Introduction

INTRODUCTION o story should begin quite where the reader expects it to begin and Nthis is no exception. This one begins in Italy a few miles to the south of Rome. The Appian Way is the best known of all the Roman roads. For several miles outside the south-eastern walls of Rome it can still be followed, lined with trees and the crumbling remnants of Roman tombs. It makes for a striking, if exhausting, walk and takes the traveller past the vast Circus of Maxentius overlooked by the drum-shaped tomb of Cecilia Metella, a noblewoman of the late first century bc. Around 3.5 miles further on is a funerary inscription, still wholly legible and commemo- rating the burial and wishes of Gaius Ateilius Euhodus, a dealer in pearls (margaritarius). Euhodus probably lived in the second or first century bc. He might have heard about Caesar’s invasions of Britain in 55 and 54 bc but if so, he makes no mention of the fact and nor would one have expected him to. Indeed, on the face of it there is no good reason why he would be mentioned here in a book about Roman Britain. But there is a very good reason to start with Gaius Ateilius Euhodus. He exemplifies the emergent sense of self in the Roman world and, most importantly of all, of the sense of self in the ordinary man and woman and the desire or need to express it in a durable medium. This does not mean that other peoples, British tribes included, lack a ‘sense of self’ – such a judgment would be absurd. What it does mean is that in the vii viii INTRODUCTION Roman world the means existed with which to express a sense of self in a form that endures in the record. In Egypt, for example, private indi- viduals were quite capable of memorializing their lives in their tombs. Both also reflect the desire in their cultures, a commonplace need, to express oneself that way. However, in the Britain the Romans invaded there was no obvious durable means for people to express that sense of self, and nor was there apparently the desire to do so. The arrival of the Roman world changed the nature of the record dramatically. Euhodus was from any historical perspective a nobody. He left no obvious legacy of any sort and we have no idea whether or not he was thought well of by his family and descendants, though he certainly thought well of himself. We know about him because he recorded himself, and his words in his funerary inscription are a direct message to us. It reads: Stranger – stop and look at this mound to the left where the bones of a good, compassionate, benevolent man of modest means, are contained [or: a good, compassionate man and friend of those of modest means are contained]. I ask that you, traveller, do nothing bad to this tomb. Gaius Ateilius Euhodus, freedman of Serranus, pearl seller on the Via Sacra, is preserved in this tomb. Farewell traveller. Under the terms of the will, it is not lawful to preserve or bury anyone in this tomb except those freedmen to whom I have granted and assigned [this].1 Euhodus’ name was Greek (its literal meaning is that of a road that was easy to travel along) so he may have come from the eastern half of the Empire, perhaps being sold in a Rome slave market as a child or youth. We learn that the freedman Euhodus made his living as a dealer in pearls on the Sacred Way, a road in the forum of Rome, and was successful enough to free his own slaves and offer those whom he specified in his will a place in his tomb too.2 Euhodus’ inscription is certainly unusually specific and conversa- tional in style but in other respects it merely serves to communicate his ordinariness to us. Unlike many other great ancient civilizations, Rome provided its nonentities with the means to escape the anonymity of INTRODUCTION ix death. The money Euhodus made, the language he spoke and the customs of Roman society meant that this man, about whom otherwise we would know nothing, was able to tell us a little of himself in a medium we can access. His sense of self was communicable and transmissible because of the nature of Roman civilization. In Italy in the first century bc this was a fact of utterly no consequence; there were, literally, hundreds of thousands of such memorials as well as untold quantities of other written records. Euhodus’ inscription just happens to be one that has survived intact and is also more or less still where he asked for it to be erected. In Britain at that time all this would have been inconceivable. That it ceased to be inconceivable was the real revolution of the Roman invasion. The world that someone like Euhodus took for granted in Italy was imported to Britain as it had been to so many other provinces. Just as Euhodus recorded himself, so certain people in Britain began to record themselves in their own ways too and thus opened a new type of window to us on Britain’s past. It is too glib either to curse the Romans for their imperial oppression or heap plaudits on them for their beneficence. What they did provide for British history are the first manifestations of the sense of self among the ordinary, though just who those ordinary people were is one of the focuses of this book because the vast majority of those who did this were immigrants. Roman Britain is the label we apply to several centuries during which the most conspicuous forms of cultural expression were derived, all or in part, from the classical world of Rome and other peoples in its orbit. They range from altars dedicated to Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the northern frontier by soldiers, to the names and Latinate tags engraved on late Roman silver spoons found in treasure hoards buried in the late fourth or early fifth centuries. But they also include the rebuilder of a temple to Egyptian Isis in London and a tilemaker with a Latinized name who worked in what we call Kent. The inscriptions and other records of the men, women and children for whom Roman Britain was part of their experiences, whether as immigrant or native, are the first ordinary people in British history that we can name. That is, above all, why the Roman era in Britain is of such great importance to our history, however imperfect that record is. Roads outside the forts and towns of x INTRODUCTION Roman Britain became lined with tombs and inscriptions. To this we can add graffiti, wooden writing tablets and other memorials and records. The revolution began with the coming of Caesar in 55 and 54 bc. It is given to few moments in history to be really decisive. The moment Caesar first stepped ashore in Britain was one of them, even if that was not obvious at the time. Roman Britain has been a part of my life ever since in 1963 my parents took me, aged then around five, to see the excavations at Fishbourne Palace near Chichester. At the time the discovery of remains of the palace had caused something of a sensation. I can, surprisingly, still recall that vivid experience, no doubt helped along by the photo- graph taken at the time of me and my brother sitting beside the Dolphin mosaic. It had only just been exposed and a fresh spoilheap sat beside the elegant and colourful floor to prove the point. I remember even then being fascinated by the idea that this had once been a house (plate 1). Around a decade later we visited the Lullingstone Roman villa in its quiet refuge beside the River Darenth in north-west Kent. It is still a peaceful and secluded place, making it easy to see why the location was chosen. However interesting Fishbourne and Lullingstone are today, it is easy to forget that they were once homes, three-dimensional buildings in which all sorts of personal dramas and histories were played out. Hundreds of Romano-British villas are known, while modern excavation and survey work has shown that there were tens of thousands of simpler rural farmsteads and settlements across the green and pleasant land of Roman Britain, where the vast majority of the population lived, many little differently from before the Roman era. The villas and all these myriad settlements must have been places where children were born, played, grew up, experienced happiness and sadness, had their own families, grew old and died and were fondly remembered or otherwise by their descendants, who themselves wandered through the corridors with their own families and used the rooms to play out their own existences. Whole family dynasties passed through these places, experiencing joy or tragedy, success or failure, depending on the circumstances. At Lullingstone a young couple were buried below a specially constructed mausoleum a few yards from the house. We can never now know who they were, the INTRODUCTION xi tragedy that befell them and the impact it had on their families, but as human beings ourselves we can sense the evident despair their family or families must have felt. All this and more is silently attested through the wear on mosaic tesserae and graffiti on pots. Roman Britain was also, of course, home to dozens of towns, large and small, and many more fortresses and forts. Here untold numbers of unique personal stories were played out against a backdrop of the broader Roman world and its extravagant, exotic, erotic and extraordinary history.

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