‘Roman Britain,’ I asked a friend of mine, a committed pacifist and the veteran of endless marches against the war in Iraq, ‘a Good or Bad Thing?’ ‘Oh, good,’ my friend answered, not even deigning to ponder the question. Startled by the knee-jerk speed of her response, I asked her to explain. ‘Well, the roads, of course. And the baths and the central-heating.’ She paused. ‘And the peace.’
I knew exactly where she was coming from. When I pressed her, it turned out that her hazy sense of Roman Britain derived in large part from a Ladybird book that I too had read when I was young. It was the pictures I chiefly remembered. There was Boadicea, of course, a thrilling dominatrix shaking her spear amid a burning ring of fire; but there was also a fresh-faced Roman governor, the very image of a head boy in a toga, conscientiously building civic amenities for the hairy but by now appreciative Britons. This was illustrative less of any historical reality, of course, than of how, as late as the Fifties, when the Ladybird book was written, notions of Roman Britain, and of the civilising mission that Rome had supposedly brought to her own north-west frontier, derived principally from Kipling.
Even today, as David Mattingly points out in his exemplary addition to the new Penguin History of Britain, ‘we have a curious and ambiguous relationship with our Roman heritage, which is difficult to reconcile with the hard facts of Roman conquest and domination’. To be sure, empathy with the colonised Britons is much more pronounced today than it was 60 years ago, when Ian Richmond published the volume which Mattingly’s has been written to replace. The most celebrated recent dramatisation of the Romans in Britain showed them shafting the natives, after all. Plus ça change, was Howard Brenton’s message: his play openly equated the behaviour of the Roman army with that of the British in modern Ulster. All very right-on, no doubt, and yet as distorted a view of our ancient history as that of any jingo imperialist. In truth, as Mattingly exhilaratingly demonstrates, Roman Britain was an infinitely more alien place than either Kipling or Brenton began to allow.
In his opening chapter, he offers an impeccable analysis of precisely why it is that a period so remote from us should so unfailingly hold up a mirror to our own prejudices and presumptions. The gaps in our knowledge of the period, so tantalising, so hedged about by the apparently familiar, seem to beg us to fill them in. David Cannadine, editor of the series, could not have wished for a more elegant analysis of the invention of tradition. Yet Mattingly, although freely acknowledging that any history of Roman Britain must be, at best, a thing of shreds and patches, refuses to be thrown by this into a trendily post-modern despair. Although his book is as definitively of its period as Richmond’s was of the Fifties, it is also — and far more quantifiably so than any other in the new Penguin series — an objective improvement on its predecessor. Find by find, excavation by excavation, the foundations of our understanding of Roman Britain have been immeasurably broadened over the past 60 years. Mattingly, like the career archaeologist that he is, knows precisely how to sift the rubble and locate the scattered fragments of detail.
But that done, how best to reconstitute them? Answering such a question is, of course, the great challenge facing any historian of Roman Britain, and it is one that Mattingly meets by emphasising the sheer variety of responses to the occupation. The cost of invading and then garrisoning the island ensured that ‘Britain was squeezed harder than many other provinces’, which in turn resulted in a much broader spectrum of collaboration and resistance than elsewhere in the empire. While aristocrats in Sussex cheerfully commissioned swanky mosaics for themselves and developed a taste for olive oil, peasants in the north lived a bleak existence in a permanently militarised zone, where, if being male was bad enough, being female was probably even worse. Many books, on the basis of isolated tombstones which describe concubines being freed and married, romanticise the role of women in garrison life; but Mattingly, having duly cited the relevant inscriptions, then points out what we do not read about. ‘There is,’ he reminds us, ‘an ominous, if unsurprising, gap in our evidence for the lowest tier of women serving the army.’ What that gap might signify brings us closer to the experience of most Britons under Roman rule than any number of illustrations of hypocausts.
From brothel slaves to procurators, then, from the very lowest to the highest, all are here in a magnificent work of resurrectionism. It is the portrait of a Roman Britain that was neither a Good Thing, nor necessarily, by the much crueller standards of the time, a Bad Thing — just different, immeasurably and unnervingly different.
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