Life and Letters from the Roman Frontier

Alan K. Bowman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781136773921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

First published in 1998. Over three hundred letters and documents have recently been discovered at the fort of Vindolanda, written on wooden tablets which have amazingly survived nearly 2000 years. Painstakingly deciphered by Alan Bowman and J. David Thomas, they have contributed a wealth of evidence for daily life in the Roman Empire. From the military documents we learn of the strength and activities of the units stationed at Vindolanda. The accounts testify to the lifestyle of officers and ordinary soldiers, with payments for pepper and oil, towels and tallow, boots and beer. Then there are snapshots of domestic life in letters between the officers' wives, including a birthday invitation (see front cover). Most fascinating of all is the evidence for a high level of literacy in the Roman army, where even someone of humble rank receives a letter from home promising him a parcel of socks. Alan Bowman's lively summary of this new evidence is followed by the texts of 38 key tablets, in Latin and in translation, including new tablets found in 1991-4, which bring the reader very close to the actual people who inhabited Vindolanda in 100 AD.

1

INTRODUCTION

Despite the very great advances brought by increased archaeological activity in recent years, the poverty of evidence for the period in the history of Roman Britain which lies between the end of Agricola’s governorship and the construction of Hadrian’s Wall (c. ad 85–122) has been striking by comparison with later periods in Britain, and with other provinces of the Roman empire. We have had a skeleton, but a truly fleshless one. Since the resumption of excavations in the early 1970s Vindolanda has established a claim to have given us, in more senses than one, a considerable amount of flesh.

The archaeologist’s spade

delves into dwellings

vacancied long ago,

unearthing evidence

of life-ways no-one

would dream of leading now,

concerning which he has not much

to say that he can prove:

the lucky man!

Knowledge may have its purposes,

but guessing is always

much more fun than knowing.

Auden wrote those words in 1973¹ which was, by coincidence, the year in which the most extraordinary product of the excavations at the fort first came to light in the shape of written texts, letters and military documents preserved on wooden tablets.²

Precisely what these texts will allow us to prove is perhaps for the reader of the following pages to judge. There is still more than enough room for guesswork. What is beyond doubt is the fact that a total of more than 250 substantial written texts gives us a very great deal of new evidence. This information has to be teased out of material which is all too often barely legible, fragmentary or obscure (or all three at once). Our ability, such as it is, to read it depends on our predecessors in the field of Latin papyrology and palaeography and, as a token of our debt to an earlier pioneer generation, it is appropriate to identify two of the most distinguished British scholars in these fields by recalling the words of the late Sir Eric Turner in his obituary of Sir Harold Idris Bell, written in 1967: ‘I remember Bell’s telling me of his hope that one day he would find a letter on papyrus written by a soldier on Roman service in Britain, a hope that has not yet been fulfilled.’³ Bell would surely have derived pleasure from seeing that hope amply fulfilled in the 1970s and 1980s, even if on wood, rather than papyrus. He would certainly also have derived great pleasure from the fact that my responsibility for editing this material has been shared with the last and most distinguished of his pupils, Professor J. David Thomas of Durham University. That my name alone appears under the title of this publication should not obscure the fact that the credit for any sense which we have been able to extract from these often fragmentary and obscure texts belongs in at least equal measure to him. Our collaboration in this work has extended over two decades.

Like all papyrologists and documentary historians of the ancient world, we live with the awareness that tomorrow’s new text may stand today’s truth on its head. With writing-tablets still coming out of the ground in the 1990s, it should be obvious that many of our present conclusions can only be tentative and provisional.

There is a great deal to be gained, even so. Our knowledge of roads, forts, archaeological and inscriptional evidence has given us a skeletal history of this period in Britain. Our Vindolanda texts give us, as we shall see, a vast mass of detailed information, but hardly any explicit generalisation of importance. To take two extreme examples, what do we learn of any value from the fact that one of our writers refers in a letter to the possibility of ‘tempestates molestae’,⁴ that another, writing in the winter months, says that he does not wish to trouble the draft animals dum viae male (sc. malae) sunt?⁵ It can hardly be claimed as a major advance that we can recognise the existence of bad roads in winter during Roman times! Our difficulty is to make the detail coherent and coax it to general conclusions that are not merely trite. We have to proceed on the basis that the accretion of detail does actually modify the general picture and change our state of knowledge, surely, if almost imperceptibly; this is advance from within the subject, working within the framework of what we already know, and I hope to be able to show that the significance of this detailed information for northern Britain in the late first and early second centuries ad has some dramatic implications for our general conception of the development of the frontier region and for our knowledge of the character and behaviour of the Roman army as an instrument of imperialism.

It is, nevertheless, appropriate to emphasise what this book is not. It is not a history of Roman Britain, nor of the northern frontier, nor the Roman army, nor even of the fort of Vindolanda as a whole in this period. All these topics have been well served by recent research and by publications of scholars far better qualified in those subjects than I am. The general Romano-British context, physical and cultural, is illustrated with a wealth of detail in a recent publication and reports on various aspects of the archaeological excavations of the early wooden forts at Vindolanda have been published.⁶ What follows, therefore, is an attempt to describe and analyse specifically what the Vindolanda writing-tablets tell us about various aspects of the early Roman occupation of northern Britain and life in the frontier region, and to say something about the context into which that evidence needs to be put.

This presentation of the evidence of the writing-tablets is, I need hardly say, fundamentally derivative of and secondary to the editio princeps of the texts from Vindolanda.⁷ The form which the presentation takes in this book, however, is based in large part on the Lees Knowles Lectures in Military History which I gave at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the autumn of 1988. For that opportunity and for their gracious hospitality I am most grateful to the Master and Fellows of Trinity College.

I have gratitude to express on several other counts. To the Vindolanda Trust and particularly to its Director, Robin Birley, who takes the credit for recognising these sodden fragments of wood for what they are, who has continued to conjure them out of the ground over a period of two decades and has constantly encouraged us in our attempts to reveal their secrets. To Dr Ian Longworth and Dr T. W. Potter of the Department of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities at the British Museum, where the tablets have now come to rest. To Alison Rutherford, formerly of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, to Eric Hitchcock, formerly of University College, London and to David Webb of the British Museum Photographic Service, for achieving photographic miracles without which we would hardly have been able to contemplate reading anything at all. On matters papyrological and Romano-British I have been helped by a very large number of scholars who have made helpful comments either in writing or in person. They will, I hope, understand that it is impossible to acknowledge each individual debt. To J. N. Adams, S. S. Frere, M. W. C. Hassall, G. D. B. Jones, J. R. Rea, R. S. O. Tomlin, J.-P. Wild, J. J. Wilkes special thanks are due for making this work less imperfect than it would otherwise have been. Neither they nor my many unnamed creditors are responsible for the remaining errors or follies. I am grateful to Dr N. P. Milner for valuable bibliographical assistance.

Publication of the writing-tablets from Vindolanda over the past two decades has been generously supported by the Trustees of the Haverfield Bequest and by Mr H. A. Orr-Ewing. The Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford, has been generous in helping to provide resources and time needed for research. In 1991–3 I was awarded the British Academy (Marc Fitch) Readership in the Humanities in order to enable me to complete my share of the work on this project. I am most grateful for the very necessary freedom from other commitments which this Readership has provided.

Addendum Four further seasons of excavation took place at Vindolanda in 1991–4, yielding about 400 new ink tablets and several dozen stilus tablets. It is estimated that there are between seventy and eighty substantial new ink texts which Professor Thomas and I intend to publish in the near future. A handful of these texts have received preliminary publication⁸ and I have taken the opportunity to add the most interesting of these to Appendix II. I have also been able to make some minor corrections and to add a few essential items to the bibliography. [September, 1997]

NOTES

1 ‘Archaeology’, W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (London, 1976), 662.

2 See R. E. Birley (1977), 132–4, Bowman and Thomas (1983), 19–24.

3 JRS 57 (1967), xiii.

4 17.ii.6–8 (see note 7, below).

5 32.ii.20–1 (see note 7, below).

6 Jones and Mattingly (1990), VRR i–v.

7 Tab. Vindol. ii. References in boldface are to the texts as numbered in Appendix ii of the present book. Other texts are referred to by the publication numbers assigned Tab. Vindol. ii. These are numbered in a continuous series but note that Tab. Vindol. ii contains re-editions, with new numbers, of the texts first edited in Tab. Vindol. i.

8 See Birley and Birley (1994), Bowman and Thomas (1996). For comparable and interesting new material from Carlisle see now Tomlin (1998).

2

THE WRITING-TABLETS

The preservation, recognition and recovery of large quantities of written material at a key site in the development of the northern frontier of the Roman empire in the period before the construction of Hadrian’s Wall is one of the most important and exciting recent developments in Romano-British archaeology and history. The writing-tablets afford a uniquely detailed view of aspects of the Roman occupation of Britain for which there has hitherto been scarcely any evidence at all. Historians have had largely to base their reconstructions of this period in the history of Roman Britain on one historical account, the Agricola of Tacitus, a number of inscriptions, the evidence of archaeological sites and a large quantity of artefacts.¹ Whilst this body of evidence is by no means negligible, it does contain immense gaps. The Vindolanda writing-tablets add an enormous and invaluable amount of depth and detail – evidence of this kind and on this scale is quite simply unparalleled.

As for the context in which these documents must be placed, the archaeology at Vindolanda has its own story to tell and it can be reviewed only very briefly here. Robin Birley’s analysis shows that in the early forts at Vindolanda which have given us the writing-tablets five periods of occupation can be identified; the dates assigned to these periods have to be treated with the caution which must always be applied to such indications. The earliest fort begins c. ad 85 and terminates c. ad 92 (Period 1); the fort is then enlarged and Periods 2 and 3 run down to c. ad 103 (Period 2 c. ad 92–7, Period 3 c. ad 97–102/3); after a short hiatus, Period 4 perhaps begins in ad 104 and takes us to about ad 120, and the occupation of Period 5 lies between the years ad 120 and 130.² The period shortly after ad 90, from which the earliest of the writing-tablets appear to derive, may be crucial in the establishment of the pre-Hadrianic, Stanegate frontier (fig. 1). The enlargement of the fort at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Writing-Tablets
• 3. Strategies of Occupation
• 4. The Roman Army
• 5. Officers and Men, and Women
• 6. Social and Economic Life on the Frontier
• 7. Letters and Literacy
• Appendix I. Technical Terminology
• Appendix II. The Texts
• Bibliography
• The Plates
• Index
• Acknowledgments