This magnificent volume covers little short of 500 epigraphic texts relevant to the history of Roman Britain, mostly inscriptions cut on stone, but also some lead curse tablets (wooden stylus writing tablets originally covered in wax) legible because the stylus has scored the wood beneath the wax coating, and other wooden tablets written on in ink. There are also five military diplomas and a few other inscribed objects.
The work commences with a short preface that records the author’s debt to numerous scholars especially Robin Burn – A R Burn, the author of The Romans in Britain (Reference Burn1969), a collection of epigraphic texts and translations. This is followed by an introduction discussing lettering, spacing between words (or lack thereof), abbreviations, dating and the use of consular dates and imperial titles. Then there is a section on damage to inscriptions. The introduction finishes with a section on the editorial conventions used by Tomlin. These are basically simplified versions of those used in epigraphic publications, but the transcripts of his texts are given simply in lower case and he does not use capitals for monumental inscriptions.
The work as a whole concludes with a number of lists and indices: abbreviations and bibliography with twenty-two items by Tomlin himself; photo credits – it should be said here that many of the inscriptions are illustrated by small black and white photographs, though these often do not do justice to the texts themselves; concordance tables giving the items included by Tomlin and primary places of publication, such as Collingwood and Wright’s Roman Inscriptions of Britain (Reference Collingwood and Wright1965, Reference Collingwood, Wright and Tomlin1990–5), Keppie’s Inscribed and Sculptured Stones (Reference Keppie1998) and Tomlin’s Roman London’s First Voices (Reference Tomlin2016); a list of locations of inscriptions; and finally a somewhat simplified index divided into three parts: 1) persons, 2) geographical and 3) general.
Turning to the main body of the work, the actual inscriptions and epigraphic texts, the material is divided into fourteen numbered sections, themselves split into subsections. The main sections are: the Invasion of Britain in ad 43 and subsequent military operations (sections 1–4); Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall (sections 5–6);the later second and early third centuries (sections 7–8); such topics as soldier and civilian, administration, the economy and religion (sections 9–12) – which together cover approximately half the entries – and the final two sections (13 and 14), which return to the historical order and cover the third and fourth centuries. Items selected by Tomlin for inclusion are designated by main section number, and then numerically, so ‘4.19’ as quoted below means the nineteenth text in section 4, a system that is simple and works well. One difficulty that Tomlin faced will have been to decide into which section to put some of the items – thus the famous writing tablet from Vindolanda (4.19) written by Claudia Severa, the wife of the commanding officer, to Sulpicia Lepidina, the wife of a fellow officer, is given in a sub section on Vindolanda in main section 4 – an early chronological section preceding the section devoted to Hadrian’s Wall – whereas it would have been tempting to put it in section 9 (Soldier and Civilian in the subsection entitled ’equestrian officers and their families’).
There is only one case where this reviewer disagrees with Tomlin’s interpretation and that is the inscription round the mouth of the Ilam Staffordshire cup (5.16), and Tomlin’s taking the name Aelii with Valli – ‘the Wall of Aelius’, ie of Hadrian, while it almost certainly goes with Draconis ‘(the property) of Aelius Draco’. For this name, possibly the same man, see Henzen et al (Reference Henzen, de Rossi and Hülsen1886, 2,050), Rome T Aelius Aug. lib Draco. Of course any second edition of Britannia Romana would also include inscriptions found after Tomlin’s closing date of 2014, such as the inscription from Dorchester (Tomlin Reference Tomlin2018), the tombstone of a veteran of Legion ii Augusta comparable to the tombstone of the Veteran of the same legion from Alchester, Oxon (2.03), and, like that, useful in tracing the changing location of the legion in the first years of the Roman occupation.
In conclusion it is often said that there are too many books on Roman Britain and readers – and possibly reviewers! – may well agree. However, if this statement is limited to books based on the historical or epigraphic source or one confined to the historical sources themselves, this is certainly not true; and it is hard to conceive of any other writer who would have the knowledge to produce a work like Britannia Romana or one who would have had the ability to have read texts like the Bloomberg documents or lead curse tablets from Bath or Uley in the first place.
