What the Romans really did for British history

What the Romans really did for British history was provide the first manifestations of the sense of self among the ordinary. This way we encounter all sorts of people at random points in their lives, lives passed in Britain when it was a Roman province. The inscriptions and other records of the men, women and children for whom Roman Britain was part of their experiences, whether as immigrant or native, are the first ordinary people in British history that we can name.

However interesting the ruins of a Roman villa are today, it is easy to forget that it was once a home, a three-dimensional building in which all sorts of personal dramas and histories were played out. Hundreds of Romano-British villas are known, while modern excavation and survey work has shown that there were tens of thousands of simpler rural farmsteads and settlements across the green and pleasant land of Roman Britain.

The villas and all these myriad settlements must have been places where children were born, played, grew up, experienced happiness and sadness, had their own families, grew old and died and were fondly remembered or otherwise by their descendants, who themselves wandered through the corridors with their own families and used the rooms to play out their own existences. Whole family dynasties passed through these places, experiencing joy or tragedy, success or failure, depending on the circumstances.

Roman Britain was also, of course, home to dozens of towns, large and small, and many more fortresses and forts. Here untold numbers of unique personal stories were played out against a backdrop of the broader Roman world and its extravagant, exotic, erotic and extraordinary history. Roman Britain was a human experience but we can all too easily forget that among the generalities of military campaigns, the antics of emperors, the arid plains of statistical models and typologies of pottery, the skeletal remains of buildings, and theoretical archaeological agendas.

Today it has become more usual to regard the Roman era in Britain as one during which an oppressive regime exploited and abused the population as part of an Empire-wide policy of systematic larceny. The Roman Empire in this revisionist paradigm is a malicious, greedy and destructive force that created and exacerbated social inequalities; it also fragmented society into disparate groups. The reality, inevitably, is altogether more blurred. Roman rule was neither invariably an idyllic induction to the pleasures of life in an imperial system and nor was it exclusively an oppressive nightmare characterised by merciless exploitation and cultural totalitarianism.

For around 360 years in Britain, Roman rule was a fact of life. The people involved would have included those who exploited their advantages and those who were oppressed. No doubt there were plenty of people who both exploited and were exploited in equal measure. All human beings seek an acceptable accommodation between individual liberty and control since most of us crave some sort of order and security. It is obvious that there was great inequality in the Roman world, but it is also true that social mobility existed to some degree, that there was a significant component of elective acceptance of the system as it was, and that there was also impotence, either legal or practical, to do anything about it.

The Romano-British all had to operate in a system that was determined in the main by the conquering culture. What is impossible for us is to establish the extent of deliberate participation, whether willingly or begrudgingly, and also to track the process of assimilation, especially as it has always been very clear that the experience of Roman domination varied wildly between regions. After all, a Briton might have spent an impecunious lifetime suffering exploitation, and loathing his Romanised oppressors, but been content to use a Roman road when it suited him and accept its inevitable impact on his life. His grandson may have developed into a far more willing participant when money and position came his way as a result. In the end human beings can make very polarised decisions, even within a family, depending on the prospect of immediate advantages or disadvantages of any given situation. Collaboration, cohabitation and compliance are often the consequences of expediency and we can see all of these beginning to occur in some parts of Britain before the Roman invasion.

Our knowledge of this era is handicapped by the restricted visibility. But from inscriptions and graffiti we can learn about the soldiers and women of Rome’s most northerly frontier, slave girls, potters, errant tilers, jewellers, immigrants and others whose claim to fame is often no more than a fleeting glimpse of their lives or the circumstances of their death. Together these sources provide a rich seam of isolated incidents, personalities and memorials creating a remarkable record of the 360 years of Britain’s time as a Roman province. These stories paint an animated picture of a world populated by transient Spaniards, Gauls, Thracians, Greeks, and Italians among others. Britons, by comparison, are tantalizingly scarce.

Only in those rare instances where a British origin is specified are we on firmer ground. Lossio Veda, who appeared in Colchester between 222 and 235, is an instance of a person from beyond the province’s northern frontier who uniquely identifies himself as both a Caledonian and as someone who expresses himself through a Roman conduit. Thereby he becomes visible as an individual to us.

Every year that passes sees more individuals from Roman Britain’s population recovered from the ground in the form of records on tombstones, religious dedications, writing tablets, and graffiti. But in relative terms the numbers are tiny. These people must be seen to stand for the myriad and nameless others who passed all or some of their real lives in Britannia seventeen to twenty centuries ago and with whom we share the remarkable fact that we were born and lived at all. The rest are lost to the ages. And it will probably be much the same for most of us in time.

The Real Lives of Roman Britain by Guy de la Bédoyère was published on May 1st by Yale University Press, priced £20