Peter Jones

Regina, a Syrian in South Shields

Ancient and Modern on slavery in the Roman Empire

D(is) M(anibus) Regina liberta(m) et coniuge(m) Barates Palmyrenus natione Catuallauna an(norum) XXX

‘To the spirits of the dead, and to Regina, his freedwoman and wife, of the Catuvellauni, aged 30 years, Barates of Palmyra erected this.’

There Regina sits, in all her Roman finery. You cannot make out her face because the great stone funerary monument in which she has been sculpted is 1,800 years old, very worn in places and the face mutilated. She looks straight out at you from her wicker basket-chair — a nursing chair, perhaps? Uncomfortable, too: she sits on a cushion.

She is dressed in a linen shift, which protrudes under her woollen skirt at the ankles (Roman women liked the ‘layered’ look); she has a torc (a sold neck-ring, for luck) around her neck and, fashionably, a bracelet on each forearm. Her left hand holds spinning equipment (spindle and distaff) in her lap, and there is a basket of wool at her feet. Her right hand proudly holds open the lid of a stout, solidly bound jewellery box, with a good, strong lock.

At the bottom of the monument is a Latin inscription. The first word is Regina — Romans would have pronounced it Raygeena — and it meant ‘Queen’. This is clearly a member of high society. Well, not that high. For the second word is liberta: liberated, ‘freedwoman’ — she had once been a slave. Not a queen, but ‘Queenie’?

Things now become very interesting. This monument was found in the Roman fort at South Shields, near the entrance to the River Tyne. So this is a Geordie lass? No: the inscription tells us that she originated from the Catuvellauni, a tribe that lived around St Albans. So down south she was sold into slavery — probably to raise money for her poverty-stricken family — and taken up north.

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