Shady Characters

This is the third in a series of five posts on Field Trips. Start at PART 1, continue to PART 4 or view ALL POSTS in the series.

Hadrian’s Wall is quite a thing. Its construction is linked to a visit to Britain, in 122 CE, of the Emperor Hadrian, although work may have been underway before then. Conventional wisdom says that Hadrian wanted to keep the restive Celts out of Roman Britain to the south; another interpretation is that the wall was a means to collect tolls and duties from whomever might have cause to pass through it, Celt or otherwise. Whatever the case, the finished wall was eighty miles long, running almost from coast to coast, and it became the abiding symbol of Roman rule in the island of Britain.1,2

Vindolanda is just a mile south of Hadrian’s Wall. It’s the site of a Roman auxiliary fort and an associated village, or vicus, both of which predated the wall but subsequently became part of its supporting infrastructure. The fort was rediscovered some time before 1702, which was the year that a doctor named Christopher Hunter3 described:

a square room, strongly vaulted above, and paved with large stones set in lime, and under this a lower room, whose roof was supported by rows of square pillars of about half a yard high: the upper room had […] two chimneys on each side of every corner or square [.]

All of which sounds exactly like the warm room, or tepidarium, of a Roman bathhouse, with a hypocaust below the floor and chimneys within the walls to convey hot air from the furnace.4

Despite the find, little happened in the way of excavations until the land on which the fort sat was acquired in 1814 by one Anthony Hedley, an Anglican priest and enthusiastic amateur antiquarian. Hedley’s purchase saved what remained of the fort from the stone-robbing and looting that blighted much of the rest of the wall, with Hedley himself rescuing a Roman gravestone from the attentions of an over-eager tenant farmer in 1818. Many more finds would follow and, since the 1930s, the site has been subject to near-continuous archaeological investigation.4

Today, Vindolanda is run by a charitable trust as combination of an open-air museum and an ongoing archaeological excavation.5 It’s a great place to visit if you’re in the vicinity — some of the nearby sites on Hadrian’s Wall itself have a more dramatic outlook, but the scale of the fort and vicus, along with a well-presented museum that houses nearly a century’s worth of archaeological finds, mean that Vindolanda more than holds its own.

On a recent visit, I couldn’t help but linger at a collection of Roman inscriptions — well, replica inscriptions, since the originals are in nearby Chesters Museum — originally discovered by Anthony Hedley himself. Together, they provide a fascinating snapshot of how stonemasons in Roman Britain approached writing and punctuation.

First up is the gravestone that Hedley found in 1818. It’s dated to between 43 to 410 CE, which is archaeology’s way of saying “we don’t know when it was made but we’re pretty sure it came from Roman-occupied Britain”,6 and it marks the death of one Cornelius Victor.

The inscription reads:

D(is) M(anibus)
Corn(elius) Victor s(ingularis) c(onsularis)
mil(itavit) ann(os) XXVI civ(is)
Pann(onius) fil(ius) Saturni-
ni p(rimi) p(ilaris) vix(it) an(nos) LV d(ies) XI
coniux procuravi(t)

Or, translated and with its abbreviations expanded,

To the spirits of the departed; Cornelius Victor, singularis consularis, served for 26 years, a Pannonian tribesman, son of Saturninus, a senior centurion, and lived for 55 years, 11 days. His wife had this set up.”7

All the usual quirks are there: uppercase letters only; dots between words; abbreviations for familiar phrases; too-long words broken across lines. It’s a time capsule of Roman writing customs.

With the gravestone are three altarpieces that all display the same traits:

Moreover, all three show a quirk of Roman numerals that I hadn’t previously thought much about. The inscription for the first, for example, reads as follows:

Genio
praetori
sacrum Pi-
tuanius Se-
cundus prae-
fectus coh(ortis) IIII
Gall(orum)

Or, translated,

Sacred to the Genius of the commandant’s house Pituanius Secundus, prefect of the Fourth Cohort of Gauls, (set this up).8

The thing I found interesting is that the number four is rendered not as “IV”, as I had expected, but rather in the “IIII” style found on some clocks.* “IIII” is said to be additive and “IV” subtractive, but very little (that I can find) has been written about when or why the Romans switched from one to the other. The only real convention seems to have been that the additive notation was preferred for inscriptions, especially official ones.9 The colosseum, for example, used “IIII” rather than “IV” for some of its gates.10 Beyond that, the choice seems to have come down to taste and/or context, even within the same document.

I’d love to know if any readers can shed some light on this!

The featured photo, released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence, was taken by Mike Bishop. In common with many heritage sites, Vindolanda’s finances have suffered during the past year. Please consider making a donation to their survival appeal.

1.

Breeze, David. “History of Hadrian’s Wall”. Accessed June 22, 2021.

 ↢

2.

Lobell, Jarrett A. “The Wall at the End of the Empire”. Archaeology Magazine.

 ↢

3.

Goodwin, Gordon, and F Horsman. “Hunter, Christopher (bap. 1675, D. 1757), Antiquary and Physician”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

 ↢

4.

Birley, Robin. “Roman Researches from Camden to Anthony Hedley, John Clayton and Eric Birley”. In Vindolanda : A Roman Frontier Fort on Hadrian’s Wall. Stroud: Amberley, 2009.

 ↢

5.

The Vindolanda Trust. “History of the Trust”. Accessed June 26, 2021.

 ↢

6.

“An Introduction To Roman Britain (AD 43–c.410)”. English Heritage. Accessed June 27, 2021.

 ↢

7.

Roman Inscriptions of Britain. “RIB 1713. Funerary Inscription for Cornelius Victor”. Accessed June 27, 2021.

 ↢

8.

Roman Inscriptions of Britain. “RIB 1685. Altar Dedicated to the Genius Praetori”. Accessed June 27, 2021.

 ↢

9.

Hornblower, Simon, and Antony Spawforth. “numbers, Roman”. In The Oxford classical dictionary, 1053.

 ↢

10.

“Colosseum”. Flickr.

 ↢

*

It’s amazing the things you notice when writing a book about the pocket calculator. ↢