About halfway through this wildly enjoyable delve into Roman military history, you see an eerie object: a cuirass, a piece of torso-fitting armour that looks too big, as if it were created for a giant. It makes you think the legions that dominated so much of Europe, north Africa and the Middle East two millennia ago must have been full of truly invincible men.
Then you discover this is a relic not of a Roman triumph but one of the most devastating defeats its legions ever suffered. It was found on the battlefield near today’s village of Kalkriese, Lower Saxony, where German warriors massacred the legions led by Publius Quinctilius Varus in 9 AD. The legionary who wore this armour may have been slaughtered after the battle, on the ground, to judge from leg irons with which he was apparently restrained. Or perhaps he was paraded as a trophy? It feels incredibly intimate to be so close to an event that has become a kind of historical horror story. “Varus, where are my legions?” yelled Brian Blessed as Augustus in I, Claudius.
There’s history and then there’s Roman history. The Romans lived as if planning to be remembered. They did history consummately, building their empire, losing their republic, throwing up monsters of emperors, provoking rebels and messiahs, even producing some of the world’s greatest historians from the myth-making Livy to the bitterly truthful Tacitus to tell their story.
So when you walk into this perfectly laid out, satisfyingly stuffed blockbuster in the British Museum’s epic exhibition space, part of the pleasure is the instant recognition. Whether your images of ancient Rome’s army come from Andrea Mantegna’s Renaissance masterpiece The Triumphs of Caesar or the battle in the woods at the beginning of Gladiator where Russell Crowe gives the order to “Unleash hell!”, you will find the Rome you’re thinking of here.
Ever pictured ranks of Roman soldiers with identical tall shields, javelins and short thrusting swords? The best surviving examples of such arms and armour from collections all over the world have been marshalled with superb precision. Here you will see the world’s only perfectly preserved legionary shield, its tall curved surface painted as exquisitely as a Pompeiian fresco, with the same blood-red favoured on villa walls. There it signified luxury, here it’s the colour of war. Presumably a shield like this had to be restored after every battle, the real blood washed off and replaced with a new coat of crimson paint.
Artillery from Hadrian’s Wall demonstrates how the soldiers on Rome’s frontline actually could unleash hell if necessary. Pieces of a “tormenta”, a cross between a catapult and outsized crossbow, reveal how metal bolts could be rapidly fired at any troublesome “barbarians”. Elsewhere, I thought I recognised a Celtic statue – so much more savagely modernist than all these classical reliefs. But it turned out to be a dummy used for target practice, also from Hadrian’s Wall.
Yet this is not just a blood and guts orgy of Roman military might. It is one of the warmest encounters with individuals from the remote past you could ever hope for. It taps beautifully into something unique about ancient Rome. The extant remains of other ancient civilisations favour remoteness: whether it’s the lofty splendour of the Athenian Acropolis or fearsome palace reliefs of Assyrian conquest, such wonders don’t make you picture the ancients relaxing or joking or just living. Whereas the sheer material abundance of the Roman empire has left astonishing relics of the everyday of Roman soldiers, chilling and loving and writing home.
Bathhouses with underfloor heating were the indispensable luxury for those who followed the raised standards to a miserable wet place like Britain. Here you see the wooden-soled slippers they wore in the baths (in men’s and women’s sizes), and games they played while hanging out in this recreation of a Mediterranean environment. One of the most amazing exhibits is a bronze “dice tower”, an anti-cheating device into which you dropped the dice to ensure they fell arbitrarily.
The women in army bathhouses were not just enslaved people or sex workers but also military wives who played a big social role in the camps, especially at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall to judge from its extraordinary cache of letters on wooden tablets. One of the loveliest is displayed here, in which Claudia Severa invites her sister to her birthday party.
The exhibition’s gripping reality is almost unbearable when you meet the skeleton of a Roman soldier who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. He seems to have been assisting in the evacuation from Herculaneum harbour, when the wave of hot mud killed him along with many civilians huddled nearby. His sword and dagger, perfectly preserved, were still in their sheaths. He died not in battle but helping others. He was a soldier of Rome – honour him.
• At the British Museum, London, 1 February-23 June.
