All of which was deeply interesting to Rowland. But his attention really began to focus when archaeologists working at Vindolanda, one of the forts along Hadrian’s Wall, turned up a huge haul of letters. The letters were in the form of flat pieces of wood about the size of postcards, hinged together with leather thongs. A person would write on these, tie them up with the thongs, and send them off. And there was one signed Lucius Claudius Setibogius.
I could guess what effect this had on Rowland — mainly because I had seen an enormous blown-up photograph of the letter blu-tacked to his living room wall. All those years trying to follow Lucius through bits of documents and things other people had said about him, and here was Rowland finally looking at the man’s handwriting. It was, I thought, rather florid and childish handwriting, the kind of handwriting an eager country boy on the make might have.
Only fragments of the letter survived. We had the salutation at the beginning, to somebody called Marcus — presumably someone stationed at Vindolanda — and we had the signature. And in the middle, where the faint ink-scratched words hadn’t been rotted or faded away, we had a few sentences about a visit Lucius had made to the Colosseum.
You needed a bit of background for this part. The Colosseum was not all gladiators knocking seven shades of shit out of each other. The Romans loved pitting people against animals, staging hunts in the arena that must have been like bloodier versions of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. They brought megatons of animals to Rome from all over the Empire for this purpose. I forget how many animals were killed when the Colosseum was dedicated, but I once heard a figure that ran into the thousands. Lions, cheetahs, bears. If it had claws and teeth and an attitude, the Romans were happy.
Lucius’s letter to his friend Marcus bemoaned his life now he was living in Britain again. He recalled his days in Rome, in particular an afternoon spent at the Colosseum watching gladiators fight animals. More specifically, some animals he called homunculi.
“They were very small,’’ he told Marcus, “but very quick and hard to kill.’’
Most commentators thought Lucius was referring to chimpanzees here. Most commentators dismissed as pure fantasy Lucius’s next comment, which translated as, “One had been taught to speak Latin, and I conversed with it. It told me its home was much warmer than Rome.’’
Rowland was not most commentators. He really did wonder about that line. Lucius was not given to flights of fancy. He was money-driven. He was the world’s most prosaic man. Rowland thought he really was remembering talking to a small creature, regarded by the Romans as an animal, which nonetheless was capable of speaking Latin. “I am told,” Lucius wrote, “that they lived in a bronze house.”
Rowland wondered. Lucius said the homunculi had been found in the great braided area of deltas and marshes where the Danube enters the Black Sea. Rowland put all his data about Lucius and the Colosseum and Roman ‘hunts’ and stories of mythical animals into his PC and he juggled them around and for years and years he wondered.
Archaeology never stands still. There’s always somebody digging something up somewhere. Fragments of letters, for instance, from an unidentified inhabitant of Lincoln to an unidentified inhabitant of Rome talking about money lent to Lucius Claudius Setibogius for a villa. A letter from one Caecilius, an apparently much sought-after mosaic artist, to his sister, bemoaning the fact that he had to travel all the way to Britain to work for someone called Luci Cl S (the rest of the name had faded away) and that his employer wanted to include much eye-witness detail in his work. Rowland looked at all this stuff, and he did wonder, oh yes he did.
And then, about six months ago, a farmer in the Cotswolds was given a metal detector for his birthday. He took it out into one of his fields, just to try it out, and it went berserk the moment he switched it on. He dug a hole in the field and came up with a dozen Roman coins, thirty assorted silver ornaments and a hundredweight of roof-tiles, and then he called the local archaeological society, who dug around a bit and called the nearest university, who dug around a bit and called Lew, who called Rowland. Who turned up on my doorstep.
And here we were, almost two thousand years after the death of Lucius Claudius Setibogius, standing in a muddy field in Gloucestershire, looking down from the edge of a huge hole at the mosaic floor of the largest Roman villa ever discovered in Britain.
Rowland’s first words were, I thought, marvellously restrained under the circumstances. He said, “Are you certain it’s him?”
“There’s no doubt,” Lew said smugly. “There are inscriptions praising him all over the site. His name’s everywhere.”
I couldn’t stop staring at the floor.
“You know,” Rowland said, looking around the site as if the idea had only just occurred to him, “do you think he might actually be buried around here somewhere?”
The floor was a wonder.
“There’s a cemetery just over there,” Lew said, pointing. “We’ve only just opened it up, but we’re turning up burials with extraordinary grave goods.”
I took a step forward.
“My god,” Rowland said quietly. Then he yelled, “What on Earth are you doing?”
I walked out across the floor, across the mosaic tiles in which Lucius had instructed Caecilius to record his life’s story. Caecilius was a genius; this was the best mosaic work I had ever seen. It must have cost Lucius a fortune to bring him out here from Rome. He had added representations of the gods and goddesses in various places, but really what I was standing on was a biography, a monument to the ego of one man. I walked with my head bent forward, looking at the pictures. Here was Lucius’s early life in what appeared to be a pretty standard British hovel circa the Second Century. Here he was driving a little herd of goats. Here he was selling the goats. Here he was buying some sheep. Here he was selling wool to somebody else…
I turned and looked at Rowland. “Caecilius was working from life,” I said. I pointed at the representations of Lucius beneath my feet. “This is what he looked like.”
Rowland had his mouth open ready to yell at me for walking on the floor. He closed his mouth with a little gulp and looked at all the figures.
I presumed that Caecilius was no fool; he’d idealised his patron, but even so Lucius looked disappointingly ordinary. He didn’t look like Flash Harry in a toga. He had a Roman haircut that had grown out a bit, and he had a mean little mouth and what looked like a bit of a beergut, but really he could have been anybody.
The winner always writes the history. Okay. So here was Lucius turning his little herd of sheep bit by bit into a mighty trading empire. He shook hands with clients. He didn’t cheat anyone or make shady deals. He married his wife, whose name we still didn’t know but Caecilius had given her a J-Lo arse and a penchant for playing stringed instruments. Later on there was a son, as cute as you could make a mosaic representation. I wandered back and forth across the floor, picking up details. Here he went to Rome. Here he visited the Colosseum. Here…