The aim of this paper is to study the visible remains of a typically Roman institution in the most northerly province of the Roman Empire. At the same time, however, it sets out to survey why and how the Roman remains in Britain became and become a re ...
The aim of this paper is to study the visible remains of a typically Roman institution in the most northerly province of the Roman Empire. At the same time, however, it sets out to survey why and how the Roman remains in Britain became and become a rewarding one. My first study was Bath(AQUAE SULIS). Unlike all other Romano-British towns, Bath existed solely as a spa and, except for London, was the most cosmopolitan town in the country. From the thermal spring flowed the sacred water of the Celtic spirit Sulis, whom the Romans identified with Minerva, the goddess of healing. They built a temple to Sulis-Minerva and channelled the spring water into a huge lead-lined bath. Round this they built a full-scale bath complex and exercise hall. The temple, unlike other Celtic-Romano ones, was a full-scale classical building with a magnificent head of Medusa sculpted in the likeness of a barbarian Celt. The temple became the centre of a cult to Minerva with its own priest, the only such one in Britain, who interpreted omens and prepared sacrificial victims. Both the temple and the baths were visited by people from all over Europe, particularly those seeking cures. Not only were baths a focus of social, cultural, aesthetic and physical life in the Roman Empire; in constructing and operating them the Romans made use of almost every technology available at the time. To investigate baths in detail is to look at the manufacture, transport and use of a wide range of building materials from natural stones to concrete and glass, from lead pipes to bronze faucets, from painted plaster to splendid mosaics. It is to look at materials used in construction, at the provision of fuel for a sophisticated system of heating, and at the supply of water by hydraulic engineering which can be highly ingenious. Roman baths evolved rapidly, particularly during the early principate, and evidence of many of the changes and experiments can be seen in the remains preserved on sites and in museums in Britain. This study hopes to give a coherent and plausible history of the evolution, which is both consistent and convincing, not to say the present situation of excavation and preservation of bath relics.
Another experiment is Hadrian's Wall, especially Vindolland forts. Why the Romans bulit the Wall Standing on a high point of Hadrian's Wall, buffeted by a keen Northumbrian wind and looking out over the wide-open, sparsely inhabited landscape to an horizon cloaked in mist, the Roman soldier from a far-off corner of the empire must have thought that there to the north were not only barbarians but, surely, the ends of the earth. Following the Claudian invasion of 43AD, it took another 60 years before the country was pacified as far north as a chain of forts along the Stanegate, a military road running east-west across the Tyne-Solway isthmus to form a border that remained disputed, undefined and under almost continual attack until Emperor Hadrian visited Britain in 122AD. He decided on a policy of damage limitation and ordered a wall to be built across England from the Tyne estuary to the Solway Firth, a distance of 73 miles(117km) or 79 Roman miles. Hadrian's Wall was built not by slave labour but by legionaries, the elite troops of the Roman army who were as skilled in civil engineering as they were in fighting. It was a massive engineering feat requiring immense manpower, finance and logistic support. A force of between 11,000 and 12,000 men was needed to build its 156 turrets, 79 mile castles and 16 forts. The garrisons were auxiliaries, not legionaries, who acted as frontier police collecting tolls from the customs posts at the mile castles, as well as front-line troops taking the brunt of tribal attacks. The legions remained in their permanent forts and were used only in major campaigns, for heavy punitive expeditions or to repel invaders. What remains is an impressive monument to the greatest civil engineering project undertaken in pre-modern Britain.