ANTIQUE ENTERTAINMENT

Last year I visited Verulamium - capital of the Catuvellauni - at St Albans near London. It was on my bucket list for quite a while, because it is the only Roman theater visible in Britain today. This time, I took the train from Rotterdam to London and from London to St Albans. Arriving in St Albans it took a half hour walk through the village and passing some Roman remains in a park to reach the remains of the theater. Verulamium was among the first Romano-British towns to be built and by about AD 250 it was the third largest in this Roman province, surpassed only by London and Cirencester. It was not until about a hundred years after the Roman occupation of Britain, that the theatre in Verulamium was built. That might be around 140 AD, with serious alterations through time, until the early fourth century. The stage and seatings were mainly of wood, while the arena and orchestra were covered by a flat cement floor during the fourth major renovation (AD 300).     The tota...

Bij de Muur van Hadrianus in Engeland zijn twee leren bokshandschoenen van de Romeinen gevonden uit ongeveer 120 na Christus. Dat meldt The Guardian . Het zijn waarschijnlijk de enige exemplaren die de eeuwen hebben overleefd. De twee handschoenen, die op het oog geen paar vormen, zijn gevonden in een Romeinse legerplaats, die vorig jaar werd gevonden onder een stenen fort uit de vierde eeuw. Dat was het fort van Vindolanda ten zuiden van de muur van Hadrianus bij Hexham.  Boksen was een populaire sport bij de Romeinen, gezien de talloze verwijzingen ernaar in teksten en afbeeldingen uit die tijd. De leren bokshandschoenen waren eigenlijk een soort banden die om de knokkels van de hand zaten en die waren gevuld met natuurlijke materialen om schokken te absorberen. De handschoenen zijn niet vervormd en passen nog steeds om een normale hand. In één van de handschoenen zijn zelfs de afdrukken van de knokkels te zien. De grootste van de twee is ooit gerepareerd. In de opgegrav...

In 2006, I visited the amphitheater of Londinium or London. The above artist impression gives a nice panoramic view over Londinium - fort and vicus - at around 200 AD, with the river Thames at the background. The amphitheater is in the lower center, close to the rectangular form (the Roman fort). Currently, the remains are buried under the medieval Guildhall.  The discovery of the Guildhall amphitheater in 1988 was proclaimed on national and international television and radio. The Observer (February, 28) described it as 'one of the most exciting archeological finds since the Second World War'. The Sunday Telegraph (March, 6) called it 'one of the most important (finds) in Britain this century'. Historians and archeologists still agree with this view. The amphitheatre may have seated more than 5000 spectators. The position of the amphitheater near to the Roman fort, suggests that the arena would have been used for entertaining soldiers as well as the general public...

A short trip out of London, north of Hampshire in 2002, brought me by train into the British countrysite. During a stroll I encountered the Roman excavations at Silchester, or Calleva Atrebatum. Originally, a settlement of the Atrebates - or as the Celtic name says 'the town in the woods of the Atrabates' - it became Romanised after the Roman invasion AD 43. There is no certain evidence available to suggest that Calleva Atrebatum ever attained the status of a municipium or chartered town, where the citizens had voting rights, but this may have been granted as early as the time of creation of the civitas. It is difficult to estimate the population of the town, but if suburbs are excluded and calculations confined to the known buildings within the Roman defences, a minimum figure of about 1,200 is reached. Without written evidence there can be neither certainty about numbers, nor how they fluctuated with time, but figures as high as 7,500 and as low as 600-750 have also been e...