Under Another Sky

by Charlotte Higgins

  Just as the drover’s path of the modern meadow cuts blindly across the grain of the Roman streets, so beneath and between the lines of the Roman grid lie the ghosts of other paths. What does it mean? Were the British inhabitants clinging on to pre-Roman property boundaries? Was there a religious significance in the orientation of the buildings, with their alignment to the solstice sun? Or are the shape of the streets and the angle of the houses telling us of deliberate resistance, a refusal to align physically and perhaps also mentally to the Roman plan? Equally, there may be some entirely different explanation; or some overlooked factor or misinterpretation of the evidence. Someone may look back on the data in a century, with new methods and new technologies, and contradict Fulford’s conclusions. Archaeologists may dive down into the depths of the earth, but they can only bring back what they have eyes to see. Archaeology feels its way along: it deals in the provisional, not in certainties.

  I asked Fulford what mental picture he had drawn of Calleva: what he believed the town might have ‘been like’. He talked about a shanty town of incomers from the countryside, ‘drawn into it to benefit from the economic advantages, the trading opportunities with the Roman world’. He said he thought there would have been ‘plenty of rickety wooden buildings that let the rain in: life would have been pretty hard’. Then he wondered aloud about these economic migrants: ‘Would you even understand what people were saying? If others spoke Latin, or Celtic with a Gallic accent?’ (He was thinking of Commius and his putative community of immigrants from Gaul.)

  At the same time, Calleva would have been cosmopolitan, he argued. Every Roman soldier heading towards the great Welsh garrisons from London would have passed through Silchester. At the south gate there is evidence, he said, for what might be a ‘mansio’ – a kind of inn where couriers on imperial business would put up for the night. The connectedness to the world outside was reflected in the imported goods. Wine had come into the town from the Mediterranean, and oil, and garum (the ubiquitous Roman sauce, impossible to imagine for the modern palate, since it was made from rotten fish). Amphorae have been discovered, containing traces of dried dates and raisins from Turkey and Palestine. Among the timber buildings there were also rich stone-built mansions: the archaeologists have found mosaic floors, and traces of Egyptian porphyry and Tuscan marble. Fulford is particularly fond of a bronze figurine of a lady wearing a high tiara on her elaborately dressed hair, holding a flute. A few summers ago, the excavators discovered a tiny bronze statuette of the god Harpocrates, who was adopted by the Greeks from the Egyptians: he was a hellenisation of the deity Horus, child of Isis and Osiris. In Egyptian iconography, the god holds a finger to his lips, a reference to the form of the hieroglyph for ‘child’. The Greeks, and after them the Romans, misinterpreted the gesture, and made Harpocrates into the tutelary spirit of secret and silence: an appropriate find in this city that keeps so much to itself. Among all this, said Fulford: ‘I am struck that we are finding what I would call “Iron Age things” even in the layers relating to the third and fourth century.’ He told me about the curious business of the Calleva dogs. Canines turn up regularly, deliberately buried, he said. Recently, they found the remains of a puppy that had been buried in a pit in about AD 250–300. Nearby was found an ivory-handled knife, carved with an image of two dogs mating. ‘Perhaps the dog was sacrificed, perhaps with that knife,’ he offered. There were nicks in the bones of the dog, as if it had been flayed.

  After our conversation, I went upstairs into the Roman galleries of the Reading Museum. Here was a little eagle cast in bronze, one of the museum’s most celebrated objects. Its beak was cruelly curved, its feathers exquisitely described in the surface of the dully glowing metal. It was also about the size of a pigeon and lacking wings, such that its grandeur was a little undercut. James Joyce found it in 1866, while excavating beneath the basilica. A mystery: how had this creature, which he thought must be an eagle from a Roman legionary standard, ended up here? There are so many unanswered questions in ancient history, questions that the novelist, where the historian may hesitate to advance a theory, can fearlessly answer with invention. It was this bronze eagle from which Rosemary Sutcliff made her children’s story The Eagle of the Ninth, first published in 1954.

  The Eagle of the Ninth tells of the young Marcus Aquila, a centurion on his first command. Injured terribly during a skirmish with Britons flamed to rebellion by a wandering Druid, he must forfeit his military career. But then rumours begin to circulate of sightings of the standard of his father’s lost legion, the Ninth – north of Hadrian’s Wall. If he can find it, he will recover the honour of the disgraced legion, and of his father.

  I call it a children’s story; my copy, with its gorgeous line drawings by C. Walter Hodges, bears my name on the title page in barely joined-up handwriting. But Sutcliff claimed her books were readable by anyone from nine to ninety. In an interview given in 1992, the year she died, she said: ‘I don’t write for adults, I don’t write for children. I don’t write for the outside world at all. Basically, I write for some small, inquiring thing in myself.’ Aged two, she had contracted Still’s disease, a form of arthritis, and for most of her life she used a wheelchair. That, and an itinerant childhood as the daughter of a naval officer, meant that when young she was educated at home by her mother, and did not read until she was nine. By way of compensation, the learning she got at her mother’s knee was surely the perfect training for a storyteller: she was told tales from the Norse and Celtic legends, fairy tales, Icelandic sagas. There was Malory too, and the Mabinogion. Her first attempts at writing were retellings of her mother’s tales.

  I have read The Eagle of the Ninth dozens of times; and as the reading self changes, so does the book. When I last read the story, it was the sheer quality of the prose that delighted, the utter rightness with which Sutcliff gives life to the visible world. She attended art college from the age of fourteen, and specialised in miniature painting. She told an interviewer: ‘Fortunately, I have got a very good memory. And it’s a visual memory: I was taught how to look at things. And I’ve found this really useful because I know … how the colour of sunlight gleaming off a sword will change, depending on whether it’s a warm sky or not.’ A miniaturist’s visual skill, then, but deployed on a generous imaginative canvas: desperate moorland chases on horseback; a fort subject to a vicious attack; strange and wild native rituals practised by night.

  Marcus, then, invalided out of the army, joins his uncle Aquila, a retired army officer, at his house at Calleva Atrebatum. Here he ‘comes face to face with the wreckage of everything he knew and cared about’. He is lonely, in pain and homesick, enduring ‘the wind and rain and wet leaves of exile’. Gradually, though, he forges friendships – not with soldierly young Romans, but with a slave, a wolf cub and a young British girl. All four are deracinated, parentless creatures. Esca, a Briton of the Brigantes tribe, has lost his family to Roman slaughter as well as his freedom; Marcus buys him after watching him fight in the Calleva amphitheatre. Cub has been plucked during a hunt from the lair of his mother. The proudly British Cottia has been sent to live with her aunt and uncle, whose comically overeager adoption of a Roman lifestyle she despises.

  Sutcliff here, as in her later books on Roman Britain that spiral out of the Eagle, is greatly interested in questions of identity. What does it mean to be British? Where is home? Can friendship trump tribal loyalties? The Eagle of the Ninth speaks deeply of its time of writing, during Britain’s post-war era of decolonisation. Reading half a century on, when the the imperial age is viewed in a more critical light, Sutcliff has Esca relate to his master in a way that we might now find troubling. A moment at which Cub is offered his freedom – but then comes trotting back home, humbly offering his muzzle to Marcus – is echoed by a parallel scene in which Marcus offers Esca his liberty, only for the Briton, just like the potentially savage wolf cub, to declare his continued allegiance and devotion to the Roman.

  What Sutcliff achieves above all in T
he Eagle of the Ninth is a world that is entirely credible; a world that could trick you into believing in it as historical truth. She once said: ‘I think that I am happiest of all in Roman Britain. I feel very much at home there … If I could do a time flip and land back in Roman Britain, I would take a deep breath, take perhaps a fortnight to get used to things, then be all right, for I would know what was making the people around me tick … I have a special “Ah, here I am again, I know exactly what they are going to have for breakfast” feeling when I get back into Roman Britain.’

  I envy Sutcliff and her supreme confidence that she could feel at home in Roman Britain. Even if I know that some people in Calleva, at some point in the day and in some unknown combination, were eating celery and dill and coriander and mutton and goose and oysters (for these are some of the food remains that have been found here), Roman Britain seems to me an alien, irrecoverable place. Yet I love Sutcliff’s imagining of it. I want very much to believe it, and in fact for as long as I am reading The Eagle of the Ninth, I always do: which is the storyteller’s gift.

  The 9th Legion last left its mark in Britain when it raised an inscription in York, in AD 108. Its abrupt disappearance from the epigraphic record, and absence from historiography, has long been a mystery, leading many to speculate that the entire legion was wiped out somewhere in northern Britain. But there is no evidence of such a disaster, and it is now thought to have been simply withdrawn from the province. It may have been transferred to Germany, where a bowl and a horse brass marked with its name have been found. Possibly, even, it was the nameless legion that Cassius Dio recorded as having been destroyed in Asia in AD 160. But there is no certainty about its fate; mystery still clings to it.

  The eagle? It is now thought not to have been a legionary standard, but part of a bronze statue group. Clearly it was a precious and expensive object, perhaps part of a sculpture of Jupiter, or of an emperor. How it ended up under the basilica is a matter of speculation. Fulford told me he believes it may have been part of the wreckage and rubble of a building that was burned down, and later built over; and perhaps, just perhaps, the fire may have been part of the devastation caused by Boudica and her rebels. Fulford even wonders whether it may have come from Commius’s (or his family’s) household of luxurious and exotic possessions. Boudican burnings; dog sacrifice; olive-chewing natives; Egyptian cult objects; powerful Gaul-Britons with bronze sculptures of Jupiter: this is not Sutcliff’s Calleva Atrebatum at all.

  In another display case in the museum is a rather undistinguished piece of terracotta tile. Into the damp clay someone has scored words in a neat, schoolboyish hand: ‘Pertacus Perfidus Campester Lucilianus Campanus conticuere omnes’. The first five words are all men’s names. The last two, ‘Conticuere Omnes’, were written by Virgil: they are the opening words of the second book of the Aeneid. They mean, ‘They all fell silent.’ Who wrote this? A group of schoolboys, swearing secrets into the damp clay, sealing the vow with Virgil’s magical words? The scene in the poem is this: Aeneas and his crew, exiles from the now-destroyed Troy, have arrived on the coast of north Africa at the court of the Carthaginian queen, Dido. Aeneas is welcomed as a guest. There is a feast. Wine is shared and a bard sings. Dido asks Aeneas many questions about the Trojan War; about Priam, and Hector, and the greatness of Achilles. Then she persuades him to tell the assembled guests the whole story from the beginning: to tell them about the trap that the Greeks set for Troy, about the calamity that befell his people. ‘Conticuere omnes’: everyone fell silent, and each face was turned intently, expectantly upon Aeneas.

  ‘Conticuere omnes’ is exactly half a hexameter. We have reached the point of the lacuna, the tiny, subtle pause in the centre of the poetic line. Looking at the faint scratched words, I feel caught in an instant of suspense. The drinking cups have been refilled, the audience is still and expectant; it is that enchanted second when the singer breathes in deeply and the first note has yet to come. I am silent; I wait for the story to begin. But for me, the clamour of the people of Calleva Atrebatum is forever stilled. I will not – I cannot – hear them. The silence is not the hush of expectation, but the chill of secrets. Harpocrates holds his finger to his lips.

  5

  Wales and the West

  It is strange indeed that by merely peeling off a wrapper of modern accumulations we have lowered ourselves into an ancient world.

  Thomas Hardy, 1885

  Wroxeter: ‘It lieth low near merry England’s heart/Like a long-buried sin,’ wrote Wilfred Owen, a Shropshire lad, who used to visit the site of the Roman town as a boy for happy afternoons digging up coins with his younger brother, Harold, or his friend Stanley Webb. I thought of him as Matthew and I chugged there in the camper van, in the heat of midsummer, poppy fields flashing by in a red haze. Wroxeter Roman City – as Viroconium Cornoviorum is now officially described – with its car park, visitor centre and English Heritage signboards, lacked the charm I imagine Owen found here, when he cycled along the lanes, urging his brother to ‘Hurry, Harold, hurry. Think what we may be missing – the greatest find of the century.’ But there is something indelibly particular about the way the ruins inhabit the landscape that cannot entirely be erased by the banality of their presentation. The Roman site has never been built over, and the medieval village of Wroxeter is a short walk away, through sheep-grazed pastures. There is a piece of masonry at the heart of the remains, called ‘the Great Work’, which dominates the skyline: a miraculously tall, pitted, scarred hulk of a single wall, once part of the wall of the palaestra, or exercise ground, of the town baths.

  In the AD 50s, the soldiers of the 14th Legion marched here, north-west up Watling Street from London, and established a fort; in the 60s they were replaced by the 20th, which, in the early 80s, set off with Agricola to Scotland. When the soldiers finally left the fort for good in about 90, to be stationed in Chester, the town proper began to spring up: temples, baths, the basilica, the forum. It became, in all likelihood, the administrative capital of the Cornovii tribe. Soldiers from Faenza and Piacenza were buried here; and a woman called Placida, whose death at the age of fifty-five was marked by a stone set up by her nameless husband of thirty years. In Shrewsbury Museum, which Owen loved, is an inscription dedicating the forum to the emperor Hadrian. Charles Dickens visited Wroxeter in 1859, while the site was being excavated by the antiquary Thomas Wright, and he wrote up the trip for his magazine All the Year Round. He described the scene: ‘There is a bright spring sun over head, the old wall standing close by looks blank at us; here and there a stray antiquary clambers among the rubbish, careless of dirt stains; an attentive gentleman on the crest of a dirt heap explains Roman antiquities to some young ladies in pink and blue, who have made Wroxeter the business of a morning drive. An intelligent labourer, who seems to be a sort of foreman of the works, waits to disclose to the honorary secretary the contents of a box in which it is his business to deposit each day’s findings of small odds and ends.’ In the same issue of the magazine, one could read a chunk of the freshly written Tale of Two Cities.

  Wroxeter lieth low, as Owen wrote, but it is fringed around by Shropshire’s wild hills with their wild names: Abdon Burf; Wenlock Edge; the Long Mynd; Hoar Edge. They say you can see twelve Iron Age hill forts from the Roman town, if you know where to look and the day is clear. Massing greatest of all are the volcanic, gloomy heights of the Wrekin – whose name has a family resemblance to that of the Roman town, as William Camden noted. I used to see the Wrekin’s hunched shoulders from a window in the house where I grew up in Staffordshire: a threatening, tempting presence on the distant horizon.

  It was before the First World War that Owen used to come here, before his poetry was transformed into vatic, discordant outpourings by Flanders slaughter. It is tempting to imagine another reality for Owen, if there had been no war, as an amateur antiquary or even a professional archaeologist. One of his biographers, the poet Jon Stallworthy, wrote that as a sixteen-year-old, Owen ‘enjoyed the company of h
is contemporaries less than the contemplation of the the long dead’. Sometime around 1913, he wrote a poem about Wroxeter, called ‘Uriconium: An Ode’. It is a Keatsian outpouring into which thoughts and associations crowd freely as he reflects on the ruins; just as Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ contemplates the figures locked into stillness on an ancient vase. Walking over the streets of the ancient city, time collapses:

  I had forgot that so remote an age

  Beyond the horizon of our little sight,

  Is far from us by no more spanless gauge

  Than day and night, succeeding day and night,

  Until I looked on Thee,

  Thou ghost of a dead city, or its husk!

  The ancient city, its bones revealed, allows him ‘To lift the gloomy curtain of Time Past/ And spy the secret things that Hades hath.’ The city becomes both a way of imagining a descent to the realm of the dead, and a means of contemplating the harsh, repetitive cycles of man’s violence: ‘Yet cities such as these one time would breed/ Apocalyptic visions of world-wrecks.’ Owen would soon be experiencing his own apocalyptic visions: in his masterful battlefield poem, ‘Strange Meeting’, he indeed seems to spy the ‘secret things that Hades hath’ when he describes a dream-state descent through a ‘profound dull tunnel, long since scooped/ Through granites which titanic wars had groined.’ ‘Uriconium: An Ode’ seems to prefigure the later, greater poem.