Under Another Sky (32 page)

The luckiest mosaics, perhaps, are those that have been carefully looked after
in situ
. In 1811, a farmer called George Tupper stumbled on the remains of a villa when ploughing on his farm at Bignor on the South Downs, a short step away from Stane Street, the Roman road from Chichester to London. Nearby, at Bignor Park, lived John Hawkins, whose family had grown rich from mines in his native Cornwall. Hawkins, a well-travelled man of botanical and antiquarian leanings, took charge of the excavations – since, in his words, Tupper was ‘a man of very low education and manners’. (The villa is still owned by
Thomas Tupper, the great-great-great-great grandson of the original George.) The remains were quickly secured from ‘nightly depredations’ by a ‘Hovel in which one of [Tupper’s] sons can sleep’. Later, sturdy thatched-roof buildings were put up, which still stand – and indeed are regarded as rare surviving examples of early-nineteenth-century agricultural buildings, valuable in their own right.

In a pattern now familiar, Lysons was brought in to study and record the excavations. Visitors began to flock to see the mosaics: between March and November 1815, there were 904 signatures in the visitors’ book. Hawkins and Lysons became firm friends, corresponding copiously: on one occasion Lysons gave an all-too-vivid hint of the discomforts of even gentlemanly archaeology, noting (in March 1813) that ‘I have been so much troubled with my old complaint of the Rheumatism in my hip, that I was afraid of venturing to stand about in the open air, unless there had been a greater probability of the absence of the East or North wind.’ In 1819, Lysons died suddenly – a shock and an ‘irreparable’ loss to Hawkins. The following year a guidebook by Lysons was posthumously published ‘for the accommodation of [the proprietor’s] visitors; many of whom were desirous of obtaining more information on the subject, than it was in his power to afford’. The book described the mosaics as ‘in a good taste, and the figures are better executed than any which have been before discovered in similar remains in this island’. The villa – now surrounded by vineyards, giving it an oddly Mediterranean atmosphere – has been attracting visitors ever since.

The high point of the mosaics at Bignor is a depiction of the rape of Ganymede by Jupiter, disguised as an eagle. The boy was taken to Olympus, to become cup-bearer to the gods. One of the eagle’s wings is blotted out, but the other is a bright sweep of ruby and rust and cream. The eagle grasps Ganymede carefully – a claw around the boy’s sexily naked hip, the beak nuzzling his scarlet Phrygian cap. The boy wears a crimson cloak, its folds and shadows carefully picked out. He holds out his right hand, as if in surprise, and he still carries his shepherd’s crook in the other, for the unsuspecting Trojan prince had been herding a flock of sheep on Mount Ida. In Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, the story of Ganymede’s abduction is the first of the tales that Orpheus tells in his poem-within-a-poem, as he sits in the grove of listening trees, surrounded by animals and birds.

And off he swept the Trojan lad; who now
Mixing the nectar, waits in heaven above
(Though Juno frowns) and hands the cup to Jove.

Ovid’s stories seem to run through so many mosaics: but were these really readers’ mosaics, meant to be associated with poems – or just images to be plucked from a pattern book, entirely divorced from their literary associations? Often it is hard to tell. But one famous mosaic discovered in England cannot be understood without a poem. Indeed, it demands to be read like a poem.

One day in 1938, Herbert Cook was digging a hole to bury a dead sheep on his farm near Low Ham, in Somerset, when he came across an unfamiliar-looking terracotta tile. He took it to the local museum, where it was identified as part of a pilae stack for a hypocaust system. The site was excavated in 1946 and a villa, probably dating from the late fourth century, was revealed – including a mosaic that is now one of the great objects of the collection of the Museum of Somerset at Taunton. Alongside the mosaic, the museum shows a Pathé newsreel shot during the excavation. Against a soaring, Elgar-like score, the voiceover intones: ‘Even in this atomic age, the richness and grace of the mosaics are of great significance in the recording of Britain’s long history … When the excavation is completed, experts hope to perpetuate this relic of an age that had no such things as prefabs and housing problems.’

The mosaic is divided into five panels, two running the length of the mosaic at each side, and three occupying the central strip. They tell a story sequentially, like a graphic novel. It begins with one of the long flanking panels, which shows three ships ploughing the sea, the boats with beaky figureheads, and the faces of little men emerging rather comically above the decks. One of them, in the centre boat, wears a Phrygian cap: which shows that these people, like Ganymede, are Trojans. From the first boat, the leading figure hands an object – perhaps a necklace or diadem – to a man who, rather awkwardly, stands on the shore at right angles to the rest of the composition.

The next panel makes the subject of the mosaic perfectly clear. It is a family group of sorts. On the left stands Aeneas, bearded, leaning on a spear. Beside him is a young boy, also with a spear, and also wearing the distinctive Phrygian cap. It is his son, Ascanius. Next is a
tall, elegant creature, white-skinned and naked but for her jewels: armlets, a necklace, a diadem, and a body chain, which fits over her neck and under her arms, connected between the breasts – there is one just like it in the British Museum’s Roman Britain gallery. This is Venus, goddess of love, who is also Aeneas’s mother. And at the right, a female figure, draped in scanty fabric, her hair bound in a topknot: Dido. This, then, is the story of Dido and Aeneas, the doomed love between the queen of Carthage and the prince of Troy, which is told in the early books of Virgil’s
Aeneid
.

Venus, flanked by two Cupids (one holding his flaming torch pointing down, the other raising his aloft), also sits in the panel at the centre of the mosaic – for it is she who is orchestrating this story, the spider at the heart of the web. In the
Aeneid
, when the exhausted, storm-tossed Trojans turn up on the north African shore, Venus fears a hostile reception for her beloved Trojans, and so she disguises her son Cupid as Ascanius, and he inflames Dido with what turns out to be a disastrous love for Aeneas.

The next scene shows three galloping horses. Mounted are Ascanius, Aeneas and Dido. They are out hunting, all three of them at full pelt, their cloaks streaming behind them. Ascanius gallops out in front, his mount’s hooves pounding. Aeneas comes next, his head turned back towards Dido, who follows on a white horse. The final panel shows the culmination of Venus’s plans. As the hunt continues, a storm breaks. Dido and Aeneas take shelter together in a cave, and there they make love. The mosaic shows them embracing, kissing: he has lifted her bodily from the ground.

‘
Ille dies primus leti primusque malorum/ causa fuit
’ – ‘that was the first day of her death, the first day of her sorrows, the cause of everything’, says the poem. Dido is completely engulfed by her love for Aeneas. And the Trojan is in love, too, up to a point: until Jupiter sends Mercury, the messenger of the gods, to remind him of his destiny, which is not here building Dido’s new city (for she too is an exile, a traveller from Phoenicia in the east who must establish a new home for her people). Aeneas must leave her and go on, back to sea, and to Italy, where destiny decrees he will establish the dynasty that will one day found Rome.

What happens next is not on the mosaic. Aeneas orders his men to prepare the ships in secret: he will find a moment to tell the queen
of his departure. But Dido senses what is afoot. She rages through the city, like a furious maenad, and then confronts him. ‘Did you think you would keep this a secret? Did you think you’d steal away from my shores?’ she asks. Aeneas replies that their love was no marriage; that Italy must be his darling desire now. Nothing moves him. He is resolved; the Trojans leave. Dido builds herself a funeral pyre, takes Aeneas’s sword, which he has left behind him, and stabs herself: ‘
ensemque cruore spumantem sparsasque manus
’ – ‘the sword is spattered with blood, her hands are soaked in it’. It is a cruelly symbolic suicide, penetrated by her lover’s weapon. The pyre burns; the Trojans, as they put out to deep water, see it flaming in the distance. Later, Dido and Aeneas meet again when he makes the perilous journey to the Underworld, the realm of the dead. She turns her back on him. It is then that Aeneas tries, at last, to express his real love for her: too late.

There is nothing quite like this mosaic elsewhere in Britain. It is, you could argue, the first object in Britain that tells a complete story:
a set of images that reveals, and is to be read alongside, a literary text. It has been argued that the owner of the villa at Low Ham might have commissioned the mosaic based on images he himself knew: there is a manuscript of the
Aeneid
in the Vatican, for example, whose illuminations are similar to the scenes in the Low Ham mosaic. That can be no more than speculation: but what seems clear to me is that someone in what we now call Somerset loved a poem so much that they wished it to be picked out in fragments of stone: a set-piece of learned, literary, utterly Roman taste on the fringe of the empire. And just a few decades later, everything that the mosaic and the poem stood for fell apart.

But we are moving in a dim land of doubts and shadows. He who wanders here, wanders at his peril, for certainties are few, and that which at one moment seems a fact, is only too likely, as the quest advances, to prove a phantom. It is, too, a borderland …

Francis Haverfield, 1905

It was a gloomy June day in Great Yarmouth, beneath the infinite Norfolk sky that sank into the flat and treeless fens. Matthew and I had come to the edge of England, and to the end of a month-long journey in search of the remains of Roman Britain. We drove through the outskirts of the town, past endless rows of static caravans poised for occupation by those with a taste for the bleak. At length we arrived
at Burgh Castle, the name of both a village and the Roman ruin that lies at its edge. When we saw it, we were quieted by its sheer force. Even from a distance the fort walls – standing as tall as they were built, and outridden by fat, tubular towers – were daunting.

New clouds had flooded the sky; it was cooling, and threatening to rain. As we approached the fort on foot, through fields of calf-length grass, we began to get a sense of the landscape beyond. With the sweep of the river Waveney in the foreground, and a windmill in the distance, it resembled a scene, more sky and water than land, by one of the more austere seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painters: Jacob van Ruisdael, perhaps. When Burgh Castle was built, probably in the third quarter of the third century, there was none of this land to be seen: it guarded the southern tip of a great estuary, where Great Yarmouth stands now. The northern edge was presided over by another fort, at Caister-on-Sea.

We walked to the south wall of the fort, which rose an imposing four and a half metres tall. Five neat courses of terracotta tiles, in the usual Roman style, ran at regular intervals through the flint-and-mortar walls. Some of the smartly squared-off flints used to face the wall were still in place, though many had been plundered over the years, revealing its rubbly innards. I ran my hand over the unforgiving sharp grittiness of it – the familiar texture of East Anglian buildings of almost any age. A large chunk of wall, in all its massy two-metre width, leaned out at a disconcerting angle from the main run, like a slice of cake ready to be levered on to a plate. We were the only people here, except for a dog-walker and two joggers who ploughed determinedly round and round the walls.

Burgh Castle is one of the Roman forts, dating from the third century, that dot the east coast of England from the Wash to the Solent. The
Notitia Dignitatum
, a Roman document outlining all the military commands held in the empire in the late fourth century, notes the existence of a post called the Count of the Saxon Shore. It is because of the existence of this post that the great coastal remains of the east have come to be known as the ‘Saxon shore forts’. In fact, the forts – including those at Brancaster, Reculver, Lympne, Dover and Pevensey – cannot be ascribed confidently to a single, coherent building plan. They seem to have been built at different dates and fallen out of use at different times. But they point clearly to a threat
from the sea: pirates from the east; Saxon raiders. Burgh Castle is not a romantic or picturesque remain: it is the remnant of a vast and glowering military installation.