Tomb-Houses
Some of the sculptured fragments found in the Camomile Street bastion, while doubtless parts of sepulchral monuments, as Price thought, are of too large a scale to have belonged to mausolea of the Igel type. Two of the stones evidently came from angle pilasters of considerable scale. As Price said: “The size and weight of the stones indicate that the edifice was of proportions to bear comparison with the sepulchres in the vicinity of Rome: such monuments were placed near the city gates.” One of the fragments just mentioned has a nude boy or Cupid carved against a background of foliage on one face, while the return of the same stone contains similar ornament without the boy. Probably on the front face there were several little figures one over the other. This treatment for a pilaster is found on the monuments of Trèves. The boy on the stone at the Guildhall carries an object which Price thought might be a trident, but it is rather a torch; amorini and torches had a sepulchral significance. These big stones must have formed part of the angle pilasters of a large square tomb-house. They are more than 1¾ ft. wide, and one is over 3 ft. high, and contains two units of the fine carved pattern of very similar character to the carving on the Haydon Square sarcophagus. I should doubt if it is much earlier, say, c. A.D. 300 (Fig. [70]). The pattern is evidently a simplification of the scheme shown in Fig. 61 from a tomb sculpture at Trèves, illustrated by Espèrandieu.
Fig. 70.
At the Guildhall is a niche-head cut out of one stone into an arch form (Fig. [71]). It came from the Camomile Street bastion and very possibly formed part of a monument—perhaps a built-up niche surrounded a larger scale figure than the usual reliefs of the steles. Price associated this niche-head with the stele now at the Guildhall, but that was rather all in one stone (see my restoration in Arch. Rev., 1913). A man’s head of larger size than that of the stele and separate from any background was found at the same time as the niche fragments, and the figure to which it belonged may have stood in the niche. Possibly, however, the stone formed the head of a small doorway. Another monument at the Guildhall is a crude and late sculpture of a lion seizing some other animal. Many similar groups have been found in Britain and abroad. It would have had some symbolical significance. “Mythological” figures, such as Hercules and Atys, seem also to have been used for tombs.
Fig. 71.
This examination of the few broken remnants of monuments that have been accidentally preserved, which obviously represent but a small percentage of those once existing in the cemeteries of Londinium, brings out a new criterion for an estimate of the dignity and opulence of the Roman city. To this evidence we may add the extent of the walls and the importance of the port, and the fact that the city was the key of the road system of the country. It was probably a seat of the Governor; in the Constantinian age it became a bishopric and a mint town. Then we have the quantity and costly nature of the imports which are known to us from objects in our museums—an immense quantity of Samian pottery, decorated glassware, silver, fine bronzes, etc. We also see how closely the monuments of London resembled those of Trèves, the later capital of Western Europe. Altogether I get the impression that Londinium must have been one of the most important commercial cities in the West. In the rote education of our schools, the great facts of our history are too much buried under an avalanche of minor details, and mere dates and names. If we can get a story written about Roman London, one scene must be set among the Tombs.
CHAPTER VI
SCULPTURE
“Fantastic and even grotesque, it possesses a wholly unclassical fierceness and vigour, and not a few observers have remarked that it recalls not the Roman world, but the Middle Ages.”
—Haverfield on the Corbridge lion.