Legion: life in the Roman army
British Museum, London

IN 1987 a wooden writing tablet was unearthed at Vindolanda, a Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, after almost 2,000 years. It records, among sundry orders for tallow, towels, socks and sandals, a request by Gambax, a legionary stationed thither around AD 120, for a quantity of Indian pepper worth two denarii. “Presumably to make palatable his stodgy Romano-British dinner,” ventures historian William Dalrymple, “something to cheer him up as he peeped over the battlements at the naked, painted, spear-waving Picts shouting incomprehensible insults from their forests and bogs.”

This speaks, of course, to the Roman empire’s astonishing reach — forging comprehensive trading relations with a land over 4,000 miles from its axis — but also brings to mind a lonely soldier, far from home and probably damp, shivering away at its northernmost point and longing for the comforts of home. 

Such piercing flashes of human connection form the basis of this comprehensive and sumptuous exhibition at the British Museum, loosely woven around the life and times of one such legionary (a contemporary of Gambax in fact, though I can’t imagine they met) – one Claudius Terentianus, an Egyptian who longed for Roman citizenship and sought it by the only means possible: enlistment.