‘The Race that is Set Before Us’: The Athletic Ideal in the Aesthetics and Culture of Early Roman Britain

Abstract

I first met Barry Cunliffe when I came to dig at Fishbourne, and I still remember my amazement at seeing what were clearly stylobate blocks of Mediterranean type being unearthed. In that first season I excavated for only three days, but the memory lingered with me and I later returned to supervise on the east and north wings of this extraordinary site. Subsequently, on my arrival in Oxford to embark on a doctoral dissertation upon Roman intaglios and cameos excavated from British sites, I wrote to Barry to ask whether he knew of any gemstones I might not yet have located. In a characteristically terse, but very courteous and helpful, reply he told me there were over thirty at Bath and that if I were to write them up in two or three months he would be delighted to publish my work in a Research Report he was preparing for the Society of Antiquaries (Henig 1969). Thus, I owe to Barry my first lucky break in the Weld of archaeological publication. Subsequently, and not too long afterwards, I was invited by him to publish the gems from Fishbourne (Henig 1971). It seems appropriate to return to those intaglios from Bath and Fishbourne, in order to survey a little of this glyptic evidence, in association with gems and other material from elsewhere, in order to explore a very small but fascinating aspect of a theme which has so often aroused Barry’s attention and mine, that of Romanization or, as we have been urged to call it by Greg Woolf, ‘Becoming Roman’ (Woolf 1998) especially in the first century BC and first century AD. My starting point will be an intaglio from Bath cut with a Greek theme, that of a discobolos who is about to throw his discus (figure 24.1). In front of him is his prize, a palm in a vase. This image has previously been used by me to illustrate an essay about Greek themes in Romano-British art (Henig 2000: 133, fig. 5) for the spa at Bath was clearly a sophisticated cultural centre with connections across the Graeco-Roman world ; and it has long seemed very probable that the patron who sponsored this stupendous work was none other than the Atrebatan client ruler Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus, whose titulature as Great King in Britain must surely have been borrowed from the Hellenistic East (Bogaers 1979; Henig 2000: 126).