I didn’t realize that Peter Caddick-Adams is the same age as me, but it does seem that our interests pretty much ran parallel for a while:
Re-enactors in Roman legionary gear, 19 May, 2021.
Original photo from https://pxhere.com/en/photo/883133 via Wikimedia Commons.
I am a proud member of the Airfix generation. The desire (less so the ability) to assemble and paint plastic model kits of aircraft, tanks and ships hit me squarely between the eyes on my tenth birthday in 1970. Several aunts and uncles had arrived at the same solution to bring out my inner Spitfire on the same day. Who needed the high of polystyrene cement and Humbrol enamel when you could refight D-Day across your bedroom floor with kits costing as little as 1/6d? Although Airfix was the premium producer of scale kits, other competing brands included Frog, Tamiya, Monogram, Hasegawa and Revell. I wish I knew what I did with them all, but many of the aircraft I recall casting out of upstairs windows, set on fire by match and candle. Looking back, I can see how it sewed the seeds of my becoming a professional military historian decades later. From little acorns, eh?
Two years later, I discovered I was interested in anything historical when my parents packed us into a train (great excitement in itself) for a trip to London. Although long past the days of steam, I can remember my father walking me down to thank the engine driver for getting us safely into Euston and then the true adventure began. The arrival at the British Museum to see the Tutankhamun Exhibition, which ran from March to December 1972. When it ended, besides the young Caddick-Adams, 1.6 million visitors had passed through the exhibition doors, making it the most popular attraction in the museum’s history. My favourite art class activity thereafter altered from drawing Spitfires and Messerschmitts chasing each other across every page to depicting ghostly, golden burial masks. Ever since, I have held an unbelievably soft spot for the old BM, always remembering that due to its vastness, it is best to go there to see something specific, rather than wander hither and thither, lost in its many treasures.
Then in 1977, when studying Ancient History for “A” Level, it was the turn of the Royal Academy in Piccadilly to capture my imagination with its Pompeii AD 79 exhibition. Mosaics, personal possessions, wall paintings and plaster casts of Romans and their animals caught in the moment of death as toxic gases, ashes, molten rock and pulverized pumice froze them forever, like insects in amber, likewise left a profound mark on my understanding of the bigger wheels of history.
The other day I was more than happy to be reunited with my old friend, the British Museum, this time hosting another Roman exhibition, which promises to be every bit as impactful as the Tutankhamun and Pompeii antecedents. Just unveiled, Legion: Life in the Roman Army is an inspired portrayal of an institution which numbered around 450,000 at its peak in AD 211 (33 legions and c. 400 auxiliary regiments), although numbers always fluctuated. The first amazing realisation is how little archaeological evidence remains of this vast organisation that endured for many centuries. The second is how well the scanty remnants in this exhibition have been preserved and interpreted.
Here, the British Museum has assembled the best surviving examples of arms, armour and personal possessions from collections around the world, in over 200 artefacts from 28 lenders. Though we view gleaming bronze helmets, swords long-rusted into scabbards, a pile of near-fossilised chainmail, it is incredible to think that there is only one intact example remaining of all those hundreds of thousands of rectangular and curved legionary shields (called a scutum), still bearing its decoration and crimson dye. This one comes from Syria.
There are some fine funerary carvings of Roman officers from around the empire, then we encounter some of the battlefield detritus including breastplate armour found near Kalkriese, in the Teutoburgerwald of Lower Saxony. This is where a coalition of Germanic tribes led by a rebel chieftain called Arminius ambushed 3 legions led by Publius Quinctilius Varus in 9 AD. The story of discovering this battle terrain was as dramatic as the assault itself. It was the result of a meticulous British soldier who combed an area north of his base at Osnabrück with a metal detector in 1987. Major Tony Clunn recorded each discovery of Roman coins and sling shot, making it possible to reconstruct the route taken by Roman legionaries under Varus and determine where they were ambushed and massacred.
