First Stop: Coggydubs' Palace at Fishbourne

A map of Roman Britain.  Noviomagus, or modern 

Chichester, is on the southern coast,  southwest of 

Londinium. Fishbourne was just west of Noviomagus.

So after an interminable Odyssey to get the car and some musings on why people drive where, Mirko and I arrived at our first stop, Fishbourne Roman Palace, near modern Chichester in the southern most part of England.  To the Romans, Chichester was called "Noviomagus" and it was the site of both some of the earliest Roman buildings in England during the invasion under Claudius in 43 AD and, later, possibly home to one of the supporting characters of the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC), Tiberius Claudius Cogidubnus (Coggydubs to me and my students).  As such, the palace served as the setting for Stages 15, 16 and 21 in the CLC books.

Hypocausts or heating system of one of the rooms of the
Roman palace at Fishbourne.

Due to the misadventures of getting the car, we only had about 30 minutes to explore the whole site.  It really wasn't nearly enough time, but we did get a good overview of the site and we could begin to understand its incredible size and complexity.  We also got to see some fantastic hypocausts (or Roman heating systems), some mosaics and we had just enough time to grab a book and some trinkets in the bookshop.

"Dolphin mosaic" from the Palace.
Features Cupid riding a dolphin

However, the most interesting aspect of the visit for me was that I suddenly found myself asking some of the very same questions that my students often ask me about the people, places and things which appear in the Cambridge Latin books.  How much of the stories are real?  How do we know?  What qualifies as evidence or proof?

Well, now that I'm settled in Rome, I finally have had some time to start reading the book I had hurriedly purchased in Fishbourne.  It turns out that this palace only may have belonged to Cogidubnus.  In fact, there is no hard evidence to say that it did, only some pieces of circumstantial evidence which one of the leading experts on the site has strung together to form a hypothesis.  More shocking than this is that many argue that the king's name might not have even been Cogidubnus, but rather Togidubnus! Finally, another archeologist has recently attacked the theory that Cogidubnus was the owner and has instead suggested that, due to architectural and aesthetic similarities with the Emperor Domitian's Domus Augustana in Rome, it was more likely built as late as the 90s AD, undoubtedly after the death of Cogidubnus.

So does that make everything that Cambridge Latin has told us about Coggydubs and his sweet palace a lie???  Well, not exactly.  First of all, as I have talked about with my students many times, the stories in the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC) are just that, stories contrived to help us learn to read Latin but based in the real culture in order to help us gain more cultural awareness as we transition toward classical texts towards the end of the series.  So as always, the books have taken some real people and real places and have woven them into a plausible, if not fully authentic, tale.  So keeping that in mind, let's take a look at what we do actually know about these people and places before we move on...

First of all, as I mentioned there is an ongoing debate about who really built and owned the palace.  In fact, the wikipedia article on the Fishbourne Roman Palace is actually very good, full of cited sources and presenting well both sides of the argument, so it's definitely worth checking out.  But don't stop there!  The website Roman Britain has an interesting entry on the palace and something called Wikimapia will help you explore the area from satellite views.

Original stone inscription found in Chichester in 1723.

Now about his name.  Was it Cogidubnus?  Or Cogidumnus?  Or Togidumnus?  Or Togidubnus?  We simply don't know!  The best evidence for his name is the inscription that was found in nearby Chichester (Noviomagus) in 1723, seen in the picture here and reproduced in the drawing below.  It came from a temple the king had built to Neptune and Minerva and so is evidence that he certainly seemed to want to fit in with the newly arrived Romans.

Recreation of the inscription with postulated missing letters.

In it, as you can see, the left side of the inscription is missing, as well as a few other pieces in the middle and on the right.  While most of those other letters are easy enough to guess at, the very letter we need--the first letter of the king's name--is missing!!  Argh!!  So why do some people say Cogidubnus and others Togidubnus?  Well, our only other historical source for this guy, believe it or not, is a passing reference in the Roman historian Tacitus' book about his father-in-law, your friend and mine, Gnaeus Iulius Agricola.  In it, Tacitus refers to a king who had been very loyal to the Romans in general and Vespasian and the Flavian emperors named "Cogidumnus" in all but one of the manuscripts where he is called "Togidumnus."

Folio from the 9th Century manuscript
of Tacitus' Agricola.

So which is it?  Well, without dragging this out too much further, remember that basically all the ancient Roman books that we have come down to us through medieval manuscripts which were copied and recopied by hand throughout the centuries.  Therefore, it is not uncommon for slight variations in spelling and even grammar to occur in one or more manuscripts.  However, just because most of the manuscripts have his name start with C and only one has it start with T, doesn't necessarily mean that Cogidumnus must be the correct spelling.  It's possible that all the "C" manuscripts derive from one common ancestor where the mistake was first made.  Without knowing the history of the transmission of manuscripts of Tacitus, we cannot really even make a guess at this.  That sounds like a great summer project for someone, but sadly I have so much else to read and write!!

So how about you?  What do you think?  Cogidubnus or Togidumnus?  And did he live at Fishbourne?  Or did the palace belong to someone else?  Do some research of your own and feel free to comment below!!

Note:  I have just learned how to include hyperlinks, so there are plenty of clickable words above that will take you to some cool sites for more information on some of these topics!

Litterae e Britannia...

Salvete omnes!

So this is my first attempt at blogging and I have no idea what I'm doing, but I hope that it will improve as I go!  My main goal is to keep my students up to date on all of my Roman-themed adventures this summer, but if I can also obtain the secondary goal of making my friends and colleagues jealous, I shall consider it a resounding success!

So after arriving in London early on Wednesday 26th and catching up with my friends Tiziana (who lives in London and has been hosting us) and Mirko (who just so happens to be the lead singer of Italy's number 1 Muse cover band, Bemuse) we rested up before hitting the road for some adventures in Roman Britain the next day.

Thursday began as a comedy of errors as Mirko and I seemed to bungle every step of our journey.  Even just getting to the right place to pick up our rental car was a Herculean task.  Then we had to get used to driving on the opposite side of the road, which is much more challenging than it looks.

Mirko driving on the right with Stonehenge in the distance...

This, of course, got me thinking... how did this happen?  Why does most of the world drive on one side and the British (and many of their former colonies) drive on the other?  As with most questions like this, there does not seem to be a clear, definitive answer and, as usual, searching the internet turns up more half truths and speculation-stated-as-fact than hard answers.  However, I did find some nice nuanced reporting on the blog of a certain Brian Lucas who has at least systematically and intelligently considered many different situations and vehicles.  Check out his findings here:  http://brianlucas.ca/roadside/.

Of course, we are concerned about the Romans.  What did they do?  Lucas feels fairly certain that the Romans drove on the left and he cites three pieces of evidence.  First, a report that an excavation of a Roman road at an ancient mine near Swindon in England revealed that the tracks on the right hand side of the road heading to the mine were deeper than those on the left.  This is taken as evidence that the tracks on the right must have been made by heavier carts leaving the mine, and therefore, "the Romans must have driven on the left--at least at this particular site."  However, in an admittedly quick Google search, I have not been able to uncover any viable links to this research.

Next, he says that someone named Robert Pease has seen a coin which shows Roman horsemen crossing each other right shoulder to right shoulder--again, signifying left side of the road driving.  However, again, I was unable to uncover any such image.  But, when looking at the images of Roman coins that did come up, I began to have my own thoughts about the matter.  All the Roman coins of horsemen which I could find always seemed to show the lead horse in the background.

Roman Republican era coin, ca. late 3rd, early 2nd Century BCE.

This, of course, could simply be for reasons of design--presumably the rider and the horses head are more interesting to look at than his hindquarters--but, if it does represent how they would ride, then driving on the left would make more sense, since you most likely would want the lead horse to stay to the outside leaving space for the others to fall in behind him.  If these horsemen were driving on the right, then the lead horseman could be stuck in the middle of the road with nowhere to go when encountering oncoming traffic.  Also, there is the idea that being on the left is more practical for mounting and dismounting, which, as my horseback riding instructor also told me and as was written about by the ancient Greek author Xenophon (in The Art of Horsemanship), is basically universally from the left.  If you mount and dismount from the left, you probably want to mount and dismount from off of the road, rather than in the middle of it...

However, just when if feels like we are getting somewhere, I was sitting at the Circus Maximus when I had a thought... haven't I seen images of chariot races?? Which way are they going?  Now, of course, you don't have two way traffic in chariot races, but the direction of the races might give us some clue.  In fact, a quick review of some images from all over the Roman world revealed what I had already suspected--Roman chariot races ran counter-clockwise.

While this does not prove anything, it may be evidence supporting an idea that, like us, the Romans would run their races counterclockwise to match the wide left turns of their everyday driving.  (Auto races in left-side driving Britain, in fact, typically run clockwise!).

Well, unfortunately, it looks like we're not able to solve this particular question at this time, but it's certainly fun to think about.  What do you think?  Leave a comment below and weigh in on this intriguing conundrum!