Following our opening lecture on Roman technology By Prof Julian Vincent, and another very well attended event within the Bath Literary Festival, we were honoured by the visit of Professor Ian Haynes, Head of Archaeology at Newcastle University, who addressed another large and lively audience on Britain's First Information Revolution. 

Although there was minor use of writing in pre-Roman Britain, principally on coins, the arrival with the Romans of written records brought about a whole new way of life; interesting to the individual, collectively revolutionary. It happens that a hoard of oily wooden writing tablets, so far some 1600, found at Vindolanda, by Hadrian's Wall in Cumbria, has hugely increased our understanding of Roman customs. Messages gleaned from the vestigial scratches on these tablets, dispossessed for millennia of their wax coatings, have proved to be as rich in revelation as they have Herculean in decipherment. 

Having little grammar and no punctuation, their decription calls for painstaking skill, such as evidenced in the masterly scholarship of Dr Roger Tomlin and his team, who thrill yet groan as each new hoard comes to light.  Most of these wax-engraved writings (handwriting was known as 'chicken-scratches' to the Romans) were exchanged within the military community and command structure, such as our first slide (see photo), a letter from one Octavius to his 'brother' (or colleague) Candidus, which at some length discusses arrangements for collection and delivery of various commodities, promises received and made in their regard, and cash-flow embarrassments threatening to accrue.  

The style was agreeably discursive yet suffused with ill-concealed impatience.  Writing favoured the development of a road structure not dissimilar from today's overall network, serving a mail service which placed Rome within two weeks' communication of its furthest boundaries, yet from what we read, deliveries were already a problem.

Safety of record
Whereas orality favours fluency and updating, and makes of memory the vital container, the change to the written word, for all the opportunities for partiality, editing and alteration, can bind and fix, providing a safety of record previously unavailable.  The road network is estimated to have taken 3,540,000 man-days to construct, itself a mark of power unknown before the Romans, to have called for many bridges which often became the locus for cult offering, and to have provided the need for milestones, opportunities also for written record. 

Empire-wide, some 8000 milestones were erected, half written in Greek, the established custom in the Eastern Empire, and the western half in Latin, where writing was widely unknown.  These vital aids to travel indicated distance, but served also as markers, less of the Emperor’s munificence than of the local governor’s boastful loyalty to him.  Along these roads at suitable intervals were built ‘Mansiones’, predecessors to the coaching inn, where official travelers could find rest and fresh horses and which gradually became administrative centres for payment of taxes etc. 

Writing bound the military community, and at the end of a soldier’s career, served the important need to record the acquisition, by him and his family, of Roman citizenship.  Writing also served on tombstones; of 450 found in Britain, 200 refer to soldiers and 150 to members of their families. 

Writing too can be erased; when an Emperor dies or is killed, his memory can thus be erased, and such erasures, such as the damnatio memoriae visited upon the Emperor Geta by his surviving murderous brother Caracalla after Geta’s assassination in AD 211, can if detected tell tales of their own.  In Geta’s case, confirmation of such an erasure was found in one of the Oxyrhynchus papyri in Egypt, evidence also of the of the travel of news at that time.

In Bath a particular use of writing was the ‘curse’.  These were imprecations to the gods to punish evildoers.  In Bath they were all addressed to Sulis Minerva, and concerned a great variety of grievances, from the theft of a metal pot, a plough, a woman – one even asked Neptune to find his lost trousers and said he could keep them if he did.  The Bath curses, of which Dr Roger Tomlin has also undertaken an impressive translation, may be seen as an early form of communication to the gods, and contain much that is mysterious, seemingly magical.  They were written on small metal sheets, generally lead (there were lead mines in the Mendip hills, MS), and sometimes with letters or words reversed, or even whole passages written ‘backwards’, like mirror writing.  None of the ‘curses’ found in Bath used tri-partite Roman names, all seemed to be written by different hands, and many appeared to be encrypted with magic intent.

Correspondence more generally was for the dissemination of information, mostly downwards, though sometimes upwards, and was entrusted to messengers who formed part of the cursus publicus mail service.  (Costs were met by the sender, who might opt for a single messenger traveling the whole distance, which was slower and more costly but offered the perceived advantage of greater reliability, also allowing the receiver the opportunity of first-hand complementary information, or a faster dispatch relay alternative.  MS)  Another innovative use of writing was to record legal matters, both Roman and British.   

During numerous questions, Professor Haynes described at some length the manner in which British colonisation proceeded. The Romans were quite astute and their road surveyors became sophisticated in developing contacts with different tribes, also quite sophisticated, as the road network developed.  They even recorded evocations to others’ deities, as may be seen in a relief carving in Bath of Mercury and his consort Rosmerta, the Celtic goddess of fertility and abundance.

Martin Sturge