Ruth Downie
Showing posts with label Ruth Downie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ruth Downie. Show all posts

I want to speak to your manager!

by Ruth Downie

If you’ve ever been left on the phone listening to tinny music and assurances that “Your call is very important to us,” then spare a thought for the outraged trader whose draft letter of complaint turned up near Hadrian’s Wall a few years ago.


Parts of the letter are missing but there’s enough to piece together most of the story. The man seems to have got into a fracas with some soldiers who threatened to tip his goods down the drain, and subsequently beat him with sticks. When he objected, they beat him again.

Then, to make matters worse, nobody wanted to listen to his complaint.

He tried the men’s Commanding Officer, but the great man was off sick.

He tried the Commanding Officer’s assistant but got nowhere.

He tried various other centurions, but none of them wanted to know - and finally he’d had enough.

We don’t know exactly which “Your majesty” the letter was intended for, but Hadrian was touring Britain at about the time it was written and, since in theory any citizen could appeal to the Emperor, it’s possible that the victim decided to go right to the top.

As he explained, he was not only an innocent man with a good reputation, but a man from overseas. And now he’d been beaten until he bled, as if he were some sort of criminal!

It’s hardly surprising that he claimed to be innocent and honest, but the third reason for his outrage is more interesting – he was an expat. He was more or less saying, “I’m one of your own people!” as opposed to being a native Briton. Giving a beating to a Briton, he implied, would have been perfectly acceptable.

There are long decades of history during which we know very little of how the Britons and the Romans rubbed along together. British names appear in trading documents (and on curses!) from the relatively peaceful south of England, but the military letters that have turned up on Hadrian’s Wall barely mention the locals. There’s a disparaging report on their fighting skills that refers to them as “wretched little Brits” (Brittunculi), but that’s about it.

There is other evidence, though. The other day I did one of my on-the-way-to-somewhere-else whistlestop tours of a museum – the sort where I rush around glancing at my watch, taking hundreds of photos and not stopping to read anything. Suddenly the rush came to a halt. I was in the Corinium museum in Cirencester, but wasn’t that the same tombstone I’d seen at Corbridge, miles away on Hadrian’s Wall?

It wasn’t until I got home and compared the photos that I realized it was the same design, but commemorated a different cavalryman. I’ve no idea how many stones there are like this, but here are the ones honouring (from left to right) Dannicus, Genialis and Candidus. Each man is shown valiantly brandishing a weapon from the back of a prancing horse. You have to look a little more closely to spot the natives.


In case you can’t make them out, I’ve highlighted them in red below. Greater minds than mine may be able to tell you if they represent the fallen from a specific battle or just generic barbarians, but either way, it’s pretty clear where Candidus’s boot is pointing. Hardly a design calculated to win the hearts and minds of the locals in an occupied country.


So did our outraged expat get justice, or was he left to seethe at being beaten like a lowly native? We don’t know. All we have is a draft of the letter, so perhaps a fair copy reached the Emperor and justice was done. On the other hand, that draft was found in the quarters of a centurion – so maybe it was intercepted before it got anywhere, and all the man got for his trouble was another beating.
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Gang of Suspects Named in Kidnap Case

by Ruth Downie

STOLEN: VILBIA

HELP OF GODDESS SUMMONED

GUILTY PARTY THREATENED WITH BECOMING LIQUID AS WATER

The loss of Vilbia is the most famous cold case that’s come down to us from the Romano-British town of Aquae Sulis (modern Bath). The aggrieved party – whose name we don’t know – called up the goddess Sulis Minerva’s help by writing the suspects’ names on a thin sheet of lead, rolling it up and throwing it in the pool above her sacred hot spring. It wasn’t alone: well over a hundred other curses have been found buried in the silt and others may be hidden there still.

Most of the spidery letters on the scraps of lead are the work of victims asking Sulis Minerva to avenge a crime. Some name the suspects. Some don’t say what they did: presumably the goddess knew what Britivenda and Venibelia had been up to and could punish them accordingly.

Often, though, the victim had no idea who had wronged them. The curse on the modern reproduction below translates as “the name of the culprit who stole my bracelet…” There’s a space left, but no name in it.

When no likely evildoer could be identified, the aggrieved party often reminded the goddess to suspect everyone, “whether man or woman, slave or free.” Children could be in the frame too -“whether boy or girl” - and once, “whether pagan or Christian”.

Some victims offered Sulis Minerva a share of the stolen goods if they were recovered – a sort of ‘no win, no fee’ deal, with the suggestion that the hot property could be handed in anonymously at the temple.

A few of the lead sheets are blank. Others bear rows of squiggles, perhaps put there by people who knew what writing looked like but couldn’t actually do it. All but two seem to have been in different handwriting: some educated, some very clearly not. Writing backwards might have made the curse more powerful: it certainly made for more spelling mistakes. But no matter what was being written, the sight of a stylus waking the dull surface of the lead into a gleaming message for the goddess might have frightened the guilty party into repentance.

If the culprit didn’t co-operate, though, bad things lay in store. Docimedis, whose gloves had gone missing, demanded that the thief should lose his minds [sic] and his eyes. Anyone even remotely involved in the theft of Basilia’s silver ring was to be accursed in blood, eyes and every limb, or even have all his or her intestines eaten away.

Sometimes the thief’s whole family was cursed. And sometimes the curses were subtle enough to work on the conscience. Whoever stole Docilianus’s cloak was to be deprived of both sleep and children until the cloak was returned to the temple. Whether or not he [or she, slave or free] knew the exact wording of the curse, it’s not hard to imagine them lying awake in the night watches and wondering whether they would get a better night’s sleep tomorrow if they got up now and delivered the stolen goods to Sulis Minerva under cover of darkness.

Bath isn’t alone in having a fine collection of curses: they turn up all over the Roman empire. There are attempts to silence witnesses, to sabotage racehorses, and to crush business competitors and love rivals. Most of the Bath curses, though, seem to be about thefts from the bath-house, although one poor chap had his house burgled. The crimes must have been very annoying for the victims, but as a writer looking to set a murder mystery in Aquae Sulis, I have to say there wasn’t as much instant plot in them as I’d hoped.

Even the apparent kidnap of Vilbia might have been less dramatic than it seems. Roger Tomlin, the modern translator, points out that the word has never been found anywhere else. The stolen “vilbia” might simply be an inanimate object with a name that none of us now understands. But while Vilbia doesn’t provide a ready-made plot and cast of characters, the curses as a whole give a lively insight into a busy town and the everyday struggles of its people to thrive and survive. And perhaps of the wider divisions between them.

We know that Roman citizens lived in the town (some of their tombstones have turned up, proudly announcing the three-part names that show social superiority), but none of the curses has a citizen’s name on it. All the complainants and culprits seem to be either lower-class Latin-speakers or native Britons. That might be because, as Pliny put it, the Britons were enthusiastic practitioners of magic while all good Romans ought to look down their noses at it (yes, I am paraphrasing wildly here). It might also be because the poorer you were, the less chance you had of owning a slave who would guard your kit while you were bathing.

Even if you knew who’d done it, in the absence of a police force there wasn’t much you could do unless you had powerful friends or plenty of cash. At a guess, Arminia had neither. She knew exactly who’d made off with her two silver coins – it was Verecundinus, son of Terentius - but getting them back had to be left to the goddess. 

Did Verecundinus pay up? Or did he suffer the punishment of being unable to sit, lie down, walk or sleep? We don’t know. For us, at least, none of these cold cases is resolved. But people believed in the curses enough to carry on throwing them into the spring for over two hundred years. There might have been no police officers to investigate crime, but even while you slept, that lump of lead hidden under the steaming surface of Sulis Minerva’s waters could be working its revenge on your enemies. And that must have felt good.

Roger Tomlin’s work on the Aquae Sulis curses - from which much of this information is drawn - can be found in The Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, Vol 2: The Finds from the Sacred Spring – Barry Cunliffe et al – OUCA Monograph no 16, 1988

Read more about the site at https://www.romanbaths.co.uk/

Ruth writes a series of crime novels featuring Roman army medic Ruso and his British partner, Tilla. The latest is MEMENTO MORI, set in Aquae Sulis.
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