Horrible Histories: Retracting Romans
Part Two:
A new interpretation of “Hadrian’s Wall”
by
Damien F. Mackey
“Without Clayton’s work, Hadrian’s Wall today would look more like Offa’s
Dyke”.
Mary Beard
Introduction
Neither the Roman Republicans nor some of the early Roman Emperors have
fared very well in this present series, and in my multi-part:
Famous Roman Republicans beginning to loom as spectral.
Part One: Still a Republic at time of Herod 'the Great'
culminating in:
in which collection of articles famous Roman Republicans, and at least
the emperor Hadrian, are shown to have their origins and proper identities in
Hellenistic rulers.
Hadrian himself has been merged with the Seleucid king, Antiochus IV
‘Epiphanes’, and with Herod ‘the Great’. Archaeologists, as we have found, have
the greatest difficulty in distinguishing the building works of Herod from
those of Hadrian.
Now, in the following intriguing article, Mary Beard has something reached
some unexpected conclusions about the famous, so-called: Hadrian’s Wall:
Was
Hadrian’s Wall built in the nineteenth century?
I am at a conference this weekend. It’s called From Plunder to Preservation and it’s organised by our Victorian Studies Group. In fact right now I should be at the conference dinner, but I begged off. It was bound, I thought, to be a Bacchanalian affair — and, as I am not drinking, I feared that I would either get irritated at everyone else’s jollity or else too tempted to have a glass myself. So I came home to write a review, which I’ve half finished now.
The
idea of the conference is to explore the relationship between heritage and
empire. There hasn’t been a duff paper so far and there are too many highlights
to go through them all. I particularly enjoyed Maya
Jasanoff, who raised the issue of how far (or not) we ought to see
the human plunder of empire, in the form of slaves, as analogous to the plunder
in the form of art works. (In the course of this she talked interestingly about
slave trade tourism in Ghana, and the different treatment of the monuments of
the slave trade between Ghana and Sierra Leone).
On
the classical/Greek side, the husband talked about the Anglican cathedral in Khartoum, designed by Robert Weir Schultz, an Arts and Crafts architect who
had started his career drawing and recording Byzantine monuments in Greece (the
Khartoum church is based on the church of St Demetrius in Thessaloniki). This
paper fitted extraordinarily well with Simon Goldhill‘s on the work of another Arts
and Crafts-man, C. R. Ashbee in Jerusalem. Meanwhile Ed Richardson
had spoken of the classical presentation of the Crimean War (with warships
called things like "Agamemnon").
I
looked instead at Roman Britain. The aim of my talk was to knock a nail into
the coffin of the fashionable view that Roman British archaeology in the
nineteenth century was a handmaiden of empire, that it was practised by
classically trained public schoolboys, imbued with the spirit of empire.
Archaeology was, in other words, imperialism pursued by other means. For
Hadrian’s Wall, read the North West frontier and vice versa.
My
line is that this is a politically correct, but unthinking, approach to the
study of Roman Britain in the nineteenth century. In short, it’s wrong.
What
exactly is the matter with it?
In part,
the supposed imperialist character of Romano-British archaeology is based on selective
quotation. Of course, you can find a whole range of examples where
nineteenth-century archaeologists use comparisons with the British empire, and
laid end-to-end these look pretty impressive. But if you read the original
material itself, there’s really not that much of it and it’s not the driving
force behind the archaeological interpretation. If anything, they are much more
aggressively interested in the role of Christianity in the province.
More
important though is the role of classical texts. There’s a common view that
these classically trained archaeologists had somehow inherited an imperialist
view of their subject from the classical texts they had read. That would, of
course, be possible if those texts really were straightforwardly imperialist in
outlook. But in fact Roman writers expressed deep ambivalence about the effects
of the empire, and correlated Roman moral decline with the expansion of its
imperial territory. More to the point, Tacitus’
Agricola — the key literary text for
understanding Roman Britain — is also the text in which that ambivalence is
expressed most clearly (this is the "make a desert and call it peace"
text). Anyone brought up on the Agricola
would be encouraged to take a wry, not an enthusiastic, position on imperialist
endeavours.
Another
factor is the striking mismatch territorially between the British and Roman
empire. Until the final dismemberment of the Ottoman empire, there was hardly
any overlap between the two (Cyprus, Malta, Gibraltar). This meant that British
archaeology was quite unlike its French equivalent, in the French colonies of
North Africa — where Roman archaeology really did go hand in hand with imperial
expansion. There was no such thing in the nineteenth century as Roman
archaeology in the British empire.
Except,
of course, in Britain itself. Indeed the paradox at the heart of Roman Britain
for its nineteenth-century practitioners was just that: the province which had
been the most distant in the ancient empire, was the metropolis of the modern.
Was Britain centre or periphery?
In
the course of this I looked at Hadrian’s Wall and its Victorian history. Two
men were clearly crucial in its rediscovery (patriotic northerners, and hardly
part of the British imperial project). First there was John
Collingwood Bruce, who conducted ‘pilgrimages’ to the Wall and wrote
the standard guide books. Second was John
Clayton, who preserved miles of the central section of the Wall from
‘native" depredation (in fact he bought up a lot of it to keep it safe).
The
more I read, though, the more I came to realise that Clayton’s interventions
were considerably more significant than simply preservation. Over miles and
miles, Clayton had his labourers rebuild the Wall and in the process he created
for us those all the most impressive sections that tourists now love — several
courses of dry stone masonry, topped with turf, scaling windy ridges. Without
Clayton’s work, Hadrian’s Wall today would look more like Offa’s Dyke.
Another
‘ancient’ monument built by the Victorians then. There’s hardly any that
weren’t, it sometimes seems. ….
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