Dear Diary,
Oh my giddy aunt. I have just been to one of the most magnificient displays of artefacts that I have ever seen in my life! These are just a few of the objects on display (and these are just the gold and amber selection - there were many more: pottery, flint nodules, axe-heads, arrowheads, necklaces, pieces of old chariots, tools, musical instruments, you name it!).
Unfortunately my camera ran out of battery
just before I got to the Roman section (my favourite part). Even so, the pre-Roman and Anglo-Saxon selections were absolutely unbelievable! Out of this world, truly.
I spend most of my spare time poring over literary sources in Latin and ancient Greek, trying to fathom or coax out their meaning(s) through close reading and translation. On the face of it, reading the Roman literary sources (in either language: Latin or ancient Greek), one comes away with the impression that - in the words of Amy Richlin, an expert on Plautus and the steamier side of the ancient world - "the Romans liked to dump on their enemies". There is certainly a telling poem in Ausonius (
Epigram 107 in trans. Evelyn-White, 1921, pp.214-217 [
Loeb ed. Ausionuis vol.2]) about Roman feelings towards the Britons. Furthermore, the Vindolanda tablets give us an insight into the pejorative term
Brittunculi "pesky little Brits" or "wretched little Britons" and one tablet even that implied that it was perfectly okay for a Roman to simply beat up a British trader and requisition all his worldly goods. Anyway, let us assume that there were no such sources or inscriptions, and that all that survived was the (hundreds of) artefacts on display at this exhibition today. The contemporary viewer may well come away with the impression that the
Romans were some semi-civilised bunch of savage brutes, and that the
Britons had an
extremely refined culture, a rich culture, a very highly skilled culture, elegant, sophisticated, civilised. Outstanding, absolutely outstanding.
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