to work on Roman Britain … John Evelyn took me to Virgil and Carausius by a roundabout route. The whole thing took about twelve minutes.’

He had simply seen that R.S.R. are the initial letters of the words ‘
redeunt saturnia regna
’, ‘the Golden Age returns’; and I.N.P.C.D.A. of ‘
iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto
’, or ‘now a new progeny is sent from Heaven’. The two phrases constitute the most famous line and a half of Virgil’s fourth
Eclogue
, an ecstatic poem foretelling an era in which a miraculous child will be born and the earth will bring forth its bounty unbidden. If de la Bédoyère’s leap was right – and it seems too great a coincidence not to be – it provides another hint towards how Carausius was trying to project himself: he was using Virgil’s poetic language to suggest that he would preside over nothing less than the rebirth of the Augustan values of the Roman empire, now tarnished and tired. But nothing more of Carausius is known. Whether he really did wish to restore old virtues, or whether he was using these Virgilian references as mere empty propaganda, is obscure. It seems unlikely that his reign was imagined, in its time, as the beginnings of a proudly independent Britain: Carausius will more likely have had his eye on the greater prize of being accepted as some kind of legitimate joint ruler of the empire, as the coin showing him with Maximian and Diocletian suggests. But our fragmentary knowledge of the Carausius episode remains intriguing. Could old Rome really have been reborn? In Britannia? This is fertile ground for the historical
novelist: Rosemary Sutcliff’s sequel to
The Eagle of the Ninth
,
The Silver Branch
, is set during Carausius’s British reign.

It was John Evelyn, as it happened, who had first proposed that the phrase ‘
decus et tutamen
’ – ‘an ornament and a safeguard’ – should be engraved on the edge of Charles II’s silver coins. The phrase, somehow inevitably, also comes from Virgil, from the
Aeneid
, book five; it is a description of the beautiful cuirass that Aeneas bestows on one of his men as a prize in the funeral games that he holds in honour of his father. Evelyn had been inspired to suggest the phrase after seeing it, of all places, on the binding of one of Cardinal Richelieu’s books in 1644. It was surely this coincidental Virgilian connection that had steered de la Bédoyère unconsciously towards solving the riddle of R.S.R. and I.N.P.C.D.A. The words ‘
decus et tutamen
’ are still inscribed around the rim of our one-pound coin, though the practice of clipping coins, which the inscription was meant to discourage in the seventeenth century, has long ceased. Collingwood, I think, would not have approved of the route by which de la Bédoyère reached the fourth
Eclogue
: it would have been insufficiently scientific and systematic for his taste, I imagine. But the intuitive threads that connect Carausius, the seventeenth century and our own ordinary pound coin – I hope that he would have enjoyed that, as the child Robin, if not as the don R. G. ‘Suppose,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘the past lives on in the present; suppose, though incapsulated in it, and at first sight hidden beneath the present’s contradictory and more prominent features, it is still alive and active?’

That it was a famous place, the Romane coins, the cherkerworke pavements, and the engraven marble stones that now and then are here digged up (which have beene broken, and to no small prejudice of Antiquitie) do evidently testifie.

William Camden, 1607

In the second half of the fourth century, Roman Britain was decades away from collapse. Things were changing. Populations in many of the now 200-year-old towns were dipping. The wealthiest inhabitants’ urge to endow municipal buildings and set up inscriptions was fading. Towns were ceasing to be thriving centres of civic life: in Silchester, the grand basilica, once the scene of regional administration, seems to have ended up being used for industrial metalworking. On the other hand, some people, in some parts of Britain, were enjoying more prosperity than at any other time under Roman rule, and a lifestyle that would not be equalled in wealth or sophistication for another 800 years. In the Cotswolds and the south-west came a great flowering of grand country estates – rural villas, some of enormous size, luxuriously appointed, probably controlling great swathes of agricultural land. When Matthew and I puttered along the dead-straight Fosse Way to visit the villa remains at Chedworth, and those at nearby Great Witcombe (among whose low walls wild orchids were pushing up their purplish spears), I could not help but be reminded of eighteenth-century country gentlemen, and of the twenty-first-century super-rich, in the Gloucestershire fastnesses of later centuries.

Often, Roman remains have survived precisely because of the care taken by the gentry of a later age – and their access to cheap labour. ‘The discovery of Roman villas in these woods originated with an
under gamekeeper, engaged in ferreting rabbits,’ wrote James Farrer, the antiquary who excavated the Chedworth villa in the 1860s. The gamekeeper showed a handful of tesserae to the heir to the local estate, Lord Eldon. Recognising them as Roman, Lord Eldon brought in Farrer, his uncle, to supervise an excavation. Fifty labourers and foresters were employed to clear the surrounding trees and to unearth the remains. What they found was a palatial fifty-room villa with two bathhouses, and numerous hypocaust-heated rooms with elaborate, still-bright mosaics. The family built a museum and opened the site to the public; it is now owned by the National Trust.

When we visited the Cotswolds, we stayed in a borrowed shack in a woodland clearing. A wren was nesting in the room where we slept; from the bed I could hear its tiny wings thrumming above me and see its tremendous, tremulous bursts of flight. The cottage was hard by the walls of one of the great Gloucestershire estates, Barnsley Park. In the grounds had once been excavated a Roman villa, among whose remains was found a gemstone engraved with an image of Orpheus. With certain feelings of feudal anxiety, I knocked on the door of the early-eighteenth-century Palladian house, and we were let into the entrance hall, the walls of which bristled with icy Italianate stucco plasterwork. We were politely sent away without being allowed to look at the site of the villa.

Cirencester – the epitome of a snug Cotswolds market town, built in golden, sun-washed stone – was once the capital of Britannia Prima, the south-western province of Britain after its division into four administrative sections in the late third or early fourth century. We left the camper van in the bathetically named Forum car park. Just south of here once stood a magnificent basilica, 102 metres long, the second largest in Britain, after London’s. I found it almost impossible mentally to project a Roman grid and buildings on to the winding streets of this genteel town, with its gentlemen’s outfitters and antique shops. In the centre, Quern Lane and Lewis Lane tentatively pick up the line of the Roman Fosse Way, and point towards the high, grassed-over remains of one of the largest Roman amphitheatres in Britain, on the south-western edge of the town. (Beyond, the Fosse Way marches south-west to Bath, and north-east to Leicester and Lincoln.) Apart from these traces, the most intriguing signs of Cirencester’s Roman past are to be found in the Corinium Museum.

Here is the ‘Septimius stone’, whose inscription gives weight to the idea that Corinium, Roman Cirencester, was a provincial capital; it is a dedication to Jupiter by ‘
primae provinciae rector
’, the ‘governor of the first province’. An immense Corinthian column capital, wreathed in carved acanthus leaves, gives a notion of the scale of the town’s public architecture. Nearby is displayed an ingenious word square, scratched into a bit of wall plaster, which reads:

R O T A S
O P E R A
T E N E T
A R E P O
S A T O R

It means ‘Arepo the sower holds the wheels by his labour’, and the words are palindromic, such that they can be read from left to right, right to left, top to bottom or bottom to top. There may have been magic in this arrangement of letters. Such word squares have been found in Pompeii and in Syria. There is a sculpted trio of stone Matres, the Celtic mother-goddesses, their laps swelling with cakes, fruit and bread. A cavalry tombstone tells us that Sextus Valerius Genialis was Frisian and served for twenty years in a Thracian cohort. As I read the inscription, I realised the sculptor had slipped, and misspelled THRAEC as TRHAEC.

The most wonderful things here, however, are the mosaics, brought to the Corinium Museum from beneath the streets of the town or from the great country villas. Found under Dyer Street in 1849 was a remarkable pavement, its layout a three-by-three series of octagons in a guilloche frame. Within the octagons are depicted intricate scenes – four of them badly damaged, but the remaining five clear and bright. In the corners are the four seasons. Winter is obliterated, but the others are there. Spring is especially lovely: she has flowers in her hair, and on her shoulder perches a swallow with a red flash at its throat and streamers for a tail. The finest of the medallions shows the hunter Actaeon, who, in Ovid’s poem on mythical transformations, the
Metamorphoses
, chances upon the chaste goddess Diana as she bathes. His punishment for this unwitting violation is to be turned into a deer. As Ovid wrote: ‘
dat … vivacis cornua cervi
’ – ‘she gave him the antlers
of a mature stag’. In the mosaic they are beginning to sprout from his still-human body, just as they do in the poem. He is already being ripped apart by his own hunting dogs, who tear into his thighs, their little fangs dripping tesserae of blood.

Better still is the Barton Farm mosaic, found in 1824 when workmen removed a tree from a spot just outside the old town walls of Cirencester. In its central, circular panel is Orpheus, who sits upon a rock strumming a lyre, his cloak stretched out behind him. He wears a Phrygian cap; and a fox leaps away from him. Around him, arranged in two concentric circles, are the animals that he has charmed with his unspeakably seductive music. Nearest him are the birds: a peacock with its tail furled; a peahen or pheasant; a swan or a goose. In the next band are great animals: tiger, leopard, lion and – the only mythological beast – griffin. The felines have the powerful necks, low-held heads and stealthy tread of real cats. Between the animals are trees, for in the
Metamorphoses
they too are charmed by Orpheus’s song: according to Ovid, the oak, the poplar, the hazel; the plane, the willow, the arbutus; the beech, the willow, the pine. Even in its damaged state, with whole passages of it destroyed, it is wonderful.

Further west into Gloucestershire, near Stroud, is another version of this Orpheus mosaic. It lies under the graveyard of the village of Woodchester – perhaps a church was built here because of the grandeur of the spot, for the mosaic, which would have covered the floor of the most spectacular room of the villa here, is nearly fifteen metres square. Local antiquaries knew of its existence from the late seventeenth century and from time to time portions were revealed – and appallingly damaged – when graves were dug. Finally, over the course of four summers from 1793, it was studied in detail by Samuel Lysons, one of the most significant figures in the development of Romano-British archaeology.