The first of these objects – the word ‘tablet’ lends a deceptively sturdy, lapidary air to these delicate fragments – was discovered by the historian and archaeologist Robin Birley in 1973, digging at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, which stood on land at Chesterholm that had been purchased by his father, the eminent archaeologist Eric Birley. ‘If I have to spend the rest of my life working in dirty, wet trenches, I doubt whether I shall ever again experience the shock and excitement I felt at my first glimpse of ink hieroglyphics on tiny scraps of wood,’ he later recalled. He had unearthed two thin fragments of wood, ‘which looked rather like oily plane shavings’. He passed one to his assistant, who observed that it seemed to have some odd marks on it. ‘I had another look and thought I must have been dreaming, for the marks appeared to be ink writing. We took the piece over to the excavation hut and gently cleaned it, discovering that there were in fact two slivers of wood adhering to each other. After gently prising them apart with a knife, we stared at the tiny writing in utter disbelief.’ The tablets, as they gradually emerged, were so friable that even the faintest pressure – such as removing a bracken frond from their surface – could fracture them, he wrote. Their remarkable survival was down to the anaerobic conditions of the waterlogged ground in which they had been trapped for nearly 2,000 years. When they emerged, delicate and with the consistency of wet blotting paper, they could not be allowed to dry out, or they would fast disintegrate. Complete, they were about the size of postcards. Postcards from the past.
A year later, on a hot spring day in 1974, a papyrology expert called Alan Bowman set out with colleagues and students from the University of Manchester, where he was then a lecturer, for a field trip to Vindolanda. Bowman spent the sunny afternoon getting a headache indoors, having been handed a tablet to decipher. ‘Robin at first thought they might be in Greek,’ he said. They were, rather, in Roman cursive handwriting, notoriously difficult for the untrained eye to read. The tablet ‘was a letter about barley and beer’, he told me, drily. At about the same time, unbeknown to him, Professor David Thomas, a papyrologist based at the University of Durham, was also being consulted about the new discoveries; eventually the two joined forces and worked together for more than thirty years. That excavation, which ran from 1973 to 1975, yielded tablets in dribs and drabs. Later, in the 1980s, came a glut. The material constituted ‘a massive percentage of Roman letters as a whole’, Bowman said. It meant that, from nowhere, suddenly ‘Roman Britain was providing the most important information on the development of Latin in the first century’. Bowman, now a professor at the University of Oxford, has since worked with Thomas on deciphering around 1,500 Vindolanda tablets, dating from circa AD 85–130.
From these discarded shards – drafts, scraps, lists, memoranda, letters received and thrown away – came a picture of a community. Characters, real people, emerged from the soil: the fort commander at the turn of the first and second centuries was Flavius Cerealis, prefect of the ninth cohort of Batavians, from the mouth of the Rhine in what is now the Netherlands. His wife Lepidina and their children were with him. The tablets contained inventories and shopping lists (‘chickens, 20; 100 apples, if you can find nice ones, 100 or 200 eggs, if they are for sale there at a fair price’). There was a soldier’s note requesting leave; letters about buying items such as hides and corn; and mentions of booze (the word usually translated as ‘Celtic beer’ is ‘cervesa’, which is surely the ancestor of the Spanish cerveza). There was a scrap of a military report referring to the fighting capabilities of the Britons, who were referred to by the diminutive ‘Brittunculi’, meaning ‘little Britons’, or, perhaps more dismissively, ‘wretched Britons’ – though it is hard safely to extract the word’s tone. The whole fragment reads: ‘… the Britons are unprotected by armour (?). There are very many cavalry. The cavalry do not use swords nor do the wretched Britons mount in order to throw javelins.’
One correspondent, Octavius, grumbled to Candidus that he had not been sent the promised cash for a planned purchase of corn, and then mentioned he would not be using his wagon ‘dum viae male sunt’, while the roads were bad. Flavius Cerialis wrote to somebody called Brocchus: ‘If you love me, brother, I ask that you send me some hunting-nets …’ Brocchus wrote to Flavius Cerealis too, assuring him that he would soon meet the provincial governor. According to Bowman, ‘They didn’t go into their feelings too deeply. It’s mostly “send me two more cabbages”, not great outpourings.’ He added, opaquely: ‘It’s probably just as well,’ as if cabbages were, after all, more his thing than emotions. What this wasn’t was Auden’s vision of chilly isolation. The tablets conveyed a picture of a busy, connected community.
The big surprise, perhaps, was the extent and the depth of literacy among the soldiering men of Vindolanda. Indeed, some of them were clearly also literary. In 2010, Bowman, Thomas and Dr Roger Tomlin, who had joined the collaboration in the later stages of the work, published their interpretations of a set of tablets that had been excavated in the years 2001–3. One of them contained a run of indistinct letters (and bear in mind that the Romans did not put gaps between words) that the scholars read as ‘certalate’. The particular quality of the handwriting (a neat copybook style) told them, from experience, to expect a literary quotation. They ran the letters through a database of the whole corpus of surviving Latin literature, and found that this particular combination occurs in just one place – in the line ‘nunc varia in gelida sede lacerta latet’, or ‘the spotted lizard now lurks in its chilly home’. The poem from which it comes, known as ‘The Hostess’, is a paean to the virtues of drinking. It’s a hot day, says the seductive Syrian hostess of the poem. The cicadas are bursting the trees with their song; even the lizards have sought the shade. Lie down, garland your head with roses, kiss a pretty girl, drink from a crystal glass. It is a vision of summertime heat and sexy Mediterranean luxury. It was, and is, also a pretty obscure poem, handed down to us as part of a group of works known as the Appendix Vergiliana, once (but no longer) attributed to Virgil. ‘Think of it: the bloody Batavians sitting on the northern frontier reading the Appendix Vergiliana!’ exclaimed Bowman in his rich Mancunian accent. Another fragment in the same set of tablets contained the sentence ‘ante iovem nulli subigeba(nt) arva coloni’ – from Virgil’s poem on farming, the Georgios. ‘Before Jove’s time,’ it means, ‘no settlers brought the land under subjection.’ The line comes from a passage on a lost golden age, a time, impossible aeons ago, when the earth brought forth her Edenic bounty spontaneously, before man had learnt to till the soil.
When I visited him in late 2010, Alan Bowman had just been elected principal of Brasenose College, though his bluff, straightforward manner hardly marked him out as a typical Oxford head of house. His office had a feel of not having quite been settled into. The spine of one A4 file was marked, facetiously, ‘bureaucratic crap’. The task of interpreting the Vindolanda tablets, and other texts that have emerged from the British sod, is one of extraordinary complexity, he told me. It is not just a matter of translating Latin; it is translating eccentric Latin that is often so fragmentary that it contains more gaps than surviving words, written in a script that is faded beyond recognition to any but the most practised eye. He and Thomas are, he told me, cruciverbalists by temperament. ‘I used to do the Guardian crossword,’ he said. ‘Now it’s too much like bloody work.’ Tomlin has a slightly different, and complementary, approach: ‘Roger’s much more artistic than me; he sees the work more in terms of images and shapes,’ said Bowman. When I visited Tomlin in his office at Wolfson College, Oxford, half the floor space was occupied by stacks of oriental carpets, the object of another of his scholarly passions. He was about to give a talk titled ‘Knotted Feathers: Birds in Small Persian Rugs’. On a table lay some rolls of paper: Tomlin’s own line drawings. When I half jokingly asked whether he thought he would have been drafted to Bletchley Park during the Second World War, he agreed unhesitatingly. ‘I am sure there are a lot of analogies between what we do an
d wartime code-breaking,’ he said. (In fact, the don who interviewed him for a place at Cambridge had been a Bletchley code-breaker who managed to turn out a book on Horace while he was there.)
Before the deciphering begins in earnest, the tablets are subjected to electronic imaging processes and infrared photography to make the ink more visible. ‘One ideally also checks the original to see whether a mark is a flaw or a letter,’ said Tomlin: blemishes on the ancient strips of wood can easily be confused with ink marks, working all kinds of mischief on the interpretation. A first look will give the sense of ‘what the document is likely to be’, he added. Tablets written across the grain (that is, in a portrait format) often turn out to be military memoranda. Those written along the grain (landscape) are more likely to be letters. Then, he said, it is a question of ‘getting to know the letter forms and how they are made’, and ‘identifying legible letters’. Many of the individual letters are ‘maddeningly similar to each other’: A’s blur into R’s; C’s, P’s and even T’s can be almost indistinguishable. He often copies out the text himself on to a large sheet of paper. This process of inhabiting the original writer’s physical movements can help him resolve the tangle into individual characters. But you can’t just transcribe a text letter for letter, he said: ‘It is not just a visual code.’ Rather, the work involves a slow, iterative process of holding several hypotheses in mind simultaneously and discarding them where necessary, bringing to bear not just palaeographical knowledge but literary, historical and linguistic insight, as well as common sense, experience and intuition.
Tomlin told me how he once translated a curse tablet found in Bath from which the top right-hand corner was missing. He supplied what he believed were the likely missing words and letters. Later, the real missing piece turned up in a box of miscellaneous fragments. His original interpretation was found to be slightly inaccurate because the writer had made a number of small mistakes, including not accurately ‘centring’ his text – he had squashed in a long word where Tomlin, applying the reasonable logic of an Oxford don, reckoned only a shorter one would fit. If the papyrologists are solvers of crosswords, then they are dealing with setters who break the rules of the game. ‘You’ve got to have a good eye for the thing, and be prepared to believe you’ve got it wrong,’ says Bowman. ‘There’s no flash of light, just a slow realisation.’ Bowman admits that the longer he has gone on deciphering Vindolanda texts, the more mistakes he realises he has made over the years. Scholars such as these work in the shadowy realm of the provisional, never the blinding light of the definitive.
You can see some of the Vindolanda tablets in the Roman Britain gallery of the British Museum, and they look deeply unimpressive. They are thin, small, brownish rectangles covered with thin, small, brownish writing. And yet, craning my neck at an uncomfortable angle to try to read the indistinct strokes, I found myself with a catch in my throat when I came face to face, for the first time, with a tablet whose text I knew already:
Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present (?). Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him (?) their greetings.
I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail.
Sulpicia Lepidina was the wife of Flavius Cerialis, the camp commandant. Claudia Severa was the wife of Brocchus, he of the hunting nets. The letter is written in two hands. The body of the note is in a clear, competent script that has been identified on other tablets – perhaps that of a scribe. The sign-off – warm, personal, urgent – is in another hand. It is probably, according to the papyrologists, Severa’s own. If it is, it means these are the first words to have survived, from anywhere in the empire, in a Roman woman’s own handwriting. ‘Sperabo te soror, vale soror, anima mea, ita valeam karissima et have,’ reads the Latin. The words ‘anima mea karissima’, my dearest soul, may have been a bland formula (‘lots of love’?), but I none the less felt ambushed by the affection and sweetness in them. The fragment contained an atavistic magic that scepticism could not entirely blot out. The years seemed to collapse as I read it, picking out the faint, spidery Latin on the dull wood. I read the words over and over again, and thought of the lost life of the woman who wrote them.
8
Scotland
Of this dyke, or wall, there are evident signs and genuine traces to be seen to this day.
John of Fordun, fourteenth century
I have lost count of how many people have said to me, ‘But the Romans didn’t get beyond Hadrian’s Wall, did they?’ What is certainly true is that the Romans never secured the Highlands, though Agricola fought through to the Grampians in the far north-east and briefly conquered – at least according to Tacitus – the whole island. It is also true that there is no evidence of Roman civilian settlements: no villas, no towns. But there are over 200 sites north of Hadrian’s Wall that have produced Roman archaeological finds. The Romans had persistent contact with, and at times power over, parts of Scotland. Twenty years after the building of Hadrian’s Wall, a second barrier, the Antonine Wall, was built between the firths of Forth and Clyde and held for a generation: it was thickly dotted with forts. There is also a line of signal stations north of Dundee, along the Gask Ridge – the most northerly of a great mass of information-gathering systems that extended beyond the main garrisons, ready to send news of trouble south. The wild territories of Scotland are sprinkled with the traces of marching camps as far north as the Moray Firth. Septimius Severus, in the early third century, campaigned brutally in Perthshire and Angus, beyond the walls. A military base at Cramond, near Edinburgh, left an extraordinary monument in the form of the Cramond Lion, a sculpture of a great feline devouring a man, its sharp teeth sinking into the man’s head, its huge claws clutching his shoulders.
A walk around the galleries of the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh is instructive. Here are fragments of Samian ware, the bases of the dishes inscribed with their owners’ – the soldiers’ – names. So that we know that at Newstead, in the borders, a man called Domitius took his rations; and in Inveresk, in East Lothian, Victor had his mess-pot. Also at Newstead, we know from an amphora scratched with the letters ‘VIN’, the troops, or at least officers, were drinking wine with their rations. Through various kinds of contact – trade, diplomacy and, no doubt, looting – Roman things ended up scattered throughout Scotland. At Trapain Law in East Lothian, an extraordinary cache of late Roman silverware was discovered in 1919. Here were fifty-three pieces, including wine cups, dishes with beaded rims, strainers, spoons: the impedimenta of an elegant Roman feast. Perhaps the hoard was a diplomatic payment, or subsidy, or bribe, to a local tribe. At Carlungie, far to the north in Angus, a French wine amphora was discovered, its contents perhaps enjoyed by the local grandees. A glass Roman dish was found on Westray, one of the northernmost of the Orkneys; a fragment of Samian in Berie in the Outer Hebrides. On a dig that ran between 1998 and 2011 at Birnie, just south of Elgin near the Moray Firth, archaeologist Dr Fraser Hunter and his colleagues found, on an Iron Age site, two hoards. One contained 320 Roman coins, the other 310. The coins, the latest of which dated from the early third century, had been wrapped in leather pouches and buried in ceramic pots lined with bracken. The peoples of the far north were not becoming Roman, but they were taking Roman things and making them their own. Scotland has a Roman past. And that Roman past comes into sharp focus at another period in Scotland’s history: the eighteenth century and the fault line running through it, the Jacobite rebellion of 1745.
When George II’s troops marched north to fight off Charles James Stuart’s attempt on the British throne, they were hampered by their imperfect knowledge of the Highlands. Of the infinitely complex contours of the northern mountains, the ragged outline of the coast, the watery interplay of the lochs and burns and bogs, there
existed no accurate maps. To many Lowland Scots, leave alone the English, the Highlands were terra incognita, a desolate, remote, even primally savage land, culturally and linguistically distant from the intellectual ferment of Enlightenment Edinburgh. There were few roads that afforded efficient transportation of troops; meanwhile, the Jacobites had the advantage of knowing the territory. So it was that the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, was successfully spirited away from the bloodbath of Culloden to safety on Skye, and thence to Rome.
The redcoats were not the first invading army to attempt the subjugation of the Highlands. In AD 79 or 80, the governor, Agricola, according to the biography by his son-in-law, Tacitus, advanced into what is now Scotland. He garrisoned the Forth–Clyde line; and contemplated the invasion of Ireland, which he later claimed (idle boast!) he could have reduced with a single legion and a force of auxiliaries. Beyond the narrow stretch between the firths the territory broadened out again into what Tacitus described as ‘almost another island’. Here Agricola now ventured, his infantry shadowed by his fleet and marines. They came under attack from the Caledonian tribes, and some of Agricola’s officers advised a strategic retreat; but the general was determined to press on. When the Caledonians learned of his intention to advance further, they massed together for a terrifying night attack on the encamped 9th Legion. The Romans successfully fought them off, but the Caledonians melted away into ‘paludes et silvae’, marshes and forests. This hard-won victory filled the Roman troops, reported Tacitus, with an appetite to drive yet deeper into Caledonia and reach the ‘farthest limits of Britain’. The next summer, 83 or 84, they came to Mons Graupius – where, said Tacitus, more than 30,000 men rallied to fight them. The location of this battlefield has never been satisfactorily identified, though there are reasonable grounds for suggesting that it may have been Mount Bennachie, north-west of Aberdeen, near to which a large Roman marching camp was discovered in the 1970s. At any rate, it was the untraceable Mons Graupius, courtesy of the fifteenth- to sixteenth-century Scottish historian Hector Boece, that gave its name to the Grampian mountain range. The shift from Graupius to Grampius is thanks to a typesetting error in the earliest printed edition of Tacitus’s Agricola.
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