A powerful mosaic of the Roman rank and file
‘The darkness ordinary Roman legionaries and auxiliaries experienced is never forgotten’
Exhibition Legion: Life in the Roman Army British Museum, London WC1 ★★★★★
Asuave bronze head of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, dominates the start of this new exhibition at the British Museum. Take a moment to savour its glaring inlaid eyes, if imperial-grade art is your thing. Because, for the most part, “Legion: Life in the Roman Army” isn’t about the top brass, but those rank-and-file grunts who served in the empire’s war machine of 300,000 troops. Hobnail boots, crocodile-skin “armour”, workaday gravestones commemorating jug-eared soldiers with close-set eyes: many of the objects on display have a tough, gruff quality, suggestive of a life of route marches and nights in cramped, disease-ridden tents, interspersed with fierce, potentially fatal scraps. If these artefacts had voices, they’d growl or holler battle cries, not sing.
At one end of the hangar-like Sainsbury gallery – in which the show’s well-drilled sections are marshalled before crimson banners evoking military standards, like regiments on parade – a marble statue of a Molossian hound appears spot-lit: an incarnation, seemingly, of one of the dogs of war. Elsewhere, a draco, or windsock-like dragon standard, on loan from Germany, is monstrous, menacing and unforgettable: part fang-baring mongrel, part alligator, and (to my mind, at least) part rooster, thanks to its cockscomb-like hairdo.
With a soundtrack playing of cawing carrion crows and boots tramping along Roman roads, Legion is, then, an exhibition of iron and blood, not gold or finery. And, to deploy a term that Rome’s all-conquering cohorts would have relished, it’s a triumph.
This is not to say that the show is triumphalist. The darkness that ordinary Roman legionaries and auxiliaries experienced is never forgotten: twisted human remains make sure of that, including the skeleton of one poor, crucified soul, discovered with a nail driven through an anklebone. A perforated ox’s skull used for target practice attests to the bone-shattering power of Roman artillery bolts. The catalogue quotes an ancient aphorism that the Romans “create desolation and call it peace”.
Besides, Legion focuses not on military exploits but on the texture of soldiers’ day-to-day lives, from recruitment to retirement for the fortunate 50 per cent who survived. The progress of a Roman citizen from North Africa who served under Trajan, some of whose letters home were discovered in a papyrus archive in Egypt, provides a narrative spine.
The domesticity is surprising. Yes, the exhibition is chock-full of flamboyant cavalry helmets, daggers, and, sensationally, the only complete surviving wooden-and-leather scutum, or curving legionary long shield (decorated with symbols painted against a rich red), lent by Yale University Art Gallery; yet, here too are toy weapons, a board game and a split-toe woollen sock, its companion lost forever in the washing machine of history. An enamelled brooch with dangling metal strips was in fact a warrior’s grooming kit; a boxwood comb was for removing lice.
When the legions weren’t fighting, they were building roads, policing local populations – and even unfurling sunshades at the Colosseum. Marines also guarded Rome’s grain fleets. Thus, the army ensured both “bread and circuses”.
At its zenith, the empire stretched from Scotland to the Sahara; unsurprisingly, Rome’s fighters hailed from various ethnic groups. Skilled North African horsemen, for instance, were prized; a specialist cavalry unit of dromedarii (camel riders) was stationed in Egypt. The tribespeople in one rain-sodden province, though, weren’t so esteemed. The Romans had a nickname for our ancestors:
Brittunculi, or wretched little Brits. Details such as this are indelible, ensuring that Legion ranks among the most powerful exhibitions at the British Museum I can remember.
“Legion: Life in the Roman Army” opens on Thursday. Tickets: britishmuseum.org