Under Another Sky (25 page)

All this seems very far away from York’s present, with its cafés, its tourist shops, its air of genial backwaterishness in its winding medieval streets. After my visit to the minster’s crypt, I emerged blinking into the hot June day and wandered across the road to admire the huge modern bronze sculpture of Constantine enthroned; and nearby, a column from the collapsed Roman basilica, found during the 1969 excavations, which had been erected in the street to commemorate 1,900 years since the founding of the city. I walked on to the Yorkshire
Museum, where I met Patrick Ottaway, an expert on the city’s Roman archaeology. He took me to the landscaped gardens of the museum, where together we surveyed the heft of the Roman walls and the ‘multiangular tower’ – a giant projecting polygonal mass, forward of the line of the town wall. ‘As impressive a piece of military architecture as you will see in Britain,’ said Ottaway. The tower’s base is Roman; it is topped off by medieval stonework. Ottaway believes it may have been built when Septimius Severus was in York, with all the pomp of his retinue.

Septimius Severus was the child of a wealthy family of Lepcis Magna whose members had received Roman citizenship in the late first century ad; he was granted senatorial status under Marcus Aurelius. He studied in Rome, and served in Africa, in Syria and on the Danube. He won imperial power in 193, ‘the year of the five emperors’, by destroying all other claimants during the chaos that followed the murders of both the emperor Commodus, son of Marcus Aurelius, and his successor, Pertinax. Severus’s final adversary was his erstwhile ally Clodius Albinus, who had been proclaimed emperor by his troops while governor of Britain and whom he defeated in battle at Lyon. A restless warrior, Severus campaigned in Parthia, sacking
that empire’s capital, Ctesiphon. Finally, he conducted two punitive expeditions in north Britain, whose tribes may have grasped the opportunity to rebel after Clodius Albinus led the British legions out to Gaul to pursue his imperial claim. Cassius Dio describes these two Severan expeditions vividly. The ailing emperor himself was carried in a litter into Caledonian territory, probably Perthshire and Angus (the Maeatae were said to occupy the lowland regions further south, around the Antonine Wall). The enemy never revealed themselves by way of meeting the Romans in battle, but instead picked off stragglers as the legions struggled with that more serious combatant, the highland terrain and climate. The Romans took to killing their own wounded to stop them falling into enemy hands. The following summer, Severus ordered genocide. Let no one escape sheer destruction, not even the babe in the womb of the mother, he commanded, according to Dio. Severus appears to have been grotesquely successful: there is no evidence of trouble from the north for over a century afterwards. Of Severus’s wife Julia Domna – the stupendously wealthy Syrian empress – Cassius Dio wrote that she had discussed sexual mores with the wife of the Caledonian chief Argentocoxus. When the empress joked with the Caledonian woman about the free-and-easy sexual habits of the Celts, the chief’s wife replied: ‘We fulfil the demands of nature in a much better way than you do: for we consort openly with the best men; whereas you allow yourselves to be debauched in secret by the vilest.’ It is a good story: but surely more to do with Cassius Dio’s own commentary on contemporary Roman morals than with any conversation that might, or might not, have taken place.

In February 211, Severus died, aged sixty-five, in York (not without a little help from Caracalla, or so Dio claimed – on one occasion, he had had to be restrained from stabbing his father in the back in full view of the Roman troops). On his deathbed, Severus supposedly instructed his sons: ‘Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers and scorn all others.’ After his funeral, his sons and widow rushed back to Rome to secure power there, taking his ashes with them. The brothers at once became distinctly unharmonious. According to Dio, Caracalla requested that he and Geta should have a private audience with their mother in order to be reconciled to each other. But Caracalla had organised a gang of centurions to storm the room and kill his brother – who staggered bloodily towards Julia Domna and died in her arms.
Geta’s name was subject to
damnatio memoriae
– all mention of him to be wiped from the official record, expunged from every inscription the length and breadth of the empire. There is, for example, in existence a rare painted portrait of Severus, Julia Domna and the two sons, in the collection of the State Museums of Berlin. Probably Egyptian in origin, it shows the dark-skinned, bearded Severus with his imperial crown; his wife with her beautifully curled hair, and the two sons – except that Geta’s face is quite rubbed out. ‘If anyone so much as wrote the name Geta or even uttered it, he was immediately put to death,’ recorded Dio, who was a senator at the time, and an eyewitness to many of the atrocities of the period. Caracalla’s most significant legacy as emperor was to drastically widen the citizenship – a move that Dio ascribed not to motives of generosity, but rather to the need to raise more cash to pay the legions, since citizens were liable for more tax than non-citizens. None the less, from his reign onwards, every free man across the empire, including Britain, was a Roman, with the same rights and responsibilities as a man born in the shadow of the Palatine.

Ottaway led me up now to the walls of the city. We ascended them by way of the medieval gatehouse of Bootham Bar, where a men’s public lavatory was furnished with a plaque noting that this was the spot where the north-west gate of the old Roman fort had once stood.
With a few medieval dips and wobbles, Petergate, which runs into the city from Bootham Bar, follows the main street of the ancient fort: Ottaway told me about excavating here, and ‘the extraordinary experience of standing on the Roman
via principalis
, five metres below ground, and looking upwards at all the layers of York’s history’. We turned and looked the other way and imagined the line of the old Roman road heading north-west towards Catterick and beyond to Hadrian’s Wall, lined with mausolea and cemeteries rather than pubs and little shops. We wandered atop the walls; from here to Monk Bar, another medieval gatehouse, they follow the line of the Roman fortress’s defences, angling round the minster and affording lovely views of the soaring Norman architecture. Ottaway looked down longingly on the land he would never get to dig. There would be lines of barracks, he reckoned, beneath the deanery gardens. ‘In my mind’s eye I see it excavated,’ he said. ‘Not in my lifetime, but one day, when they build a nuclear power station here.’

He also told me the story, well known locally, of the Roman ghosts of York. One day in 1953, an apprentice plumber named Harry Martindale looked up from his work in the basement of a building in Chapter House Street to see the ghosts of Roman soldiers marching past. They were invisible from the knee down. Ottaway added that two years later, excavations took place in the same spot, which established that the earliest Roman floor level was, indeed, a few feet below the basement where Martindale had been working, thus making a certain sense of his curious vision. ‘But,’ said Ottaway with a grin, ‘his soldiers seemed to be walking at an angle to the line of the Roman road.’

I walked back to the Yorkshire Museum and wandered round its galleries of Roman treasures excavated from the city. Here was an inscription recording the construction of a temple to the Egyptian god Serapis by one Claudius Hieronymianus, a high-ranking officer of the 6th Legion. Here were the spaces left by the Roman dead. The impressions of three corpses, one of them a baby in swaddling clothes, had been captured in the hardened plaster that had been poured into their shared coffin before they were buried – it was like looking at the dent your head makes in a pillow. Here, too, was a fragment of an inscription raised by the 9th Legion. The surviving portion lists the emperor Trajan’s official titles and the length of time he had held
them, and so can be accurately dated to the years 107–8 – the last-known reference to the legion in Britain.

The galleries of the museum were filled with death. Corellia Optata had died at the age of thirteen. Her father, Quintus Corellis Fortis, who set up her tomb, wrote a long, heartfelt inscription for her, calling himself ‘
spe captus iniqua … miserandus
’, ‘the pitiable victim of unfair hope’. To me the words have a Virgilian ring, echoing another outpouring of grief for a young person dead before their time: in the
Aeneid
’s eleventh book, Aeneas mourns the death of the boy Pallas, imagining his unknowing father at home ‘
spe multum captus inani
’, ‘utterly deluded by false hope’. In York, sadness seemed to seep from the stone. The father wept not for his daughter’s end, but rather, somehow appallingly, her ‘final end’ – ‘
supremum finem defleo
’.
‘Supremum’
is a word that might more appropriately be used of a long life, of a child burying a father rather than the other way around. The tombstone is missing its top half, so it contains only the text and no funerary relief, except for Corellia’s carved feet, which lend a certain absurdity to the otherwise poignant object. In a glass case nearby lies the skull of another young woman, and her funerary goods: yellow-glass earrings, ivory bracelets from Africa, jet bangles from Whitby, an elegant blue-glass perfume bottle from the Rhineland, a silver mirror. She also had a motto in openwork bone buried with her – ‘
Soror ave vivas in deo
’, ‘Sister farewell, may you live in God’, which may imply she was a Christian; or else, perhaps, that she was a follower of the Egyptian cult of Serapis.

This woman is known as the ‘ivory bangle lady’ to those who have studied her. She was buried at what is now York’s Sycamore Terrace, near the banks of the Ouse, and her grave was excavated in 1901. The things buried with her are exceptionally fine: she was rich. She was a little over five feet tall, and between nineteen and twenty-three years old when she died, sometime in the fourth century. Recently, her skeleton was re-examined as part of a project looking at the movement of populations around the Roman empire. Her remains were subject to a range of techniques that are in their infancy as archaeological tools: among them craniometric analysis, or ‘ancestry assessment’ based on the typology of her skull. The researchers found that it had traits pointing towards mixed-race ancestry, and they suggested that she might have come from north Africa, where
Phoenician, Berber, sub-Saharan African and Mediterranean influences mingled. At the same time, researchers conducted strontium and oxygen isotope analysis on one of her molars. The technique aims to trace where an individual may have lived, through the influence, via the water the person consumed, of geology on tissue formation. They found that she was unlikely to have grown up in York, but perhaps spent her childhood either in the west of Britain or in a warm climate in the Mediterranean. ‘In cosmopolitan Eboracum, which had been home to Severus and his troops nearly 200 years earlier, perhaps her appearance was not that unusual,’ suggested the research team in a paper. Indeed, in assessing human remains from sites in Gloucester, Winchester and York, they found that up to 20 per cent of the individuals were not local to their burial places, but had originated from elsewhere in Britain, or overseas.

Were the ‘ivory bangle lady’ to have come from north Africa, it would not, in fact, be altogether surprising. Britain, after all, had already been governed by an African – Clodius Albinus, whom the late Roman collection of imperial biographies known as the
Historia Augusta
notes as being from Hadrumetum in modern Tunisia. And, as the researchers observed, York had played host to the Libyan-Syrian family of Septimius Severus. Nevertheless, the researchers’ conclusions provoked a tumultuous response. On 28 February 2010, the
Daily Mail
ran a news piece to tie in with the publication of the findings in the journal
Antiquity
. The
Mail
’s article was headlined ‘Revealed: The African queen who called York home in the fourth century.’ It began: ‘Startling new forensic research has revealed that multicultural Britain is nothing new after discovering black Africans were living in high society in Roman York.’ The article ran fairly dispassionately through the evidence, and quoted one of the researchers, Dr Hella Eckardt, of the University of Reading, as saying: ‘We’re looking at a population mix which is much closer to contemporary Britain than previous historians had suspected. In the case of York, the Roman population may have had more diverse origins than the city has now … [The bangle lady’s] case contradicts assumptions that may derive from more recent historical experience, namely that immigrants are low status and male, and that African individuals are likely to have been slaves.’