EPILOGUE Closing the Curtain Reflecting on things past
The Star Wars films frequently make reference to the ‘Outer Rim’ of the Galaxy, where planets and their inhabitants are at their most bizarre. Edges and fringes are where strange things happen; hovering on the periphery, they are unstable and unpredictable – containing elements of both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, the known and the enigmatic.
They are, therefore, potentially threatening to the ordered core or centre. To the Romans, Britannia represented the outer rim of the civilized world and, at least until the Claudian invasion, it was regarded by many as even beyond that edge. It was a place of myth and legend, and for some Greeks and Romans, the very humanitas of its occupants was open to question.1John Wyndham’s chilling 1950s sci-fi novel The Chrysalids is set in the frighteningly unstable world of post-apocalyptic Labrador, some kind of global catastrophe having rendered most of Earth uninhabitable. The surviving Labrador communities are beset with gestational mutations, giving rise to defects in human babies and animals and causing the growth of mutant crops. ‘Breeding true’ has become an obsession with ‘norms’. Any creature not conforming to the prescribed model of perfection must be cast out into the ‘Fringes’ (the twilight zone between normal communities and the badlands) or destroyed.2 To the Romans, at any rate before Caesar’s two expeditions, the island of Britannia was, like Wyndham’s Fringes, ‘off the map’, beyond Ocean, the great river believed by the Romans to border the world, where the quirky and the wild were the norm.3
The geographical ‘edginess’ that caused Britannia to be regarded with such fascination, and not a little fear, by the Mediterranean world allowed the island to maintain a unique measure of distinctiveness and psychological independence even after its absorption into the Roman Empire.
It should not be forgotten that parts of the island – much of Wales and Scotland – were never fully annexed to Rome and remained outside the province. In the early 2nd century AD, Hadrian built a wall across northern Britain that effectively set a physical and symbolic boundary between the Empire and what lay beyond, even though the Wall itself attracted so much romanitas because of its massive Roman army presence. Thus the Roman province of Britannia butted up against the lands of ungovernable inhabitants beyond the frontier who, nonetheless, shared its island space.Religion and beliefs (or their absence) provide insight into the character and conventions of a people. It has been said of the modern Western world that those without faith and belief in a higher being are more likely to fill the resultant void with secular values and allegiances, whether those consist of wealth, power, sport, celebrity or whatever else is in vogue in the world of social media. To G.K. Chesterton is attributed the comment ‘a man who won’t believe in God will believe in anything’.4 The imperial Romans had a huge range of deities, one for each event and every activity, as well as the high gods of the State pantheon. Yet their relationship with the spirit world included a vein of superstition and magic. Following the correct rituals was necessary in order to the keep the gods on side. Contracts were forged between people and deities, who were perceived as receptive to a kind of religious bribery, wherein the promise of a thank-offering was deemed the most likely way to achieve happy outcome to prayers.
Worship of the Roman gods was bolstered by a vivid mythology that personalized the divine world, making it seem familiarly human. The ‘Cloud of Unknowing’5 with which Christians have wrestled since the time of Christ seems not to have troubled the average Roman, although philosophers like Seneca, Lucretius and Cicero struggled with the nature of the gods and the universe. However, none of this serves to deny the religiousness of the Roman world.
While one might point to the apparent cynicism that characterized the ‘contractual’ relationship between people living in the Roman Empire and their gods, there is no doubt about the devoutness of many. It is necessary only to read some of the touching memorials written on tombstones by the bereaved to realize that many Roman citizens had a deep sense of spirituality.The focus of Sacred Britannia is the manner in which the juxtaposition of two cultures, each very different from the other in terms of political and social development, played out in the arena of religion and ritual. The religious profiles of Roman provinces varied not only in terms of their Roman elements but also in their particular pre-Roman identities. Archaeological evidence demonstrates the presence of a rich spiritual tapestry in the fabric of Britannia, whose woven complexities expressed a uniqueness derived from three factors: the province’s physical position on the western periphery of the Empire; its Iron Age heritage; and the hybrid nature of Romano-British traditions. The continuing Roman military presence in frontier Britain acted as a magnet for the veneration of foreign deities, imported by the army. And it is perhaps because of Britannia’s relative isolation that early Christianity thrived here; even as early as Constantine’s reign, a Christian ecclesia (church) was able to establish itself and furnish its sacred building with the magnificent silver church plate found at Water Newton. And we should not forget the textual evidence for the presence of three British bishops at an international Christian council in AD 314.
Despite the heavy hand of romanitas, the retention of British identity throughout the four hundred years of Roman rule is striking. Perhaps some (or all) of the British elements that contributed so much to the vibrancy of religion were newly begotten during – and indeed triggered by – the Roman occupation. What matters is that Roman Britons never lost their sense of local identity.
The presence of so many British god-names in the epigraphic record and the persistent ‘surrealism’ employed by artists to create sacred images – the exaggerated heads, the triplism and the horns, for instance – suggest an intentionality of Britishness that marched alongside acceptance of the Roman ways of expressing belief. Notwithstanding the new technologies of worship introduced as part of the Roman material package, indeed perhaps because of them, British religion flourished in this most remote of the Roman provinces. I am reminded of Lewis Hyde’s ‘trickster’,6 a character in many cultures and mythologies, whose job is to cross boundaries and push edges in order to disrupt the comfort of ‘norm’. Perhaps edgy Britannia served as the ‘trickster’ to mainstream Roman religion, and maybe the experimentation with nature in which some Romano-British sculptors were engaged was an expression of such boundary-crossing.The archaeological record provides striking testament to the percolation of religious beliefs and ritual through all echelons of Romano-British society, from the highest-ranking army officers to subsistence farmers and even to slaves. The relationships between people and their gods took many forms: from the most Roman, the Imperial Cult, to quasi-magical practices that embodied the grey area between religion and superstition, like ritual curses and the symbolic beheading of corpses. Despite their demotion from sacral authority after its absorption into the Empire, it is highly likely that the Druids continued to orchestrate Roman Britannia’s religious vigour and spiritual independence. Ancient Britannia was indeed a most sacred isle, as culturally diverse then as it is today but, arguably, with a stronger spiritual pulse in its Romano-British past.