Chapter I: R I /

These letters were on the side of the potsherd which had formed the inner surface when the pot was whole; they must therefore have been inscribed after the pot had been smashed, and the size and shape of the bit give cause to think that it may have been broken intentionally for inscription--possibly for use in some game. In any case, it must have been inscribed at Traprain Law, and not brought there already written, and the occurrence of writing of any sort on such a site is noteworthy.

I am indebted to Dr. G. Macdonald for a sight of the piece.

(3) Found about three and a half miles north of the Roman fort Bremenium, High Rochester, near Horsley in north Northumberland, beside the Roman road over the Cheviots (Dere Street), close to the steading of Featherwood, in the autumn of 1914, now in the porch of Horsley Parish Church, a plain altar 51 inches high by 22 inches wide, with six lines of letters 2 inches tall. The inscription is unusually illegible. Only the first and last lines are readable with certainty; elsewhere some letters can be read or guessed, but not so as to yield coherent sense.

VICTORIAE (only bottom of final E visible)
ET....IVL (ET probable, IVL fairly certain)
MEIANIC (only M quite certain)
II........C (erased on purpose)
PVBLICO
V . S . L _m_

The altar was dedicated to Victory; nothing else is certain. It is tempting to conjecture in line 2 ET N AVG, _et numinibus Augustorum_, as on some other altars to Victory, but ET is not certain, though probable, and N AVG is definitely improbable. The fourth line seems to have been intentionally erased. I find no sign of any mention of the Cohors I Vardullorum, which garrisoned Bremenium, though it or its commander might naturally be concerned in putting up such an altar.

We may assume that the altar belongs to Bremenium; possibly it was brought thence when Featherwood was built.

I have to thank the Rev. Thos. Stephens, vicar of Horsley, for photographs and an excellent squeeze and readings, and Mr. R. Blair for a photograph.

(4-5) Found on July 17, 1914, at Chesterholm, just south of Hadrian's Wall, lying immediately underneath the surface in a grass field 120 yards west of the fort, two altars:

(4) 32 inches tall, 15 inches broad, illegible save for the first line

IOM

_I(ovi) o(ptimo) m(aximo)_....

(5) 34 inches tall, 22 inches broad, with 8 lines of rather irregular letters, not quite legible at the end (fig. 16).

_Pro domu divina et numinibus Augustorum, Volcano sacrum, vicani Vindolandesses, cu[r(am)] agente ... v(otum) s(olvit) l(ibens) m(erito)_.

'For the Divine (i.e. Imperial) House and the Divinity of the Emperors, dedicated to Vulcan by the members of the _vicus_ of Vindolanda, under the care of ... (name illegible).'

The statement of the reason for the dedication given in the first three lines is strictly tautologous, the Divine House and the Divinity of the Emperors being practically the same thing. The formula _numinibus Aug._ is very common in Britain, though somewhat rare elsewhere; in other provinces its place is supplied by the formula _in honorem domus divinae_; it belongs mostly to the late second and third centuries. The plural _Augustorum_ does not appear to refer to a plurality of reigning Emperors, but to the whole body of Emperors dead and living who were worshipped in the Cult of the Emperors.

The _vicani Vindolandesses_ are the members of the settlement--women and children, traders, old soldiers, and others--which grew up outside the fort at Chesterholm, as outside nearly all Roman forts and fortresses. In this case they formed a small self-governing community, presumably with its own 'parish council', which could be called by the Roman term _vicus_, even if it was not all that a proper _vicus_ should be. This altar was put up at the vote of their 'parish meeting' and paid for, one imagines, out of their common funds. The term _vicus_ is applied to similar settlements outside forts on the German Limes; thus we have the _vicani Murrenses_ at the fort of Benningen on the Murr (CIL. xiii. 6454) and the _vicus Aurelius_ or _Aurelianus_ at Oehringen (_ibid._ 6541).

_Vindolandesses_, which is merely a phonetic spelling or misspelling of _Vindolandenses_, gives the correct name of the fort. In the Notitia it is spelt Vindolana, in the Ravennas (431. 11) Vindolanda; and as in general the Ravennas teems with errors and the Notitia is fairly correct, the spelling Vindolana has always been preferred, although (as Prof. Sir John Rhys tells me) its second part _-lana_ is an etymological puzzle. It now appears that in this, as in some few other cases, the Ravennas has kept the true tradition. The termination _-landa_ is a Celtic word denoting a small defined space, akin to the Welsh 'llan', and also to the English 'land'; I cannot, however, find any other example in which it forms part of a place-name of Roman date. _Vindo-_ is connected either with the adjective _vindos_, 'white', or with the personal name Vindos derived from that adjective.

I have to thank Mrs. Clayton, the owner of Chesterholm, and her foreman, Mr. T. Hepple, for excellent photographs and squeezes. The altars are now in the Chesters Museum.

(6) Found at Corbridge, in August 1914, fragment of a tile, 7 × 8 inches in size, on which, before it was baked hard, some one had scratched three lines of lettering about 1-1-1/2 inches tall; the surviving letters form the beginnings of the lines of which the ends are broken off. There were never more than three lines, apparently.

O M Q L
LIIND/
LEGEFEL

The inscription seems to have been a reading lesson. First the teacher scratched two lines of letters, in no particular order and making no particular sense; then he added the exhortation _lege feliciter_, 'read and good luck to you'. A modern teacher, even though he taught by the aid of a slate in lieu of a soft tile, might have expressed himself less gracefully. The tile may be compared with the well-known tile from Silchester, on which Maunde Thompson detected a writing lesson (Eph. Epigr. ix. 1293). A knowledge of reading and writing does not seem to have been at all uncommon in Roman Britain or in the Roman world generally, even among the working classes; I may refer to my _Romanization of Roman Britain_ (ed. 3, pp. 29-34).

The imperfectly preserved letter after Q in line 1 was perhaps an angular L or E; that after D, in line 2, may have been M or N or even A.

I am indebted to Mr. R. H. Forster for a photograph and squeeze of the tile.

(7) Found in a peat-bog in Upper Weardale, in August 1913, two bronze skillets or 'paterae', of the usual saucepan shape, the larger weighing 15-1/2 oz., the smaller 8-1/2 oz. Each bore a stamp on the handle; the smaller had also a graffito on the rim of the bottom made by a succession of little dots. An uninscribed bronze ladle was found with the 'paterae':

(_a_) on the larger patera: P CIPE POLI

(_b_) on the smaller: _p_OLYBI·I

(_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 über die römische 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 BI·F. 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]C·PAGA... _and_ ..C·PA..

(_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:

Q·D·D

Presumably the initials of an owner. The letters were at first read O·D·D, 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 _Cumberland and Westmorland Archaeological Transactions_, new series, vol. xi (1911), pp. 343-78.]

The notice lay neglected till Hübner 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 Yorkshire 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 Hübner'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
NOBILISSIMO
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 Hübner 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 titles. 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 petitions 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' titulature. 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 titulature. 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 constitution, 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 Cumont, _Revue d'Histoire et de Littérature religieuses_, 1896, pp. 435-52.]