Roman Britain in 1914 Part 3

(_c_) punctate: LICINIANI

The stamps of the Campanian bronze-worker Cipius Polybius are well known. Upwards of forty have been found, rather curiously distributed (in the main) between Pompeii and places on or near the Rhenish and Danubian frontiers, in northern Britain, and in German and Danish lands outside the Roman Empire. The stamped 'paterae' of other Cipii and other bronze-workers have a somewhat similar distribution; it seems that the objects were made in the first century A.D., in or near Pompeii, and were chiefly exported to or beyond the borders of the Empire. Their exact use is still uncertain, I have discussed them in the _Archaeological Journal_, xlix, 1892, pp. 228-31; they have since been treated more fully by H. Willers (_Bronzeeimer von Hemmoor_, 1901, p.

213, and _Neue Untersuchungen uber die romische Bronzeindustrie_, 1907, p. 69).

I have to thank Mr. W. M. Egglestone, of Stanhope, for information and for rubbings of the stamps. The E in the first stamp seems clear on the rubbing; all other examples have here I or I. In the second stamp, the conclusion might be BIF. The _graffito_ was first read INVINDA; it is, however, certainly as given above.

(8) Found at Holt, eight miles south of Chester (see above, p. 15), in the autumn of 1914, built upside down into the outer wall of a kiln, a centurial stone of the usual size and character, 10 inches long, 7-8 inches high, with letters (3/4-1 inch tall) inside a rude label

[C]CESo NIANA

_c(enturia) C(a)esoniana_, set up by the century under Caesonius.

[Transcribers Note: The bracketed "C" above is printed reversed in the original.]

Like another centurial stone found some time ago at Holt (Eph. Epigr.

ix. 1035), this was not found _in situ_; the kiln or other structure into the wall of which it was originally inserted must have been pulled down and its stones used up again.

The centuries mentioned would of course be units from the Twentieth Legion at Chester.

(9) Found at Holt late in 1914, a fragment of tile (about 7 7 inches) with parts of two (or three) lines of writing scratched on it.

...LIVITILI..

..IT TAL..

I can offer no guess at the sense of this. The third line may be mere scratches. I am indebted to Mr. Arthur Acton for sending Nos. 8 and 9 to me for examination.

(10) Found at Lincoln in 1906, on the site of the Technical Schools extensions (outside the east wall of the lower Roman town), a fragment from the lower right-hand corner of an inscribed slab flanked with foliation, 13 inches tall, 19 inches wide, with 2-inch lettering.

G _fol_- _iat_- IND _ion_.

____ __________

No doubt one should prefix L to IND. That is, the inscription ended with some part of the Romano-British name of Lincoln, Lindum, or of its adjective Lindensis. From the findspot it seems probable that the inscription may have been sepulchral.

I am indebted to Mr. Arthur Smith, Curator of the City and County Museum at Lincoln, for a squeeze. The stone is now in the Museum.

(11) Found in London near the General Post Office in a rubbish-pit (see above, p. 23), two pieces of wood from the staves of a barrel which seems to have served as lining to a pit or well. They bear faint impressions of a metal stamp; (_a_) is repeated twice.

(_a_) [TE]CPAGA... _and_ ..CPA..?

(_b_) CS _or_ CB

The first stamp seems to include a name in the genitive, perhaps _Pacati_, but I do not know what TEC means.

[Transcribers Note: The bracketed [TE] above is a "TE" ligature.]

(12) Found in another rubbish-pit of the same site as No. 11, a plain gold ring with three sunk letters on the bezel:

QDD

Presumably the initials of an owner. The letters were at first read ODD, but the tail of the Q is discernible.

I am indebted to the Post Office authorities and to Mr. F. Lambert for a sight of Nos. 11 and 12. The objects are preserved at the General Post Office.

(13) I add here a note on a Roman milestone found in 1694 near Appleby and lately refound.

Among the papers of the antiquary Richard Gough in the Bodleian Library--more exactly, in his copy of Horsley's _Britannia_, gen. top.

128 = MS. 17653, fol. 44 _v._--is recorded the text of a milestone of the Emperor Philip and his son, 'dug out of ye military way 1694, now at Hangingshaw'. The entry is written in Gough's own hand on the last page of a list of Roman and other inscriptions once belonging to Reginald Bainbridge, who was schoolmaster in Appleby in Elizabeth's reign and died there in 1606.[8] This list had been drawn up by one Hayton, under-schoolmaster at Appleby, in 1722 and had been copied out by Gough. There is, however, nothing to show whether the milestone, found eighty-eight years after the death of Bainbridge and plainly none of his collection, was added by Hayton, or was otherwise obtained by Gough and copied by him on a casually blank page; there is nothing even to connect either the stone or Hangingshaw with Appleby.

[Footnote 8: As to Bainbridge see my paper in the _c.u.mberland and Westmorland Archaeological Transactions_, new series, vol. xi (1911), pp. 343-78.]

The notice lay neglected till Hubner undertook to edit the Roman inscriptions of Britain, which he issued in the seventh volume of the _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_ in 1873. He included the milestone as No. 1179. But, with his too frequent carelessness--a carelessness which makes the seventh volume of the _Corpus_ far less valuable than the rest of the series--he christened the stone, in defiance of dates, No. 17 in Bainbridge's collection; he also added the statement (which we shall see to be wrong) that Hangingshaw was near Old Carlisle. Fortunately, in the autumn of 1914, Mr. Percival Ross, the Yorks.h.i.+re archaeologist, sent me a photograph of an inscription which he had come upon, built into the wall of a farm called Hangingshaw, about 200 yards from the Roman road which runs along the high ground a little east of Appleby. It then became plain--despite Hubner's errors--that this stone was that recorded in Gough's papers, although his copy was in one point faulty and on the other hand some letters which were visible in 1694 have now apparently perished. A rubbing sent me by the late Rev. A. Warren of Old Appleby helped further; I now give from the three sources--Gough's copy, the photograph, and the rubbing--what I hope may be a fairly accurate text.

I premise that the letters RCO in line 2, LIPPO in 3, PHILIPPO in 8, IMO in 9, and I in 10 seem to be no longer visible but depend on Gough's copy.

IMPC[lambda]C SARIMARCO IV[L]IOPHILIPPO PIOFE[L]ICI INVICTO AVGVSTO _p_ERP ETMIVLPHILIPPO n.o.bILISSIMO CAESARI

[Transcribers Note: The bracketed "L" above are printed with the horizontal line slanted downwards.]

The chief fault in Gough's copy is the omission of line 6, _Augusto_.

This misled Hubner into treating line 7 (ERP) as a blundered reading of that necessary word. In reality, line 7 is the most interesting item in the inscription. It shows that the Emperor Philip was, here at least, styled _perpetuus Augustus_. That is an appellation to which I find no exact parallel in Philip's other inscriptions or indeed in any other imperial inscriptions till half a century after his death. It fits, however, into a definite development of the Roman imperial t.i.tles. In the earliest Empire, phrases occur, mostly on coins, such as _Aeternitas imperii_ or _Aeternitas populi romani_. Soon the notion of the stability of the Empire was transferred to its rulers. As early as Vespasian, coins bear the legend _aeternitas Augusti_, and in the first years of the second century Pliny, writing to Trajan, speaks of pet.i.tions addressed _per salutem tuam aeternitatemque_ and of 'works worthy of the emperor's eternity,' (_opera aeternitate tua digna_). Late in the second century such phrases become commoner. With Severus Alexander (A.D. 221-35) coins begin to show the legend _Perpetuitas Aug._, and before very long the indirect and abstract language changes into direct epithets which are incorporated in the emperors' t.i.tulature. The first case which I can find of this is that before us, of Philip (A.D. 244-9); a little later, Aurelian (A.D. 270-5) is styled _semper Augustus_ and, from Diocletian onwards, _aeternus_, _perpetuus_, and _semper Augustus_ belong to the customary t.i.tulature. Constantine I, for example, is called on one stone _invictus et perpetuus ... semper Augustus_, on another _perpetuus imperator, semper Augustus_. That Philip should have been the first to have applied to him, even once, the direct epithet, is probably a mere accident. One might have wished to connect it with his Secular Games, celebrated in 248. But by that time his son was no longer Caesar but full Augustus (since 246), and our stone must fall into the years 244-6.

The ideas underlying these epithets were perhaps mixed. Notions of or prayers for the long life of the Empire, the stability of the reigning house, the long reign of the current emperor, may have jostled with notions of the immortality of the emperors and their deification, and with the eastern ideas which poured into Rome as the second century ended and the third century began.[9] The hardening despotism of the imperial const.i.tution, growing more and more autocratic every decade, also helped. As the emperor became unchecked and unqualified monarch, his appellations grew more emphatic; _perpetuus Augustus, semper Augustus_ connoted that unchecked and autocratic rule.

[Footnote 9: See an excellent paper by c.u.mont, _Revue d'Histoire et de Litterature religieuses_, 1896, pp. 435-52.]

C. PUBLICATIONS RELATING TO ROMAN BRITAIN IN 1914

The following summary of the books and articles on Roman Britain which appeared in 1914 is grouped under two heads, first, those few which deal with general aspects of the subject, and secondly, the far larger number which concern special sites or areas. In this second cla.s.s, those which belong to England are placed under their counties in alphabetical order, while those which belong to Wales and Scotland are grouped under these two headings. I have in general admitted only matter which was published in 1914, or which bears that date.

1. GENERAL