A History of Ancient Britain (59 page)

Here, then, was yet another truly startling innovation; and as if it were not unsettling enough to be confronted by such images, not all of them stopped at just life-size. From time to time
archaeologists come across bits and pieces of metal giants that must have adorned temples and other buildings in the first decades after
AD
43. Imagine what it was like for
Britons to walk through the walls of a Roman town or city and be confronted by gilded bronze statues 20 or even 30 feet high.

Not everyone in Britain was exposed to the wonders of Rome quite so directly. Beyond the heavily Romanised south of England, and also Wales, the impact of the new goods – and the new
culture of which they were part – would have been much less. But for those living in and around the new urban centres, the Classical civilised Roman world might have touched every part of
their lives. Rather than seeming foreign, alien or in any way threatening, it must surely have been utterly intoxicating and seductive.

If the new towns, filled with shops offering exotic goods, populated by people from every part of the Empire and all sheltered beneath the shield of Roman authority – if all that were not
enough to beguile and to persuade – then there was something else. The Romans brought mass public entertainment to the people as well, often on a truly massive scale.

A chariot-racing track – known to the Romans as a
circus
– was discovered south of Colchester town centre in 2004. Aside from a possible, but unconfirmed, circus in the
evocatively named Knightrider Street, just south of St Paul’s in London, it is the only find of its kind in Britain and only the sixth known in the north-west provinces of the Empire (the
others being at Arles, Lyon, Saintes and Vienne in modern France, and at Trier in Germany).

It is the sheer scale of the circuses that makes them impressive. Classically they comprise an elongated oval track with two long, straight sides. One end is left open for the chariots to get in
and out, while the other describes a tight curve. Tiered seating several storeys high flanked the straights and the curve and, running down the centre of the track, was a low barrier called a
spina
that prevented the chariots running headlong into one another. At the open end there were traps, or starting bays. The walls were of banked
earth and rubble,
faced front and back with stone walls or timber revetments. It is thought the Colchester circus was around 500 yards long – a little less than a third of a mile. It was well over 80 yards
wide, with terraces several storeys high and capable of seating as many as 15,000 people at any one time. It is the single largest Roman building ever found in Britain.

Nothing of the Colchester circus survives above ground. The only evidence for the structure has been produced by excavation and in fact I was present on site while a tiny slot was opened in a
likely spot in a temporary car park. Once the tarmac was removed and a few feet of modern rubble shovelled away, the telltale traces of Roman brick and masonry began to appear. Those were almost
certainly parts of the foundation of the circus and it was salutary to think that a building which would have dwarfed anything in the modern city had been made to disappear so completely.

Of all the games and sports in the Roman world, chariot racing was the oldest and the most popular. The Greeks seemingly started it all but the Romans acquired it from the Etruscans, their own
predecessors as rulers of the Mediterranean world, and then took the entertainment to its greatest heights. Anyone could go to the circus and the crowds might contain everyone from slaves to
governors. Mostly they were run by private management, for financial gain, but their main purpose was to keep the people happy – and distracted from anything else that might otherwise have
stopped them thinking and behaving like good Romans.

Anyone who has seen the film
Ben
-
Hur
can imagine the thrill of watching the sport for real. Charioteers were protected only by helmets, shinguards and light chest plates for the
duration of seven exhausting laps of the track, and faced the constant threat of horrific injury and death. All of the dangers were offset, however, by the prospect of acquiring fame and truly
eye-watering fortunes.

Most of the competitors were drawn from the lowest echelons of society, often poor illiterates for whom the racetrack offered a chance of escape from lives of grinding poverty; and the wealth
amassed by the greatest of the champions makes the incomes of the greatest of today’s F1 drivers look almost modest by comparison. The greatest of the great – probably the best-paid
athlete of all time – was a man named Gaius Appuleius Diocles, born in the second century
AD
in Lusitania, a province that comprised parts of modern Spain and
Portugal. When he retired, at the age of 42, his fans and fellow charioteers were moved to erect a monument in his honour, detailing his triumphs – and his earnings.

In 2009 the US golfer Tiger Woods was estimated to have earned over a billion dollars. During the course of a 24-year career Diocles, who made his name primarily in the
Circus Maximus in Rome, pulled in 35,863,120 sesterces – the equivalent of 15 billion US dollars or nearly 10 billion pounds. To put it another way, he could have paid the salaries of every
single Roman soldier, at the height of the army’s imperial powers, for over two months – and that was purely prize money, without any of the modern sponsorship deals and endorsements
that make up the bulk of the pay packets of modern sporting heroes.

The Colchester circus was likely built during the second century
AD
, perhaps around the time when Diocles was rising to greatness, and is on such a scale its principal
excavator, archaeologist Philip Crummy, has suggested it might have been beyond the resources of anyone but the Emperor himself. Crummy has pointed out that since the visit to Britannia by Emperor
Hadrian in
AD
122 coincided with a great deal of new building in the province – including the wall raised in his name – Colchester’s circus may have been
built around the same time. So massive was it, so substantially built, Crummy also thinks it may have survived, albeit in a ruinous condition, until the time of the Norman occupation of Britain in
the eleventh century.

If the thrill of the circus was not enough to keep the people of Colchester entertained, it seems there were other distractions on offer as well. As it had been founded as a colony for retired
Roman soldiers, many of its population would have had an interest in combat in all its forms, and a vase found there in 1848 revealed evidence of fans of gladiators.

Called the Colchester Vase, it was excavated from a grave at West Lodge in the city. It was made sometime around
AD
175, probably in Colchester itself, and is regarded as
one of the very finest pieces of Roman pottery yet found in Britain. My hands shook as I handled the thing and part of what makes it so obviously valuable and unique – and therefore
irreplaceable – is the way it suggests the mind either of its maker, or its original owners, or both. As well as a hunting scene, it vividly depicts two gladiators in action. On the left of
the fight is a
secutor
, protected by shin guards, helmet and shield and armed with a short sword called a
gladius
(from which the name gladiator is derived). He is faced by a
retiarius
, much more lightly protected and traditionally armed with a trident and a net, as well as a dagger.

On the Colchester Vase, the contest is reaching its conclusion. The
‘net-man’ has been disarmed – his trident is on the ground – and the secutor
is bearing down, sword raised above his head ready to deliver the coup-de-grâce. The defeated gladiator has a hand raised towards his foe, as though asking for mercy.

The Colchester Vase is made all the more affecting by the addition of names. Scratched into the fired clay, at some time after the vase was completed, are the names Secundus, Mario, Memnon and
Valentinus – surely real-life heroes or champions known to the owner.

A Roman amphitheatre big enough to seat as many as 30,000 spectators was discovered in London, near where the Guildhall stands now, in 1988. Others have been found in Chichester, Cirencester,
Dorchester and Silchester. All would have witnessed the spectacle of gladiatorial combat.

Circuses filled with the sounds of thundering horses and chariots, and of cheering crowds of onlookers . . . amphitheatres where men were pitted against each other and against wild animals in
the name of entertainment. Britain during the centuries of Roman rule was a land in the process of being quite rapidly transformed. Ancient, pre-Roman Britain had evolved on its own over thousands
of years, but within just a couple of centuries a substantial part of the country had been reshaped in the image of a faraway land.

While time, effort and money were spent providing the populations with distractions, the aims of the Empire remained the same as they had always been. British resources – like those of
every province – were required to feed a giant animal that was growing bigger and hungrier all the time. The Roman Empire exerted a massive gravitational pull, drawing crops, precious metals
and human beings in ever-increasing numbers – all of them united in a single, intricately connected economy. All the roads led to Rome, primarily so that all the money could get there as
quickly as possible. While the circuses and amphitheatres kept the masses looking the other way it was the administrators and the civil servants – not the soldiers – who were
responsible for the lifeblood of the Empire.

London – Roman Londinium – became Britannia’s commercial gateway and also its political nerve centre. While the army kept the peace, the men tasked with counting pieces of
silver and gold built for themselves another giant structure, indeed eventually one of the largest and most impressive in the whole of the Empire. This was the basilica – part town hall, part
tax office, part courthouse and part records office and therefore a genuinely frightening building for any citizen, law-abiding or otherwise.

The administrative heart of any Roman town was the forum, a square or rectangular marketplace surrounded by buildings on all four sides. As well as a temple, banks,
offices and shops, part of the forum was always given over to the basilica. By around
AD
70 there was a forum in London, just east of the River Walbrook and centred around
what is now Gracechurch Street in the heart of the modern City of London. Grand though it undoubtedly was, and encapsulating an area 100 yards long by 50 yards wide, it was soon regarded as too
small, altogether too modest to suit the status of somewhere like Londinium, and more particularly the egos of the men who ran the place. Work on the second forum began just 20 years or so after
the first, and was to take 30 years to complete. In its finished form the basilica was a massive, three-storey structure more than 180 yards long on each of its four sides – proportions
generally in keeping with that part of the city today. It was one of the largest Roman buildings north of the Alps and impressive enough to grace any Roman city anywhere.

Grand or not, nearly 2,000 years of subsequent building works have obliterated the forum above ground. Astonishingly, however, a visit to a hairdresser’s salon at 90 Gracechurch Street
provides an opportunity to glimpse a tiny stub of the thing – behind a smoked-glass door in the basement.

The heat from the hairdryers and a lack of ventilation lends a vaguely tropical atmosphere to the room in which the foundation layer of the forum now sits. It is altogether disorientating to be
many feet below the modern road level and yet simultaneously at the heart of Roman London. It is all just testament to the sheer depth of building that has gone on in the city down through the
centuries and millennia. Having spent some minutes beside that fragment of the ancient world – a few feet of mortared masonry, standing approximately waist-high – I stepped back into
the salon, locked the door and returned the key to one of the stylists. Climbing back up the stairs and out onto the pavement meant the Roman stonework felt like something left behind in a
dream.

The Romans built a fort in Londinium around
AD
120, where the Barbican sits today, and something like 80 years later they encircled the whole town with a great wall
– the London Wall. A construction of that kind, something to shelter behind, seems to speak of troubled times but in truth there is no written explanation for its creation. Whatever the
motivation, the engineers plotted and the labourers sweated until they had
looped a three-mile-long boundary around all they cared to call Londinium. It was 20 feet high,
the best part of 10 feet wide and enclosed 330 acres of land. Behind the wall were all the things you might expect inside a city: shops, bathhouses, temples and so on – but also large areas
of open ground and pasture.

Through the wall they first built five gates, known now as Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, Ludgate and Newgate. After 150 years or so came Aldersgate. A seventh and final opening –
Moorgate – was added sometime later, in the medieval period. Dots and dashes of the London Wall remain still, fragments of Morse Code punctuating phrases of more modern architecture.

In Londinium, Rome had created a provincial capital – as far as they were concerned, the capital of a single, unified territory. This was the concept of Britannia and therefore an idea
that endures to this day. Like so many of the landmarks on the road out of ancient Britain and towards the present, it was about something quite new. Whatever else Celtic Britain had been, however
much it might have been united by a shared set of cultural ideals and values, it was still a fractured land. Individual chieftains or petty kings ruled their own jealously guarded independent
territories. But the Romans had a bigger idea, a modern idea – that of a single entity, an Empire of which Britannia was just a part – an important part, but a part just the same.

As far north as York – called Eboracum by the Romans, ‘the place of the yew trees’ – visitors would have known what to expect within the walls and would not have been
disappointed on arrival. Just a hundred miles south of Hadrian’s Wall, effectively at the end of the world, York had all of the infrastructure required of a fully functioning Roman town.
Rather than feeling they were out on the edge of civilisation, its inhabitants were right to believe they were very much within an exotic, internationally connected world.