Several pieces of small highly decorated columns have been found in London, which must, I think, have belonged to memorial pillars and not to edifices. One of these found in the Houndsditch bastion, only 9 in. in diameter, was decorated with a simple lattice pattern (Fig. [57]). Another is in the London Museum, which, in the part preserved, has a scale pattern (Fig. [58]). A third fragment, at the Guildhall, has again both lattice and scale patterns (Fig. [59]).
Fig. 58.
Fig. 59.
Jove and Giant columns were doubtless sepulchral, but they were also religiously significant. They were intended to suggest ideas of the conquest of evil powers and of renewal. Dr. Haverfield was, I think, mistaken in the passage quoted above in speaking of the giant as a barbarian; he was rather a power of darkness, and this is brought out by a piece of British evidence. Figures of four such creatures, each terminating in two serpents, fill the corners of a mosaic floor found at Horkstow; they support a large circle divided into two rings and a centre; in the outer ring are Nereids and swimming creatures, in the inner one little genii with baskets of flowers, etc. The rings are divided into four parts by radial bands, and the general suggestion must be of the seasons and the cosmic order. The snake-legged creatures in the corners are the Aloadæ, the giants who attempted to scale Olympus by putting Pelion on Ossa. They are here in their proper places in the chaos outside the circle of the ordered world, “the wheel of nature.” This pavement helps to explain the general idea which led to the erection of Jove and Giant pillars, and shows that these ideas were current in Britain. The column is the world-axis set round by planets and seasons; above, the power of light and order hurls back the giant of gloom and strife (see Daremberg and Saglio, Aloadæ). In the foreign examples of the sculptured groups which rested on the capitals of the columns Jove sometimes had a wheel as his weapon, and wheels have been found carved in Roman altars in Britain. “The sides of two large altars to Jupiter at Walton House bear the thunderbolt for Jupiter and a wheel, which possibly equates the Jupiter of these altars with the Gaulish ‘wheel-god’” (Ward). An altar at Housesteads invokes the sun-god. The Jove and Giant pillars are evidence of a time when the old mythological names had been refitted to express ideas of good and evil, cosmic forces, and supposed planetary influences. The mosaic floors, as we shall see, provide further evidence of what was “higher thought” in third-century Roman Britain.
Fig. 60.
Mausolea.—When the bastion of the City Wall in Camomile Street was destroyed, many sculptured stones from small but very richly decorated edifices were found. Price recognised that some of them must have belonged to an important sepulchral monument comparable with the Igel monument near Trèves. I saw, in 1912, some stones at Trèves which had a scale pattern cut on a roof-like slope, and soon after my return I noticed a stone of the same sort in the Guildhall Museum. Without having Price’s words in my mind I came to the conclusion that in the cemeteries of Londinium there must have been mausoleum-like monuments of the kind which the Museum at Trèves had shown me were common in the neighbourhood of that city. Several of these mausolea are now illustrated in Espèrandieu’s great work on the Roman sculptures of Gaul. In 1913 I offered a tentative restoration of a London monument of this type in the Architectural Review.
