religiously significant. They were intended to suggest ideas of the
conquest of evil powers and of renewal. Dr. Haverfield was, I think,
mistaken in the passage quoted above in speaking of the giant as a
barbarian; he was rather a power of darkness, and this is brought out by
a piece of British evidence. Figures of four such creatures, each
terminating in two serpents, fill the corners of a mosaic floor found at
Horkstow; they support a large circle divided into two rings and a
centre; in the outer ring are Nereids and swimming creatures, in the
inner one little genii with baskets of flowers, etc. The rings are
divided into four parts by radial bands, and the general suggestion must
be of the seasons and the cosmic order. The snake-legged creatures in
the corners are the _Aloadæ_, the giants who attempted to scale Olympus
by putting Pelion on Ossa. They are here in their proper places in the
chaos outside the circle of the ordered world, “the wheel of nature.”
This pavement helps to explain the general idea which led to the
erection of Jove and Giant pillars, and shows that these ideas were
current in Britain. The column is the world-axis set round by planets
and seasons; above, the power of light and order hurls back the giant of
gloom and strife (see Daremberg and Saglio, _Aloadæ_). In the foreign
examples of the sculptured groups which rested on the capitals of the
columns Jove sometimes had a wheel as his weapon, and wheels have been
found carved in Roman altars in Britain. “The sides of two large altars
to Jupiter at Walton House bear the thunderbolt for Jupiter and a wheel,
which possibly equates the Jupiter of these altars with the Gaulish
‘wheel-god’” (Ward). An altar at Housesteads invokes the sun-god. The
Jove and Giant pillars are evidence of a time when the old mythological
names had been refitted to express ideas of good and evil, cosmic
forces, and supposed planetary influences. The mosaic floors, as we
shall see, provide further evidence of what was “higher thought” in
third-century Roman Britain.
[Illustration:
FIG. 60.
]
_Mausolea._—When the bastion of the City Wall in Camomile Street was
destroyed, many sculptured stones from small but very richly decorated
edifices were found. Price recognised that some of them must have
belonged to an important sepulchral monument comparable with the Igel
monument near Trèves. I saw, in 1912, some stones at Trèves which had a
scale pattern cut on a roof-like slope, and soon after my return I
noticed a stone of the same sort in the Guildhall Museum. Without having
Price’s words in my mind I came to the conclusion that in the cemeteries
of Londinium there must have been mausoleum-like monuments of the kind
which the Museum at Trèves had shown me were common in the neighbourhood
of that city. Several of these mausolea are now illustrated in
Espèrandieu’s great work on the Roman sculptures of Gaul. In 1913 I
offered a tentative restoration of a London monument of this type in the
_Architectural Review_.
[Illustration:
FIG. 61.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 62.
]
In Fig. 60 I have roughly sketched two stones at the Guildhall which
evidently came from a mausoleum of the Trèves type, also a course from a
fluted angle pilaster, showing part of an inscription. Compare No. 5153
in Espèrandieu’s work, where we find a similar scale pattern, angle
pilasters bonded in courses with masonry, and the lettering of an
inscription coming close up to the pilaster. Another stone at the
Guildhall has a capital of a small angle pilaster on a similar course.
This capital has heads set amongst the leaves almost exactly like the
capitals of the Igel mausoleum at Trèves (see Fig. 61). Another stone at
the Guildhall is part of a frieze in two bands, the upper one of
festoons and the lower one of trees, and dogs coursing hares (Fig. 62).
Similar hunting subjects are found on foreign monuments; the festoons
and the scale of the work are also appropriate for a structure of the
mausoleum kind, and these five stones may very well have belonged to the
same monument (Fig. 63). On another stone at the Guildhall is part of an
inscription in widely-spaced lines containing the letters ... R LXX,
doubtless part of ANNOR LXX, which actually occurs on the tall headstone
in the British Museum. At least two mausolea are probably represented by
the stones at the Guildhall. Like the Igel monument, they were probably
the tombs of rich merchants. There must have been a large number of
tombs of this type in Britain. Bruce and Roach Smith illustrated and
described foundations of three tombs by the Roman road near High
Rochester, one circular and two square; the first was possibly big
enough to have been a tomb-house. At Bath, some years ago, I noticed a
stone which could only have been part of a square monument (Fig. 64).
This had the tops of the niches cut like shells.
[Illustration:
FIG. 63.
]
Another stone at the Guildhall, found like the others in the Camomile
Street bastion, has a short length of a decorated angle column recessed
as a “nook-shaft” and about a foot in diameter (Fig. 65). This, I think,
must have formed part of a similar monument. (This stone is not, I
think, given by Price, but it appears in an illustration in _J.B.A.A._)
The mausolea of Londinium must have been very similar to the monuments
at Trèves, and it may not be doubted that they would have been coloured
as some of those were coloured. (I have a note that sculpture, as well
as the decorative carving, was coloured.) The braided work of Early
Saxon monuments would have been “picked out” in colour in a similar way,
and I believe that fragments which have been found prove this.
[Illustration:
FIG. 64.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 65.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 66.
]
ALTAR-TOMBS
Another type of tomb, of which many examples exist in the Museum at
Trèves, is an altar-like structure having a square body surmounted by a
slab ending in two big bolster-like rolls covered with scale or leaf
ornament (see Espèrandieu). Tombs of this type have been found in
Pompeii. We have in the British Museum parts of a very fine monument of
this class. One of two stones is a great roll, and another has an
inscription in handsome letters. These were found together in the
foundations of one of the bastions of the City Wall at Tower Hill, as
described in _The Builder_, September 4, 1852. In the illustration which
was reproduced before (Fig. 33), a pile of other stones is shown, one of
which, a moulding with a return, may have been the base of the same
monument. The inscribed stone in the British Museum shows that the body
of the monument was made up of four stones arranged as in the plan (Fig.
66), and cramped together; the size of this part was probably 7 by 5
Roman feet. It was not a sarcophagus, as the form seems to suggest, but
a chest in which an urn containing ashes was placed. The examples at
Trèves show that it was lifted on a high base. The covering part of our
monument was made up of three stones of which one of the two end-pieces
is in the Museum. The two end-pieces had large volute-like rolls similar
to those on altars—for example, the little altar of Diana at Goldsmiths’
Hall. On these altars the central part usually rises again between the
rolls into a gable-like shape, and that this type was followed in our
tomb is shown by several examples at Trèves, as well as by the existing
end stone which was evidently one of three; the little relief decoration
on the remaining edge is suitable to have followed from relief carving
in the central stone (Figs. 66 and 67). This tomb was a work of high
quality, but it is badly shown; the two stones could be set up together
so as to show the size and importance of the monument. If this were done
and the Haydon Square and Clapton sarcophagi were shown with it, we
should obtain a better understanding of the monuments of Londinium.
[Illustration:
FIG. 67.
]
Other memorials had sculptured figures. The hexagonal base of one of
these found at Ludgate in 1806 (see before p. 71), and now at the
Guildhall, bears an inscription in memory of Claudia Martina, aged
nineteen years. A much-injured female head found with it is accepted as
having belonged to the same monument, and a dowel hole on the pedestal
confirms the idea that it supported a figure which was probably a
portrait statue. It may be observed that the capping of the pedestal is
cut with rolls in the tradition of the altar-tombs. The good form of the
letters, and the formula beginning D.M. and ending H.S.E., date this
monument about A.D. 100. I give in Fig. 68 a sketch from a careful
etching published by Thos. Fisher in 1807. The ornamentation of the
altar-like top can hardly be made out now, and even the inscription
cannot be read in the imperfect light of the Guildhall Museum. A careful
copy based on a rubbing should be put on record, for the surfaces of
such stones are all the time falling away in dust.
[Illustration:
FIG. 68.
]
Several large half-round coping stones have from time to time been found
in the bastions of the City Wall; they cannot have been taken from the
wall itself, and so probably formed parts of monuments. Espèrandieu
shows such a coping to a dwarf wall surrounding a statue, and in the
little sketch (Fig. 69) I suggest such an arrangement. Many half-round
copings from monuments have been found at Chester.
Several small inscribed memorial tablets suggest that there were some
buildings of the “Columbarium” type where the ashes of the dead might be
placed. When after about A.D. 250 burial in coffins superseded the older
way of burial, individual or family tomb-houses were erected to contain
the sarcophagi, and several such would doubtless have been found outside
the walls of Londinium. Tomb-houses were not uncommon in Britain; they
were usually square or circular (T. Ward, _Roman Era_, p. 139). At
Holmwood Hill, Kent, a circular buttressed building 30 ft. in diameter
(_Archæol._ xxi., p. 336) seems to have been such a tomb-house. Of the
stone sarcophagus from Haydon Square it has been observed that “as the
back is quite plain it evidently stood against a wall, perhaps the back
of a small tomb-house” (J. Ward). Even the back slope of the cover was
left plain; and the back of the Clapton sarcophagus is also plain.
[Illustration:
FIG. 69.
]
TOMB-HOUSES
Some of the sculptured fragments found in the Camomile Street bastion,
while doubtless parts of sepulchral monuments, as Price thought, are of
too large a scale to have belonged to mausolea of the Igel type. Two of
the stones evidently came from angle pilasters of considerable scale. As
Price said: “The size and weight of the stones indicate that the edifice
was of proportions to bear comparison with the sepulchres in the
vicinity of Rome: such monuments were placed near the city gates.” One
of the fragments just mentioned has a nude boy or Cupid carved against a
background of foliage on one face, while the return of the same stone
contains similar ornament without the boy. Probably on the front face
there were several little figures one over the other. This treatment for
a pilaster is found on the monuments of Trèves. The boy on the stone at
the Guildhall carries an object which Price thought might be a trident,
but it is rather a torch; amorini and torches had a sepulchral
significance. These big stones must have formed part of the angle
pilasters of a large square tomb-house. They are more than 1¾ ft. wide,
and one is over 3 ft. high, and contains two units of the fine carved
pattern of very similar character to the carving on the Haydon Square
sarcophagus. I should doubt if it is much earlier, say, _c._ A.D. 300
(Fig. 70). The pattern is evidently a simplification of the scheme shown
in Fig. 61 from a tomb sculpture at Trèves, illustrated by Espèrandieu.
[Illustration:
FIG. 70.
]
At the Guildhall is a niche-head cut out of one stone into an arch form
(Fig. 71). It came from the Camomile Street bastion and very possibly
formed part of a monument—perhaps a built-up niche surrounded a larger
scale figure than the usual reliefs of the steles. Price associated this
niche-head with the stele now at the Guildhall, but that was rather all
in one stone (see my restoration in _Arch. Rev._, 1913). A man’s head of
larger size than that of the stele and separate from any background was
found at the same time as the niche fragments, and the figure to which
it belonged may have stood in the niche. Possibly, however, the stone
formed the head of a small doorway. Another monument at the Guildhall is
a crude and late sculpture of a lion seizing some other animal. Many
similar groups have been found in Britain and abroad. It would have had
some symbolical significance. “Mythological” figures, such as Hercules
and Atys, seem also to have been used for tombs.
[Illustration:
FIG. 71.
]
This examination of the few broken remnants of monuments that have been
accidentally preserved, which obviously represent but a small percentage
of those once existing in the cemeteries of Londinium, brings out a new
criterion for an estimate of the dignity and opulence of the Roman city.
To this evidence we may add the extent of the walls and the importance
of the port, and the fact that the city was the key of the road system
of the country. It was probably a seat of the Governor; in the
Constantinian age it became a bishopric and a mint town. Then we have
the quantity and costly nature of the imports which are known to us from
objects in our museums—an immense quantity of Samian pottery, decorated
glassware, silver, fine bronzes, etc. We also see how closely the
monuments of London resembled those of Trèves, the later capital of
Western Europe. Altogether I get the impression that Londinium must have
been one of the most important commercial cities in the West. In the
rote education of our schools, the great facts of our history are too
much buried under an avalanche of minor details, and mere dates and
names. If we can get a story written about Roman London, one scene must
be set among the Tombs.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
+CHAPTER VI+
SCULPTURE
“Fantastic and even grotesque, it possesses a wholly unclassical
fierceness and vigour, and not a few observers have remarked that it
recalls not the Roman world, but the Middle Ages.”
—HAVERFIELD on the Corbridge lion.
IMPERIAL STATUES
[Illustration:
FIG. 72.
]
A FEW broken fragments only remain to us, but they are sufficient to
suggest to our imaginations the sculptures of Londinium. The finest work
of sculpture found in London is the magnificent head from a bronze
statue of the Emperor Hadrian, which was taken from the river near
London Bridge in 1834. The head, with the neck, is 16½ in. high. It is
really a masterly work of art, of Hellenistic character, and may, I
think, be Alexandrian. The treatment of the head and beard is
surprisingly like that of the marble Hadrian from Cyrene in the British
Museum. Here we have the close-clipped beard and moustache; also the
double row of curly locks of hair over the forehead from ear to ear, and
the hair close cut behind, an arrangement suitable for the support of a
wreath. The beard is again similar on a bronze head of a man found at
Cyrene, in the British Museum. The projecting ears of the head of
Hadrian are like the ears of the bronze head of Augustus in the British
Museum, found in Egypt. That the bronze head of Hadrian represents a
statue and an erect figure is shown by the facts that one shoulder is
higher than the other and the axis of the head and neck is bent. The
figure must, I think, have had the left arm uplifted. The statue must
have been a splendid object in some public place—possibly the square of
the Forum, or on the bridge. In a cast, when seen close by, it looks
lumpy and even dull, but the original bronze as set up in the Museum is
not only powerful but vivid; notice the sharp eyebrows, the way the nose
is set into the brow, the line on the forehead, and the strong
expressive mouth (Fig. 72, from Roach Smith). There is also in the
British Museum a bronze hand, found in Thames Street, which seems
similar to the head in scale and excellence of workmanship; moreover,
faults in the casting have been repaired in a similar way on the neck
and the wrist. Roach Smith seems to have thought that the head and the
hand did not belong to the same statue. Speaking of the head he said:
“It belonged to a colossal statue, two of which we may probably reckon
among the public embellishments of London, for excavations in Thames
Street, near the Tower, brought to light a colossal bronze hand 13 in.
in length, which has been broken from a statue of about the same
magnitude, and, apparently, judging from the attitude, from a statue of
Hadrian also. The posture is similar to that of the marble statue in the
British Museum.” Dr. Haverfield says of the head: “It appears to have
belonged to a colossal statue of the emperor; the forehead is too short;
the ears set out too obliquely; and the back of the head projects too
strongly; the beard, too, is more closely cut than Hadrian usually wore
it.” In another place he speaks of it as “a life-size head of the
emperor Hadrian; whether it belonged to a colossal statue of the emperor
I do not know, nor does it much matter”(!). In one aspect, Dr.
Haverfield was a champion of things Roman in Britain; in another, he, as
will be seen in regard to the mosaics, generally spoke slightingly of
their quality.
I may now sum up my conclusions. The head belonged to a standing statue.
The hand, found separately, may have belonged to the same statue; it
probably drooped and held a roll. The head has the characteristics of
Hellenistic art. The expression is alert and eagle-like; the
close-cropped beard already appears on the head of Mausolus in the
British Museum, and seems to have been maintained as an Alexandrian
tradition. The statue was doubtless imported and may well have been
brought from Alexandria, a chief centre of bronze casting. Notice that
repairs are executed in an exactly similar way on the head of
“Aphrodite,” brought from Armenia and probably an Alexandrian work, _c._
200 B.C. A little silver image of Harpocrates, also found in the Thames,
is, I think, certainly an Alexandrian work. The bronze statue would have
been set up as a memorial of the Emperor’s visit to Britain in 121. A
“big brass” was struck in honour of the same event, inscribed _Adventus
Augusti Britanniæ_, and the profile portrait on the coin is very like
our head. It has the clipped beard and bears a laurel wreath. Hadrian
was the first of the emperors to wear a beard, and we may take our
bronze as evidence that he began with the clipped fashion. Not much
attention has been given to this head as an early portrait of the
emperor, but it is important from that point of view. Compare it with a
small bronze bust of a later time found at Winchester and also in the
British Museum.
Other remnants of large bronze statues have been found in London. Two
fragments at the Guildhall are thus described: “(19) Arm of a bronze
statue broken off below the elbow, 19 in. long; (21) Left hand of a
statue, bronze, of heroic size, with traces of gilding, 9½ in. long.
Found in a well to the east of Seething Lane.” From a notice in _The
Builder_ (May 3, 1884), it appears that the latter was found with coins
of Nero and Vespasian during the construction of the Metropolitan
Railway. An article in the _Journal of the Archæological Association_
(vol. xxiv.) discusses other fragments of bronze statues. There must be
evidence for the existence of four or five large bronze statues in
Londinium. A bronze leg of a horse at the Society of Antiquaries, found
in Lincoln, shows that equestrian figures—probably of emperors—were also
known in Britain (cf. the Marcus Aurelius in Rome).
_Other Portraits._—In the Guildhall is a tomb with a relief of a
soldier, larger and in higher relief than usual, which was found in the
Camomile Street bastion, and probably occupied a place in the cemetery
by Bishopsgate. This figure of a _signifer_ is a little battered, and
this accentuates a certain grimness of expression, but it is really a
masterly work of unflattered portraiture. There cannot be many existing
presentments of a Roman man more real; this has the face of a
functionary, and the details of the costume are made out with careful
accuracy. The mantle, or cape, partly stitched together in front, was
like a chasuble. It was the _pænula_ on which there is an excursus at
the end of Becker’s _Gallus_. The sword had one of the ivory or bone
hilts of which there is an example in the British Museum—every detail
was evidently carefully studied from fact. Soldiers on the Trajan Column
bear similar swords. It is probably an early second-century work. (The
Colchester centurion (_c._ 100) has a similar sword-hilt.[1]) When we
learn to value and make due use of our antiquities a copy of this relief
should be set up to stand for the fact of Roman rule in Londinium. I
gave a restoration of the whole slab in the _Architectural Review_,
1913; it has been wrongly restored in Price’s volume on the Camomile
Street bastion.
Footnote 1:
Cf. Daremberg and Saglio, _Gladius_.
The relief of the Colchester centurion, Favonius Facilis, is really a
fine work, one of the most perfect representations of a centurion which
exist (cf. Daremberg and Saglio). The niche in which the figure stood
had a shell represented on its rounded top; only the hinge-end of the
bivalve appears at the apex, and the rest may have been indicated by
painting.
[Illustration:
FIG. 73.
]
At Oxford there is a soldier’s memorial stone with a sculptured relief
of a similar kind to the centurion of Colchester and the _signifer_ just
described. It was found at Ludgate Hill when Wren rebuilt St. Martin’s
Church (Fig. 73). According to _V.C.H._ the soldier carries a dagger in
his right hand. This object is so long that Pennant called it “a sword
of vast length like the claymore.” In fact, it is a rod held exactly as
the Colchester centurion holds his stick, and I suppose it was a rod of
office of some kind. The scroll the man carries in his left hand also
suggests that he was more than a “private”; so also does the monument
itself, which must have been costly. Roach Smith properly speaks of
“stick and roll.” There is a good drawing of this monument in the Archer
collection at the British Museum. I give here a sketch made from the
original at Oxford. The figure is injured, but it was skilfully cut and
gracefully posed. I should date it in the first half of the second
century. At the Guildhall is a head larger than life-size found in the
Camomile Street bastion, which, although battered, shows character (Fig.
74). The discovery of a marble bust of a girl, near Walbrook, was
recorded in _The Builder_ of March 12, 1887.
[Illustration:
FIG. 74.
]
_Roman Gods and Impersonations._—It is hardly brought out in the history
books that the inhabitants of Britain possessed a great classical
inheritance. I would say possess, but we do not seem to have determined
whether we are British or only English. For a thousand years before the
Teutonic invasions of the fifth century A.D. Britain had been in touch
with Greek and Roman cultures, and for centuries before that again some
overflow from Mediterranean lands had reached this island, and the Celts
themselves were a great European race. During five centuries from 100
B.C. to A.D. 400 Britain became fully Romanised. After that time it was
probably only some small balance of forces which gave us a Teutonic
language, while France under somewhat similar circumstances retained a
Latin tongue. Greek gods and, doubtless, Greek stories were known here
long before the Roman occupation, as the British coins (the most
beautiful money ever coined in these islands) show. Already when Ptolemy
wrote his geography, Hartland Point, in Devonshire, was the promontory
of Herakles, and this is evidence which, together with figures of
Hercules on the British coins, strongly suggests that some Hercules
story became localised in Britain. Possibly, as the seas beyond the
Gibraltar Straits became better known, the “Pillars of Hercules” were
shifted to the headland facing the Atlantic. Hercules rescuing Hesione
appears as a subject on Castor pottery. “This, and the corresponding
scene of Perseus and Andromeda, were popular in Britain and Gaul,” says
Dr. Haverfield, and adds: “Whether the scenes conveyed any symbolic
meaning in these lands I should greatly doubt.” I incline the other way.
It is to be remarked that several altars dedicated to Hercules have been
found in Britain: one at Corbridge is inscribed in Greek to the Syrian
Hercules—that is, the same who had the famous temple at Gades.