It takes a true patriot to love Roman Britain: all those water-filled ditches, and nothing at the bottom but a few centuries of provincial tat. Boots and bricks survive, but little that is articulate - just a few formal inscriptions on stone, a few lead tablets inscribed with curses and buried for the attention of the powers below. Everyday communications, on wood or papyrus, have rotted away. Or so it might have been thought, until in 1973-5 the Vindolanda tablets turned up, preserved anaerobically in an ancient floor of impacted bracken and human wastes. That find allows us to dip into a military waste-paper basket of 100 AD. The originals can be seen at the British Museum. Bowman and Thomas provide the first and the final publication. Their book does more than decipher the faded and broken scrawl (difficult enough in itself): it provides, with enviable erudition, the whole necessary context, linguistic, historical and palaeographic. The texts owe most of their interest to their ordinariness; the edition is an achievement of eye and mind of which any scholar could be proud.

LRB 17 May 1984 | PDF Download