Under Another Sky (21 page)

Before the deciphering begins in earnest, the tablets are subjected to electronic imaging processes and infrared photography to make the ink more visible. ‘One ideally also checks the original to see whether a mark is a flaw or a letter,’ said Tomlin: blemishes on the ancient strips of wood can easily be confused with ink marks, working all kinds of mischief on the interpretation. A first look will give the sense of ‘what the document is likely to be’, he added. Tablets written across the grain (that is, in a portrait format) often turn out to be military memoranda. Those written along the grain (landscape) are more likely to be letters. Then, he said, it is a question of ‘getting to know the letter forms and how they are made’, and ‘identifying legible letters’. Many of the individual letters are ‘maddeningly similar to each other’: A’s blur into R’s; C’s, P’s and even T’s can be almost indistinguishable. He often copies out the text himself on to a large sheet of paper. This process of inhabiting the original writer’s physical movements can help him resolve the tangle into individual characters. But you can’t just transcribe a text letter for letter, he said: ‘It is not just a visual code.’ Rather, the work involves a slow, iterative process of holding several hypotheses in mind simultaneously and discarding them where necessary, bringing to bear not just palaeographical knowledge but literary, historical and linguistic insight, as well as common sense, experience and intuition.

Tomlin told me how he once translated a curse tablet found in Bath from which the top right-hand corner was missing. He supplied what he believed were the likely missing words and letters. Later, the real missing piece turned up in a box of miscellaneous fragments. His original interpretation was found to be slightly inaccurate because the writer had made a number of small mistakes, including not accurately ‘centring’ his text – he had squashed in a long word where Tomlin, applying the reasonable logic of an Oxford don, reckoned only a shorter one would fit. If the papyrologists are solvers of crosswords, then they are dealing with setters who break the rules of the game. ‘You’ve got to have a good eye for the thing, and be prepared to believe you’ve got it wrong,’ says Bowman. ‘There’s no flash of light, just a slow realisation.’ Bowman admits that the longer he has gone on deciphering Vindolanda texts, the more mistakes he realises he has
made over the years. Scholars such as these work in the shadowy realm of the provisional, never the blinding light of the definitive.

You can see some of the Vindolanda tablets in the Roman Britain gallery of the British Museum, and they look deeply unimpressive. They are thin, small, brownish rectangles covered with thin, small, brownish writing. And yet, craning my neck at an uncomfortable angle to try to read the indistinct strokes, I found myself with a catch in my throat when I came face to face, for the first time, with a tablet whose text I knew already:

Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present (?). Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him (?) their greetings.

I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail.

Sulpicia Lepidina was the wife of Flavius Cerialis, the camp commandant. Claudia Severa was the wife of Brocchus, he of the hunting nets. The letter is written in two hands. The body of the note is in a clear, competent script that has been identified on other tablets – perhaps that of a scribe. The sign-off – warm, personal, urgent – is in another hand. It is probably, according to the papyrologists, Severa’s own. If it is, it means these are the first words to have survived, from anywhere in the empire, in a Roman woman’s own handwriting. ‘
Sperabo te soror, vale soror, anima mea, ita valeam karissima et have
,’ reads the Latin. The words ‘
anima mea karissima
’, my dearest soul, may have been a bland formula (‘lots of love’?), but I none the less felt ambushed by the affection and sweetness in them. The fragment contained an atavistic magic that scepticism could not entirely blot out. The years seemed to collapse as I read it, picking out the faint, spidery Latin on the dull wood. I read the words over and over again, and thought of the lost life of the woman who wrote them.

Of this dyke, or wall, there are evident signs and genuine traces to be seen to this day.

John of Fordun, fourteenth century

I have lost count of how many people have said to me, ‘But the Romans didn’t get beyond Hadrian’s Wall, did they?’ What is certainly true is that the Romans never secured the Highlands, though Agricola fought through to the Grampians in the far north-east and briefly conquered – at least according to Tacitus – the whole island. It is also true that there is no evidence of Roman civilian settlements: no villas, no towns. But there are over 200 sites north of Hadrian’s Wall that have produced Roman archaeological finds. The Romans had persistent contact with, and at times power over, parts of Scotland. Twenty years after the building of Hadrian’s Wall, a second barrier, the Antonine Wall, was built between the firths of Forth and Clyde and held for a generation: it was thickly dotted with forts. There is also a line of signal stations north of Dundee, along the Gask Ridge – the most northerly of a great mass of information-gathering systems that extended beyond the main garrisons, ready to send news of trouble south. The wild territories of Scotland are sprinkled with the traces of marching camps as far north as the Moray Firth. Septimius Severus, in the early third century, campaigned brutally in Perthshire and Angus, beyond the walls. A military base at Cramond, near Edinburgh, left an extraordinary monument in the form of the Cramond Lion, a sculpture of a great feline devouring a man, its sharp teeth sinking into the man’s head, its huge claws clutching his shoulders.

A walk around the galleries of the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh is instructive. Here are fragments of Samian ware, the bases of the
dishes inscribed with their owners’ – the soldiers’ – names. So that we know that at Newstead, in the borders, a man called Domitius took his rations; and in Inveresk, in East Lothian, Victor had his mess-pot. Also at Newstead, we know from an amphora scratched with the letters ‘
VIN
’, the troops, or at least officers, were drinking wine with their rations. Through various kinds of contact – trade, diplomacy and, no doubt, looting – Roman things ended up scattered throughout Scotland. At Trapain Law in East Lothian, an extraordinary cache of late Roman silverware was discovered in 1919. Here were fifty-three pieces, including wine cups, dishes with beaded rims, strainers, spoons: the impedimenta of an elegant Roman feast. Perhaps the hoard was a diplomatic payment, or subsidy, or bribe, to a local tribe. At Carlungie, far to the north in Angus, a French wine amphora was discovered, its contents perhaps enjoyed by the local grandees. A glass Roman dish was found on Westray, one of the northernmost of the Orkneys; a fragment of Samian in Berie in the Outer Hebrides. On a dig that ran between 1998 and 2011 at Birnie, just south of Elgin near the Moray Firth, archaeologist Dr Fraser Hunter and his colleagues found, on an Iron Age site, two hoards. One contained 320 Roman coins, the other 310. The coins, the latest of which dated from the early third century, had been wrapped in leather pouches and buried in ceramic pots lined with bracken. The peoples of the far north were not becoming Roman, but they were taking Roman things and making them their own. Scotland has a Roman past. And that Roman past comes into sharp focus at another period in Scotland’s history: the eighteenth century and the fault line running through it, the Jacobite rebellion of 1745.

When George II’s troops marched north to fight off Charles James Stuart’s attempt on the British throne, they were hampered by their imperfect knowledge of the Highlands. Of the infinitely complex contours of the northern mountains, the ragged outline of the coast, the watery interplay of the lochs and burns and bogs, there existed no accurate maps. To many Lowland Scots, leave alone the English, the Highlands were terra incognita, a desolate, remote, even primally savage land, culturally and linguistically distant from the intellectual ferment of Enlightenment Edinburgh. There were few roads that afforded efficient transportation of troops; meanwhile, the Jacobites
had the advantage of knowing the territory. So it was that the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, was successfully spirited away from the bloodbath of Culloden to safety on Skye, and thence to Rome.

The redcoats were not the first invading army to attempt the subjugation of the Highlands. In
AD
79 or 80, the governor, Agricola, according to the biography by his son-in-law, Tacitus, advanced into what is now Scotland. He garrisoned the Forth–Clyde line; and contemplated the invasion of Ireland, which he later claimed (idle boast!) he could have reduced with a single legion and a force of auxiliaries. Beyond the narrow stretch between the firths the territory broadened out again into what Tacitus described as ‘almost another island’. Here Agricola now ventured, his infantry shadowed by his fleet and marines. They came under attack from the Caledonian tribes, and some of Agricola’s officers advised a strategic retreat; but the general was determined to press on. When the Caledonians learned of his intention to advance further, they massed together for a terrifying night attack on the encamped 9th Legion. The Romans successfully fought them off, but the Caledonians melted away into ‘
paludes et silvae
’, marshes and forests. This hard-won victory filled the Roman troops, reported Tacitus, with an appetite to drive yet deeper into Caledonia and reach the ‘farthest limits of Britain’. The next summer, 83 or 84, they came to Mons Graupius – where, said Tacitus, more than 30,000 men rallied to fight them. The location of this battlefield has never been satisfactorily identified, though there are reasonable grounds for suggesting that it may have been Mount Bennachie, north-west of Aberdeen, near to which a large Roman marching camp was discovered in the 1970s. At any rate, it was the untraceable Mons Graupius, courtesy of the fifteenth- to sixteenth-century Scottish historian Hector Boece, that gave its name to the Grampian mountain range. The shift from Graupius to Grampius is thanks to a typesetting error in the earliest printed edition of Tacitus’s
Agricola
.

At this point in his narrative, Tacitus gives us one of his most remarkable passages: a speech delivered to the Caledonian troops by the war leader Calgacus. Of this Calgacus, nothing further is known: but the speech that Tacitus invents for him is one of the historian’s greatest, and most moving, acts of rhetorical ventriloquism. Today will be the birth of liberty for Britain, he declares. We will fight well because we are free. Here in the remote north, far away from the
grasp of tyranny, have been born the best of men. The Romans are ‘
raptores orbis
’, the pillagers of the world. Neither east nor west has sated them. To theft, murder and rapine they give the false name of power. They make a desert, and call it peace. Look at their troops: a motley crew of Germans, Gauls – even, it shames me to say, Britons. These people were Rome’s enemies for far longer than they have been her slaves. Here, on the battlefield, the Britons will remember their true cause; the Gauls will recall their former liberty; the Germans will desert them.

The speech is both a bitter critique of the moral vacuum at the heart of the imperial project, and an expression of a deep anxiety about its potential for collapse. What if the provincials really were to throw off those habits of mind and manners that made one Roman?
Romanitas
could be acquired; and so, perhaps, it could also be jettisoned. (Indeed, only a few chapters earlier in his narrative, Tacitus had described the mutiny of a cohort of German troops, who murdered their centurions, seized three warships and sailed around north Britain before being captured in the Low Countries and sold as slaves.) But perhaps the idea of such disasters could be safely entertained precisely because they did not come about. The battle was, like Culloden, a rout. The Caledonians scattered to the forests, where they were pursued by the relentless Romans. Arms, bodies, limbs lay on the blood-soaked earth. The day after the battle, an unsettling silence hung in the air: the hills were deserted; torched buildings smouldered and smoked in the distance.