“But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman empire, under whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose laws and letters are on every hand of us, constraining and preventing.  I was now to see what men might be whose fathers had never studied Virgil, had never been conquered by Caesar, and never been ruled by the wisdom of Gaius or Papinian.“  Robert Louis Stevenson, “In the South Seas”, Chapter 1

Thus wrote the 19^th century author of ‘Treasure island’ in his account of his arrival in the south Pacific islands where he spent the last years of his life. It is something I have found myself thinking about recently. For much of my life, I lived and worked in an area (Hertfordshire) which had been under the control of Rome for four centuries after 43CE. I studied Latin at school there. I started in archaeology there. Travels in England and the continent introduced me to the rediscovery of Greece and Rome during the Renaissance. When in later life I visited Rome itself and stood among the ruins of the Forum, it was like coming home. I almost expected to see Horace or Pliny walking across the street. To me, having the Romans around was the natural order of things. But like Stevenson, I have come to realise how much living in the area of the former Roman Empire has conditioned my thinking.

Years ago, a letter from a fellow student at university who had gone on to become a museum curator in his native Pakistan, introduced me to the idea that there were Roman finds in the Indian subcontinent. During the early 1^st century CE the Romans learned to use the monsoon winds in summer to sail to what is now India and Pakistan, and the reverse winds in winter to bring them back. They imported luxury goods, such as spices and aromatics, especially various forms of pepper. They went crazy for pearls and Chinese silk. Exotic animals for the arena such as lions and tigers were another sought-after commodity in Rome. The Indians wanted, among many other things, gold coins, not as coinage but for the metal itself, and were keen on the bright red forms of coral that the Romans could supply. They also liked wine, transported in amphorae, glassware and high quality pottery. I found it interesting, as I wandered past the showcases full of stacks of Samian tableware in the Verulamium museum, to think of similar stacks somewhere on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Strangely enough, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, a pioneering archaeologist of the years between the two world wars, who excavated at the Roman town of Verulamium and founded the museum where I worked for many years, was Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India in the 1940s. He worked at the South Indian town of Arikamedu, which produced many finds representing the trade with Rome, lamps, glassware, glass and stone beads, gems and pottery.

I am currently living outside the frontiers of the Roman empire. It is easy to forget that even in the British Isles there were areas where the Romans never penetrated. The far north of Scotland is one of them. Southern Scotland was controlled by the Roman army for short periods several times: under Agricola between 77 and 85 CE, again under Antoninus Pius between 142CE and c.165CE, and under Severus between 208 and 211CE. During Agricola’s campaign Roman military constructions were built as far north as Moray and Aberdeenshire. The Antonine Wall was built in the early 140s CE and ran for 60km, from the Firth of Clyde north-west of Glasgow, to the Firth of Forth north-west of Edinburgh. It only lasted for about 20 years, and as it was made of turf on a stone foundation, there isn’t much of it left for viewing. This bit is in a Glasgow cemetery.

Orkney, where I live now, does not have a single Roman monument, nor is there any evidence that the Romans ever set foot here. They certainly knew it was there, from at least the time around Claudius’ invasion of southern England in 43CE, and they knew that it was an archipelago with many islands. Agricola’s fleet sailed round it in 80CE according to Tacitus. There are some extremely vague and unlikely claims by poets and a 4^th century historian that it became part of the empire, but that is all.  During the 1^st to the early 5^th centuries CE, the period when England and Wales were part of the empire, the people of Orkney were non-literate, prehistoric farmers, often living in or next to brochs, circular stone tower-like buildings with small clusters of houses around them. They had to wait until the Norse settlers in the 11th century for their first towns.

But sometimes Roman artefacts are found in Orkney, usually at broch sites. They are the sort of objects, few in number, which were likely to have been passed from person to person as occasional gifts or curiosities, rather than part of a regular trade in olive oil or high-quality tableware, as happened in the south of England. Things like the broken neck of an amphora which once held foodstuffs like olives or wine; fragments of Samian ware; a glass cup in a burial; a bronze patera (handled dish); glass beads; and small groups of coins. They mostly date from the late 1^st and the 2^nd centuries CE, the period when the Romans penetrated farthest north in Scotland.  My favourite object is the exquisite carnelian intaglio from the broch at Howe, a gemstone carved with the figure of an eagle, which would have been set in a ring. You can see this in the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.

I also like the fragment of a Samian mortarium (Dragendorf 45) with a lion-head spout from Oxtro broch. It is now in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, but unfortunately their catalogue does not seem to have an image. There are also some objects which were probably not of Roman manufacture but were influenced by Roman design: tweezers, a sandstone lamp, and my third favourite object, a brooch in the form of an insect with outspread wings, made of tinned bronze and found at Howe broch, Stromness. This is also on display in Orkney Museum, along with several other Roman objects.

What the Iron Age inhabitants of Orkney had heard about the Romans, and what the Romans believed about them, apart from them being unfortunate barbarians who didn’t have the advantage of being civilised, we will probably never know. But I myself have had to look at history from a different perspective.

Many thanks to Orkney Museum, Kirkwall, for allowing me to use the two images from their collection

M