How easy it was to slip into life in Rome’s army
How can I describe that tingling in the back of the neck on confronting a 2,000-year-old sock? It was no different from our socks today: fabric, and this one (though faded) red. And it had once protected the foot (about my size) of a Roman soldier, of whom no trace remains. Such is the thrill of Legion: Life in the Roman Army, an exhibition now on at the British Museum. I went last week.
I don’t like museums. Rows of objects bore me, always have. But this exhibition breaks out of those chains. To the sound of letters being read out from soldiers on the boundaries of empire to parents back home, asking for ordinary necessities of daily life — socks, sandals, money, weapons — we follow a real Roman soldier, Terentianus, of whom we have some record, through a career in the army.
Along the way we learn how the empire reinforced its security and sway through the reward of citizenship, pay and generous pension rights to any young man of any age, if over 5ft 7in (exhibition-goers can test their height on a scale: I just squeaked in) of any race or class, from any part of the empire.
• Roger Boyes: Ancient Rome’s lessons for Israel and Russia
Conditions were tough — eight to a leather tent — sickness and lice were a scourge, toilet paper was moss or a sponge on a stick, and you had to buy your own weapons. Half were killed before retirement. But reward was the glue that held an empire together.
Thursday, then, took me on a two-hour journey through another life in another time. This may sound banal but from bits of leather, letters home, old shoes and torn fabric, the appreciation stole up on me that these were people like us, caught up in huge organisations not unlike ours, facing challenges we could understand. An old sock can speak our language better than stone, brass and chiselled inscriptions ever can.
The unfair sex
On yesterday’s Letters page Mary Ann Sieghart was right. On wanting to hear the other sex “there is a fundamental asymmetry between male and female reading and listening habits”. I have spent 18 years presenting Great Lives, a BBC programme on Radio 4 in which we ask an invited guest to choose and champion a great life from the past.
Many years ago we carried out an audit of our three or four hundred guests’ choices thus far. Half our female guests had chosen a man, and half a woman. All — I repeat, all — our male guests except about two had chosen another man. Truly astonishing.
It’s Forbes for me
I’m starting a “gays for Kate Forbes” campaign. Forbes, eminently qualified for the leadership of the Scottish National Party, is a committed Christian who has been criticised for her reactionary personal views on gay marriage.
Who cares? We’ve won that battle, and she’s clear that as a politician she won’t reopen it. We gays should renounce victim status, raise our eyes from our more parochial concerns, and see the bigger picture.
Scotland’s flagging
And the bigger picture in Scottish politics is not what’s wrong with the SNP, but what’s wrong with the Scots? The electorate there fostered what was turning into a one-party state where opposition to a dominant party could be denounced as almost unpatriotic.
Scottish politics has reminded me of the ANC in South Africa. A kind of crushing groupthink, a cultural uniformity, can provide the nest in which such monsters can be incubated.
We British rightly distrust politicians who try to wrap themselves in the Union Jack. Why should the Scottish Saltire be any more acceptable a garb?
Beware the good-looker
With some sense of I-told-you-so, I’ve been watching this week the travails of that handsome Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, whom they call El Guapo — the good-looker.
You see, it’s a maxim of mine that (excepting my own partner and possibly Justin Webb but definitely not Justin Trudeau) one should never trust a good-looking man. In my experience, being conspicuously attractive messes men up. Women regularly manage to be both beautiful and useful but I don’t think men can handle it — witness poor Johnny Mercer MP.