Concordia

good friend, I found myself writing up the magnificent collection of Greek and Roman gems in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, as well as a very varied collection of gems from Jordan. Was I in danger of being type-cast as just a gem expert? I had begun lecturing in Oxford, and one of my extra-mural pupils who worked for Phaidon persuaded me to edit a Handbook of Roman Art , published in 1983, while Dr Graham Webster asked me to research and write a book for Batsford on Religion in Roman Britain , published the following year. Several years later, in 1995, he agreed to me writing a companion book on The Art of Roman Britain . Apart from teaching and writing in Oxford, my old friend John Onians, by now lecturing at the University of East Anglia asked me to take classes in Norwich, and one of his colleagues roped me in to edit the Journal of the British Archaeological Association , which I did for 23 years from 1985. I have continued to write books on cameos and Romano-British sculpture and more wide-ranging historical work, for example questioning the tired old narrative of what Roman Britain was like in The Heirs of King Verica in 2002. Amongst recent tasks, during ‘Lockdown’ I have been writing entries for, and helping to check, a major volume on Prehistoric and Roman Winchester for my earliest archaeological hero, Professor Martin Biddle (1950-1955). Though we only overlapped at school for my first two terms, he was already pointed out to me as ‘a real archaeologist’. I certainly never thought then that, in 2010, he would have become an important colleague and friend and that I would have co-edited a Festschrift for him and his late wife, Birthe (Intersections: the Archaeology and History of Christianity in England 400-1200) . As I reflect, my life has moved on a long way from filleting dogfish in the school biology laboratory.

collectors. David directed another excavation on Moor Park golf course, at Bathend Clump, although that was early Neolithic and produced thousands of beautifully worked black flints. In 1960 I left school to take up a place at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge where another OMT Classicist came to play a considerable part in my life. John Onians (1954-1960), who I had known at school, became a very close friend at Cambridge, where we founded the Cambridge National Trust Centre together, and I visited as many churches and country houses in the region as possible. He read Classics and I read History, but we both included Ancient History with a certain amount of ancient art in our course. I would often go to meetings of the Archaeological Society (The Field Club). David Phillipson was reading Archaeology and Anthropology, as was Desmond Collins. My ideas on the past expanded in so many directions. I attended Dr Glyn Daniels’ lectures on the History of Archaeology as well as those of Professor A.H.M. Jones on Greek and Roman History, while Phillip Grierson initiated me into the early Medieval Ages and its coins. After Cambridge I felt I had somehow to find a career studying the past, so I went to the Institute of Archaeology in London for two years, and learned more about Iron Age art and Roman inscriptions. I was always more interested in Latin inscribed on stone than in books, and indeed in the material culture of the Romans, especially in Britain. Subsequently I spent two years at the Guildhall Museum exploring Roman artefacts, eventually discovering a small box of engraved Roman gems, some still set in signet rings, mostly from excavations in the bed of the River Walbrook that runs North-South very near the Bank of England passing the Temple of Mithras (only excavated the year before I went to Merchant Taylors’) which stood on its banks. Nobody knew anything much about them, and I decided they would make a good field for academic study. In 1967 I went to Worcester College, Oxford to read for a Doctorate. I wrote to Barry Cunliffe with whom I had excavated at Fishbourne, who told me he was about to publish a report on Roman Bath and if I could write up the gems in three months he would include it. So my first publication came about with many more reports on Roman gems to follow. It turned out that there were far more of these tiny and fascinating works of art than anyone had ever realised before and so my resulting corpus of Roman Engraved Gemstones from British Sites was a long one. I realised that many of the subjects engraved on these tiny objects were taken from Greek sculpture, so I found myself fully engaged with many aspects of Classical Archaeology, Greek as well as Roman. After obtaining my doctorate, after a very friendly and sympathetic viva from John Boardman, who has throughout my later career been a

Concordia Winter 2021

17

An engraved cornelian intaglio showing Cupid with his bow of late 1st century BC/early 1st century AD date found in a medieval layer in Martin Biddle’s excavation of Wolversey Palace, Winchester. Although a Roman gem it probably belonged to a medieval bishop. (Photo: Claudia

Wagner, Beazley Archive, Oxford)