Knowledge of the Literary Classics in Roman Britain

Abstract

The written sources for Roman Britain, especially after the first century A.D., are so scant that our information must come very largely from archaeological discoveries. While these have thrown light on many aspects of Britain during the Roman period, we are still very much in the dark about one important feature of Romano-British life, the intellectual and cultural activities of the well-educated Briton. It is in the fourth century that the problem becomes particularly acute; Britain escaped much of the unrest that plagued the continent and thus enjoyed an era of peace and prosperity, a prosperity reflected in the stimulus given to construction of villas on a grand scale and often with fairly lavish interior decoration. It is a period when we should naturally expect a parallel flowering in the level of cultural life. The sources, however, are virtually silent on this topic and we must base our knowledge on the deductions that can be made from the evidence of physical prosperity; a useful criterion of cultural and intellectual activity is interest in the literary classics, but while it may be reasonable to assume that in his schooling the Romanized Briton would receive some grounding in the major works of Latin literature, archaeology has provided relatively little evidence that this was in fact the case. The known examples have been so frequently cited and illustrated that they have produced a general impression that they are copious. In fact, there is prima facie evidence of only one writer, the poet Vergil; the allusions are limited to one of his works, the Aeneid, and are far from numerous. My present purpose is to provide a catalogue of the allusions in Roman Britain to Vergil's poem, to assess the evidence that they provide for a general knowledge of the Aeneid, and to show what I consider to be the special significance of one example, the mosaic from Lullingstone Villa in Kent.