Under Another Sky

by Charlotte Higgins

  If his ideas seem outmoded, it is still striking to witness the passion with which he wrote, and the absolute urgency of his thinking in the late 1930s. In Collingwood’s philosophy of history, the past was not a distant, dead thing, but stood in the closest possible relation to contemporary life. Science had brought us extraordinary technology, but the primary use to which we had put it was the invention of deadly weapons and the pursuit of war, he argued. History was the true science of human affairs, and must be marshalled to make sense of the present; it was only history that could help put a stop to the disasters that he rightly saw amassing in the immediate future. In the end, it was the ideas forged as R. G. Collingwood dug about in the Roman forts of Cumbria that caused him to break up ‘my pose as a detached professional thinker’ and throw himself, however impotently, however imperfectly, into an open political struggle. In the end, it was his encounter with Roman Britain that made a passionate anti-fascist of him.

  Collingwood’s writings also impel us to ask whether it is more appropriate to treat the Roman things brought forth from the British soil as objects of aesthetic veneration, or as the purposive jigsaw fragments of history. He himself developed fierce views on the quality of artistic production in Roman Britain. In his part of the Oxford History of England he asserted that ‘the history of Romano-British art can be told in a couple of sentences. Before the Roman conquest the Britons were a race of gifted and brilliant artists: the conquest, forcing them into the mould of Roman life with its vulgar efficiency and lack of taste, destroyed that gift and reduced their arts to the level of mere manufacture.’ There was more: ‘On any Romano-British site the impression that constantly haunts the archaeologist, like a bad smell or a stickiness on the fingers, is that of an ugliness which pervades the place like a London fog: not merely the common vulgar ugliness of the Roman empire, but a blundering, stupid ugliness that cannot even rise to the level of that vulgarity.’

  It is a remarkably extreme sentiment for someone who spent so much of his life among those ‘blundering, stupid’ remains. In truth, the aesthetic qualities of Romano-British art and craftsmanship had often caused anxiety, and still do: are the stubby little walls of Roman ruins in Britain worth admiring, when we have the magnificent, sombre depletions of medieval abbeys? It is these buildings that were officially sanctioned as picturesque by the eighteenth-century lovers of the Gothic, and lovingly depicted by artists such as Turner. Horace Walpole, who realised his Gothic appetite magnificently at Strawberry Hill, his villa near Twickenham, was derisively unequivocal about the taste for Romano-British things. ‘Roman antiquities … such as are found in this island, are very indifferent, and inspire me with little curiosity,’ he wrote in a letter of 1780. ‘I do not say the Gothic antiquities I like are of more importance; but at least they exist. The site of a Roman camp, of which nothing remains but a bank, gives me not the smallest pleasure.’ Not everyone was a Sir John Clerk of Penicuik or a William Stukeley, extolling the beauties of Romano-British things.

  In 2010, such questions of aesthetics came into sharp focus when, on the east side of the Lake District, in a field near the hamlet of Crosby Garrett, a metal detectorist pulled out from the mud a piece of crushed metal that he assumed was a Victorian ornament. It was, in fact, a Roman cavalry sports helmet – an ornate and precious thing, which would have been used on the parade ground on ceremonial occasions, too decorative and impractical for wearing on the field of combat. It was a find of immense rarity, and a thing of great visual power: the helmet had a visor cast into the form of a youthful, beautiful face. When news of its discovery was announced, the Daily Telegraph put a photograph of it on its front page. Only two other helmets of this type are known in Britain: the Newstead helmet found in the Scottish borders, now in the National Museum of Scotland; and the Ribchester helmet, which is in the British Museum. The Crosby Garrett helmet was curious in another way. Despite its undoubted rarity, it fell through the cracks of laws designed to protect archaeological finds. Had the helmet come within the legal definition of ‘treasure’, the finder and landowner would have been awarded compensation at a price agreed by a panel of experts, and the helmet would in all likelihood have been privately bought by the Tullie House Museum in Carlisle, the most important Cumbrian museum for Roman antiquities. However, only gold or silver objects, or groups of bronze objects, fall within that definition. The bronze helmet, found on its own, was not ‘treasure’. Which is how it came to be sold on the open market, the star object of Christie’s antiquities sale in London, in autumn 2010.

  On the day I went to Christie’s to see the Crosby Garrett helmet, the auction house was about to host a fire-sale of remnants from the offices of Lehman Brothers, the bank that had collapsed in 2008, triggering an international financial crisis. Potential bidders, catalogues in hand, wove around the salvage from the bank’s offices: pieces of furniture, works of art of varying quality, and even a plaque marking the building’s opening by the then chancellor, Gordon Brown. (This would a few days later sell for just over £28,000.) In the middle of all this, somebody set up a plinth. Then, from the back of the room, and not without a sense of theatre, strode a young woman in an elegant shocking-pink dress. In her gloved hands she held the Crosby Garrett helmet, which she gently placed on the plinth. It was the life-size face of a beardless boy of impossible beauty, wearing a tall Phrygian cap, the headgear that gave its name and shape to the bonnet phrygien of the French Revolution. His slightly parted lips were sensuous and delicate, the chin round and a little chubby. His hair was set in perfect whorls, as if piped by an expert patissier. His eyebrows were long and thin, the fine hairs picked out in a herringbone pattern. The back of the helmet was engraved with a starburst, and on the high proud peak of the cap sat a griffin, balancing a little amphora under its right paw. The griffin’s tail was neatly tucked but its beak was wide open in a kind of screaming ferocity quite unlike the blank serenity of the human face beneath. The whole thing had an uncanny, vacant perfection to it.

  I asked the woman who had carried in the helmet – Georgiana Aitken, Christie’s head of antiquities – what sort of person or organisation might buy it. It was estimated to sell for £200–300,000. She said that there had been interest from private buyers as well as museums, and observed that antiquities can look very fine amid a collection of modern art. I considered the helmet as an elegant sculptural piece, setting off a Richter, say, or a Twombly, and saw that it would do very well. I asked the Christie’s people how much work had been done on the helmet to present it thus. Not much, they said breezily.

  This, it seemed, depended on how you might define ‘not much’. According to Dr Ralph Jackson, curator of Romano-British collections at the British Museum, it had been ‘hugely changed’. The flawlessness of the helmet was an illusion. When it was found by the detectorist in May 2010, the visor was face down in the mud, 25cm below the surface. The chin was gashed and the curling hair was missing chunks. The helmet itself (which would have been attached to the visor mask with hinges) was in sixty-eight pieces, its greater part folded up lengthwise, like a closed book. Jackson told me this folding must almost certainly have been deliberate, that the helmet had, he believed, most likely been bent and buried as part of some kind of ritual.

  Christie’s commissioned a restorer, Darren Bradbury, to work on it. It was a ‘complex and delicate task’, he told British Archaeology magazine, that took ‘some 240 hours’. He reshaped the helmet, carefully opening out the fold. He closed cracks. He made moulds of existing curls of hair and cast them in resin to replace the missing ones; the same process was used to re-create the missing section of chin. He gilded the resin with silver leaf and distressed it, so that the whole object had a smooth, seamless patina with no visible joins. He reattached the griffin.

  The artefact now occupied a kind of limbo between the state in which it was found and its original appearance. Its surface was an agreeably antique-looking greenish-silverish, more or less as it had been when the Cumbrian sod had
been fully cleaned away. When it was first made, the helmet would have been golden and the visor tinned, so that it would have shone like silver. When I asked Jackson what the British Museum would have done, had the helmet fallen into their hands, he told me they would have worked much more slowly on its conservation, analysing it and studying it as they went. They would probably not, he said, have reshaped it, but would most likely have had a replica made to suggest its original appearance. ‘We would not have interfered with the state of its ultimate demise,’ he said. Half a century ago, the museum might have thought differently. Fashions in the acceptable levels of re-creation change, and the territory between conservation and restoration is disputed. In cases such as that of the Crosby Garrett helmet, there is no such thing as a definitive, ‘authentic’ object.

  Tullie House Museum set about raising funds to buy the helmet, which had been the cause of great excitement locally. The campaign did well, and at the sale, on 7 October 2010, the museum was able to bid up to £1.7m. But the helmet went to an anonymous buyer for the hammer price of £2m. The buyer has not, up to the time of writing, responded to the museum’s requests for a loan, or accurate measurements so that a replica can be commissioned. All that is known is that the buyer is in Britain: if he or she were overseas, the artefact would have been subject to an export stop and the museum would have had another chance to try to buy it. The helmet has made only one public appearance, at the Royal Academy of Art’s Bronze exhibition in autumn 2012; otherwise it has disappeared as completely as if it had been swallowed up once more by the Cumbrian sod. When Tullie House Museum reopened its Roman galleries in 2011 after a refurbishment, the space they had hoped it would occupy was taken by another Roman cavalry helmet, on loan from a museum in the Netherlands.

  As it is, the most fascinating object in Tullie House Museum’s Roman gallery is also one of its least visually arresting. Found in 1891, in the bed of the river Peterill, just south of Carlisle, the artefact is a rough piece of stone, just under two metres tall, rather narrower at one end than the other. In the centre of the slab was once an inscription. There is nothing there now except a faint trace of a single letter. At the slightly fatter end, roughly incised, are the words:

  IMP CM

  AUR MAUS

  CARAUSIO PF

  INVICTO AUG

  Or, ‘for the Emperor Gaius Marcus Aurelius Maesaeus Carausius Pius Felix Invictus Augustus’. At the other, slightly thinner end, and with the letters facing in the opposite direction, the inscription reads:

  FLVAL

  CONS

  TANT

  NONOB

  CAES

  Which translates as: ‘for Flavius Valerius Constantinus, most noble Caesar’. Both extant inscriptions are made in rather wobbly, drunken letters; the stone looks more like a country gatepost than a slab of Roman officialdom. In fact, the ramshackle look of the whole artefact belies the extraordinary story that it tells. For this Roman milestone brings us a fragment of the curious history of Carausius – Britain’s breakaway Roman emperor.

  The written historical record on Carausius is sparse. In the late third century, there was no historian of the stature of Tacitus to tell his story. What we know of him is gleaned from two brief passages in the work of the historians Aurelius Victor and Eutropius, both composed at different points during the fourth century and both, it is thought, relying on a lost single source from earlier in the century. Also surviving are panegyrics – speeches delivered in lavish praise of emperors – in this case to Maximian, Constantius Chlorus and Constantine. None of these literary sources was produced by a voice favourable to Carausius, but by those deeply invested in his downfall.

  The facts, such as we have them, are that Carausius was a humbly born Menapian, from the area around the mouth of the Rhine in the modern Netherlands. Having distinguished himself in campaigns against the Bagaudae, rebels in northern Gaul, he was given command of a fleet in charge of ridding the Channel and North Sea of Saxon pirates and raiders. He was accused, though, of corruption: of allowing raiders to carry off booty before attacking them, and then keeping the loot for himself rather than restoring it to either its owners or the emperor. When Maximian – joint emperor in the west, ruling alongside Diocletian – learned of this alleged abuse, he ordered Carausius’s execution. Carausius’s response, in AD 286 or 287, was to seize Britain with, crucially, its three garrisons, who must have had their own reasons for giving him that loyalty (whether it was bought, or whether it related to a real respect for his military abilities, we will probably never know). He also had the fleet at his disposal, and substantial forces in northern France.

  An initial attempt by Maximian to haul Britain back seems to have ended in failure, judging by the silence of the panegyrists, who had previously boasted of the lavish preparations being made for the province’s reconquest. The precise chronology is uncertain, but it is probable that Constantius Chlorus recovered Boulogne in AD 293, after which Carausius was assassinated by a figure called Allectus, who in turn assumed control of Britain. Of Allectus we know little: Aurelius Victor calls him Carausius’s minister of finance; Eutropius refers to him simply as an ally. Some three years later, an invasion force under Constantius Chlorus crossed the Channel in a thick fog that enabled them to pass Allectus’s fleet, lying in wait off the Isle of Wight, without detection. They defeated Allectus’s ill-prepared land army, and a further force, initially separated from the main seaborne force by the fog, later reached London in time to finish off the remnants of Allectus’s Frankish troops, who were in the process of sacking the city. After an intriguing decade of self-rule, Britain was finally brought back into the imperial fold.

  But what of the story from Carausius’s side? The Tullie House inscription is one of the few hints towards what he felt he was trying to achieve, and in what manner he was attempting to project himself as a ruler. It is an extraordinary survival: by the third century, the Romans in Britain were losing the ‘epigraphic habit’, the urge to inscribe stones with markers of deaths, great events, building projects. In fact, this artefact is the only surviving inscription that mentions Carausius at all. On it, we see him bedecked with all the pompous titles of an emperor. The imperial-sounding Pius Felix Invictus Augustus – ‘dutiful, happy, unconquered Augustus’ – will certainly have been adopted to give his rule the sheen of legitimacy. ‘Marcus Aurelius’ may just have been his names at birth; it is more likely, though, that he adopted them to recall the philosopher-emperor whose reign, over a century before, looked like a golden period of stability given the decades of barbarian unrest, imperial succession problems and civil wars that had dogged the empire in mainland Europe and Asia during the middle decades of the third century. What becomes clear is that Carausius was attempting to make his stolen reign feel reassuringly traditional.

  A further reason this inscription is so rare is that normal Roman practice after the downfall of a figure such as Carausius was to erase his name from all inscriptions: the kind of ‘damnatio memoriae’ to which Caracalla’s brother Geta had been subject earlier in the century. The blanked-out central section of the stone slab, indeed, may relate to some previous damnatio memoriae – perhaps even of Maximian, erased by Carausius’s people. But Carausius’s inscription remains, and the clue to its survival is the fact that the words on the other half of the block, relating to Constantius, are upside down. What happened, we may infer, is that after Carausius fell, instead of the inscription being scraped off in the usual way, the stone was simply upended, the old lettering buried in the earth, and the new inscription carved. The Constantius here may be Constantius Chlorus, who oversaw the invasion force that brought the erring Britain back into the empire proper in AD 296. Or it may refer to his son, Constantine the Great, who was acclaimed emperor in York a decade later.

  There exists another source for Carausius’s side of the story. During his period in power, he minted money from London and, probably, Colchester. Coins were a powerful means of trait projection for any ruler.
Even if not everyone handled or had money, or could read the legends inscribed upon it, there were plenty for whom coins were an important part of life – not least the army, through whom the bulk of money in Roman Britain flowed as pay before entering the wider economy. At their most basic, coins were a way of circulating the name and face of the emperor. In the case of the usurping Carausius, the very fact that he appeared on the coinage lent him an air of imperial legitimacy. One rather daring issue had his head in profile alongside those of the co-emperors Maximian and Diocletian, with the legend ‘Carausius et fratres sui’, ‘Carausius and his brothers’. He was claiming to stand alongside these legitimate rulers as an equal.

  Yet more intriguing, perhaps, was what happened on a coin’s reverse. Here was the place for a further message, a burst of propaganda, a world view. Carausius’s coinage was highly suggestive and utterly distinctive. One of his issues called him ‘restitutor Brit(anniae)’ – the restorer of Britain. Another showed him hand in hand with the personified Britannia, as if in mystical marriage. He was, it seems clear, projecting himself as a restorer of traditional values, of Britannia as it had once been, before the current turbulent age. On one coin are inscribed the words ‘expectate veni’, ‘come, oh awaited one’. It is, as William Stukeley recognised, an adaptation of a line of Virgil, from the second book of the Aeneid, in which Aeneas dreams that he encounters the dead hero Hector – the ‘awaited one’. It is not, perhaps, a wildly appropriate allusion, since the Hector that he conjures in his dream is battle-worn and bloody and rather terrifying, a god-sent vision to persuade him to abandon the defeated Troy. But the message of the coinage becomes clearer: Carausius seems to have been presenting himself as an almost messianic saviour of Britain. The coins were literally embodiments of the values of a better time: in an era of debased coinage and soldiers’ pay inflation, he brought back the silver content of his precious-metal issues to levels not seen since the reign of Nero 200 years earlier.