Charlotte Higgins

If you love Greek mythology as much as I do, you'll adore these versions. But your eyes will be widely open in shock and repulsion to the violence of the gods, male and female, in acting out on their lust for humans. Each chapter contains the familiar tales, here told by and woven into tapestries created by mortal women and one goddess (Athena, Penelope, Circe, Helen, Andromache, Arachne, and two others). For the humans, their only means of expression, by wool and skill, of the terror and show more indignity of their rapes, so many rapes, so many stories couched in fantastic acts - transformation into showers of gold, bulls, birds - to attack and abandon, only occasionally tossing their victims up into the sky to become part of constellations. Although rooted in the versions by Homer, Ovid, Euripides, Aeschylus, and others, this is a distinctly feminist viewpoint and really takes its rightful place in the canon with the ancient bards and poets. Most of the myths are familiar, but the feelings and thoughts of those who usually played secondary roles, the non-warriors, the mothers, sisters, daughters of kings, will ring out loudly to anyone who has cherished the traditional paths traveled by earlier storytellers. Massively important and such a pleasure to read, absorb, and remember – and greatly enhanced by a series of sensuous line drawings of the talented weavers and their subjects. show less

Beginning as a travelogue of what can be seen of Rome's presence in Britain, over the course of the book Higgins engages in a meditation on what, if anything, Britain's Roman past really means in an era when "Little England" nationalism is again becoming a real political force. If nothing else Higgins finds literary relevance in this history, as it's the Romans who created a vision of a Britain that was wild and challenging which remains a lasting goad to the imagination. It can also be read show more as a love letter by a student of classical studies to those who created her discipline. show less

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I am Irish, and was reflecting the other day with a friend born in Iran that the Romans had basically conquered everywhere between our two countries at one time or another. (Roman Armenia of course actually did overlap with present day Iran.) Now of course I live in a former Roman province, with a Gallo-Roman tumulus less than a mile from my home and ten more in the immediate vicinity. I have a big book on Roman remains in Belgium on the unread show more shelf. But I got seduced by this lovely book by Guardian journalist Charlotte Higgins, going around Britain and looking for the Roman stuff, exploring some places that I know (London, Bath, Silchester where I spent a summer afternoon long ago, Wroxeter) and others that I don't know at all (Roman Scotland, Kent, Essex). She has a good eye for character, both among the past figures who she writes about and the personalities of the present day (the patient boyfriend a little-seen but much-felt presence); and also for landscape - like her, I read Hunter Davis' A Walk Along the Wall many years ago, but she has updated it with reflections on the role of tourism in the survival of the otherwise failing rural economy. I came out of this book with a much longer list of things to see in future.

I did wish that the many photographs had had adjacent descriptions, rather than marooning them all on a separate page.

There are some very moving sections. The affair of Arthur's O'on, a Roman temple which gave its name to Stenhousemuir, almost equidistant between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and destroyed in 1743, is a sad commentary on the different valuation of heritage in the past. The story of Tessa Verney, and her better known husband Mortimer Wheeler, is also not a happy one. but I'll leave you with her lovely note on one of the Vindolanda tablets:

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You can see some of the Vindolanda tablets in the Roman Britain gallery of the British Museum, and they look deeply unimpressive. They are thin, small, brownish rectangles covered with thin, small, brownish writing. And yet, craning my neck at an uncomfortable angle to try to read the indistinct strokes, I found myself with a catch in my throat when I came face to face, for the first time, with a tablet whose text I knew already:

"Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present (?). Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him (?) their greetings.
I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail."

Sulpicia Lepidina was the wife of Flavius Cerialis, the camp commandant. Claudia Severa was the wife of Brocchus, he of the hunting nets. The letter is written in two hands. The body of the note is in a clear, competent script that has been identified on other tablets - perhaps that of a scribe. The sign-off - warm, personal, urgent - in another hand. It is probably, according to the papyrologists, Severa's own. If it is, it means these are the first words to have survived, from anywhere in the empire, in a Roman woman's own handwriting. 'Sperabo te soror, vale soror, anima mea, ita valeam karissima et have,' reads the Latin. The words 'anima mea karissima', my dearest soul, may have been a bland formula ('lots of love'?), but I none the less felt ambushed by the affection and sweetness in them. The fragment contained atavistic magic that scepticism could not entirely blot out. The years seemed to collapse as I read it, picking out the faint, spidery Latin on the dull wood. I read the words over and over again, and thought of the lost life of the woman who wrote them.

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This is roughly equal parts travel narrative, history of Roman Britain, and incidental stories touching on the latter (e.g. concerning the various eccentric antiquarians, pro and am, who've been seduced by the subject over the years). Higgins and her boyfriend (whose presence is more felt than seen or heard) roam the land in their camper van, tracing the contours of the Roman province through ruins, texts and artifacts. Of course she walks Hadrian's wall, but impressively also the Antonine show more wall, stumbling through industrial estates and along benighted towpaths without losing her good cheer.

A beautifully-written book - Higgins's prose is clever, clear and natural - which thanks to the perfect structure, part chrono- and part geographic, is more than the sum of its parts. Erudition and enthusiasm on every page. show less