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Saturday 22 November 2008

Low Life

Upward mobility

I owe English Heritage an apology. In last week’s column I was scornful of the content of the short historical documentary they show every half hour on a screen suspended above the ruins of Lullingstone Roman Villa. Specifically, I took issue with the idea expressed in the film’s narrative that Romans — or Romanised Britons — were social climbers obsessed with material gain, upward mobility and dinner parties. My objection was based not on historical knowledge to the contrary, but on a suspicion, sometimes amounting to wild paranoia, that our communist rulers are pointedly insinuating their miserable secular morality, their vulgar materialism and their anti-English sentiment even into the public pronouncements of cultural organisations such as dear old English Heritage.

But according to the Oxford History of Roman Britain by Peter Salway, which I turned to after my visit to Lullingstone, the narration was in fact spot-on. There were dinner parties. After the Roman conquest, the more impressionable sections of the ruling British élites forsook their cauldrons and mud huts in favour of the town house and the cruet set with indecent haste. In the soft south, former tribesmen were nid-nodding over glasses of imported wine while their friends in the north were still battling tooth and nail with the Roman legions for the right to remain backward. Britain’s first yuppies weren’t city traders under Thatcher, but members of the opportunistic Trinovante tribe (from Essex) under Claudius. And upward mobility was not merely the preoccupation of the vulgar few, says Mr Salway; in the Roman Empire it was an ideal pursued by all classes, from slave to senator.

More articles from: Jeremy Clarke | this section

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