Writing Londinium with the Seven Senses

Trying a garland made by Patty Baker (Kent)

by Caroline Lawrence

[This is a shortened and edited amalgam of two papers I gave in early-October 2018, one for the University of Kent and one for a conference called Sensory Experience in Rome's Northern Provinces hosted by the Roman Society at Senate House in London. Go to #SERNP2018 to see lots more about this]

Archaeologist Lindsay Allason-Jones, a visiting fellow at Newcastle University recently said, ‘It wasn’t until I wrote a book from the point of view of a Romano-British woman that I started to think about things like where did she keep her house key?’  

This is what I have discovered. As I write characters who have adventures in the ancient world, I have to imagine them moving through space with the sights, sounds, smells, and all other sensory experiences in order make it seem real to my young readers. This is especially important for children who need to be grounded in a sensory world. 

Here is how I used the seven senses to portray Roman Britain in my most recent series of books for kids, the Roman Quests, and also in my new work-in-progress The Girl with the Ivory Knife, in which a 12-year-old London schoolboy travels back in time to 3rd century Londinium (Roman London). 

SIGHT is the first of the five senses. For my Roman Quests I wanted to get an overview of what Roman London would have looked like. 

Model of London's port at Museum of London Barbican 

• Ruins aren’t so helpful to me… I need more
• Museums are useful, with their statues, inscriptions and artefacts. The Museum of London and it’s archaeology department MOLA gave me tons of material. 
• Models are very special. Storytellers know the power of the miniature.  
• Interactive maps like the one produced by MOLA are super.

superb Bath Roman Baths

• 3D computer walk-throughs on YouTube are too clean but often introduce light effects. 
• Google maps and Google Earth help me get a birds’ eye view of the terrain or walk along a road from Chester to Leicester, for example. 
• Alan Sorrell’s marvellous paintings and drawings. See my blog about him HERE. 
• Visiting sites like Butser Ancient Farm, Bath Roman Baths & Fishbourne provide 3D spatial and sensory experiences especially when they are peopled by re-enactors. 

Hard to Be a God (2013)

• Re-enactment events provide an abundance of unexpected revelations especially when they are performed by those who are passionate about getting details right. I particularly admire the members of Britannia, the Ermine Street Guard and Leg II Augusta. 
• Watching movies. For my book set in Roman London, a place you would NOT want to visit, I watched Hard to Be a God (2013), like Fellini Satyricon only with more mud, excrement and chickens. 
• Film sets can give you inspiration, too. 

London’s Mithraeum hadn’t reopened when I was writing the Roman Quests and besides, those books are set in the late first century. But I could use the Mithraeum for my new work in progress about the boy travelling back in time.

For my Time Travel book, I tried to think of things we don’t see today that would have been commonplace then. 
• A sky full of stars
• Crucified man on a cross
• People in rags and barefoot
• Indoor darkness – a world with no electricity
• Someone carrying a torch, a very symbolic object
• Someone with a staff (Main purpose? To beat off dogs!)
• The different stages of animal sacrifice
• A mind-boggling array of diseases & deformities
• Especially eye infections, skin disorders and toothache

For the first time I could relate ancient objects to modern ones. E.g.
• A tunic could be described as a big T-shirt and a toga as a blanket
• Mithras’ Persian cap is like a Smurf hat
• A Mithraeum initiation could be described as a flight simulator 
• And the seven grades as ascending levels of a video game...

Sophie Jackson on what smells to put in the Mithraeum

SMELL is one of the most evocative senses, and one of the hardest to convey in words. Giacomo Savani, one of the organisers of the conference, started with a quote from Rosemary Sutcliffe in which she speaks of the ‘blue reek of wood-smoke’. Evidence hints that my time travelling boy Alex might have  smelled burning pine cones in London’s Mithraeum, which he will use as the site of a portable portal to third century Londinium. However, Sophie Jackson (above), one of the key archaeologists involved in recreating the Mithraeum Experience, said the smell of men, cooked chicken and damp might have drowned out any pine freshness! 

A Saturnalia dinner with Stephen Cockings

Other scents from Roman London:

• To Alex, a girl smells like apple pie (clove oil for her aching teeth) and church (frankincense perfume)
• Someone’s breath smells of garlic
• Alex gets headache from breathing oil lamp smoke 
• He also smells the peaty smell of outdoor braziers
• And the roast pork smell of body being cremated 
• With an undercurrent of incense burned against demons

Smelly and Tasteable things

TASTE is one of the easiest of the senses to tap into.
• Posca, water with a splash of vinegar, was often drunk by soldiers.
• I make mine with red wine vinegar but you could use white, too.
(Adding even a little wine or vinegar to water kills bacteria. The Romans didn’t know about bacteria, germs or viruses but somehow they knew adding vinegar to water was good.)
• Honey was a hot food, prescribed for those of a phlegmatic humour. 
• Olives, especially the little bitter black ones are ‘a taste as old as cold water…’ (Lawrence Durrell in Prospero’s Cell)

ELMA mastic gum from Chios

• How did they serve a hot sausage in Roman London? Probably with a cabbage leaf wrapper. A clever idea I got from a fast food stall at a Reenactment event.
• Mastic gum. One of the sniffable objects at the Museum of London’s Roman Dead exhibition (on until 28 October) is something called mastic. I first discovered mastic while reading the first century AD epigrams of Martial. He talks about a man who picks his teeth with a mastic toothpick. But it was mainly used as gum to be chewed to freshen the breath. In fact, we get the word ‘masticate’ from mastic. Read more HERE.

SOUND is harder to replicate than taste in my opinion, especially music. Armand D’Angour has been doing fun experiments into ancient Greek music and I often listen to Indian music to try to get an idea of how exotic Roman music might have sounded. We do know about other sounds, such as: 

interactive sound at Museum of London Docklands

• The crowing of a rooster or cluck of chickens in the street
• Dogs barking in the night 
• The wailing of bereaved, more common and more audible then? 
• The shouts of peddlers, bread sellers, a rag-and-bone woman...
• Tepidarium echoes with the sound of slaps and grunts of masseuse
• Blacksmiths hammering
• Door hinges squeaking
• Bells and rattles to frighten off demons and cover unholy sounds

TOUCH can be experienced not just with fingertips and lips, but also with our bare feet. Here are just a few a time traveller might have encountered in Londinium. 

interactive touch at Museum of London Docklands

• Wet grass against bare legs in a tunic
• Bare Feet on a muddy, gravel-studded road
• Or on a mosaic floor or on London brick
• Glutinous mud of the south bank foreshore
• Warmth of a kiln and hard-baked earth around it
• A piglet snuffling at someone’s armpit
• Itchy mosquito bites on bare legs
• Stepping in squishy, still-warm manure
• loom-woven linen & woollen belt pouch
• Carbantinae (one-piece leather shoes) rub top of feet
(The Roman Dead also has a display where you can touch a replica hobnail boot, top and bottom.)

KINESTHETIC means the awareness of the position and movement of the body. Many of the objects I’ve been talking about are interactive. You have to engage with them in a kinesthetic way. 

Richard and Caroline Lawrence in Nimes

• Wearing the clothes including hobnail shoes on the cobbled streets of a Roman town like Nimes.
• Playing with an oil-lamp or a pigskin lamp
• A Saturnalia Dinner
• Leather bikini bottoms as worn by girl acrobats
• NO Bogus Roman Handshake
• NOT using a sponge stick
• Trying out a wax-tablet
• Using a strigil and oil

Tom, Giacomo and Patty try out a strigil and scented oil

At the Sensory Archaeology Conference, co-presenter Tom Derrick brought homemade oil-based Roman perfume. To demonstrate the difference of smell in the bottle and on the skin he borrowed my replica strigil to let people rub his scented olive-oil on their arms and then scrape it off. One conference member, Mr. Colin Gough, observed, One thing that surprised me was the amount of oil left after a good strigiling (is that even a word?). Unless the Romans were a lot better at it there must’ve been a lot of sticky people leaving the baths plus the oil slick on the water! 

THE SIXTH SENSE is the final sense I want to think about. 

A double flame lamp at a Saturnalia dinner

Have you ever meditated about your site, your text, your historical character, your artefacts, your bones? By meditation I mean a contemplation of your world, characters, etc using your non-verbal visual imagination. It's like a virtual reality game but with added sounds, smells and things you would feel? If you meditate, try it. If you find meditation hard, try writing a fictional piece about your subject. Maybe not the main subject but something peripheral. Someone or something on the edges of your topic. You can even do a poem or haiku. 

At the moment I’m involved in a marvellous project based around the archaeology of the House of Amarantus in Pompeii. I had the idea to write a scene from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old slave girl who has recently arrived in Pompeii from Britannia. She sleeps on a mat in the doorway of her mistress’s bedroom. My idea of showing not telling the kids about the layout of the house is that she wakes up one night in pitch black and has to grope her way to the loo. 

So close your eyes for a moment and imagine waking up in the peristyle walkway of a fairly posh Roman house. Think of five different things your fingers might encounter as you push yourself to your feet and start to grope your way along the corridor. Think of five different things you might hear. Think of five different things you might smell. Where do you have to avoid evil spirits in the house? Think of five different ways your body is reacting to this night-time grope. 


Whether we are scholars, writers, historians, teachers or all of the above, let us study the past not just with our heads but with our hearts and with all the senses.

My Roman Quests are perfect for kids studying the topic of Romans in Key Stage 2. My first time travel book, The Girl with the Ivory Knife, is out early April 2019. It is based on real bones and sites from Roman London. 

50 Bizarre Claims About Domitian

Caroline Lawrence & the 'Emperor Domitian'

In screenwriting classes they often urge authors to give their hero the most powerful opponent possible. 

So when it came time for me to write a long-planned spinoff to my Roman Mysteries books I looked at my timeline in the late first century AD and realised I had the perfect opponent, a fascinating tyrant who was the most powerful man in the world at that time: the Emperor Domitian. 

Domitian was the eleventh emperor if you start counting from Augustus. He was the third Flavian and ruled for fifteen years, longer than his father Vespasian or his brother Titus. By all accounts he was a corrupt monster. Recently some scholars have tried to argue that his reputation was the result of a smear campaign by a few disgruntled senators.

For the first three books in my Roman Quests series, he is the unseen opponent sending soldiers, guards and torturers to pursue my protagonists. In the final book, Return to Rome, we finally meet him and witness his assassination. Of course I am writing for children so some of the action happens offstage and other events are seen through the eyes of my young protagonists.  

When you write about someone you can’t help but empathise. I feel Domitian was probably somewhere on the spectrum and socially dysfunctional. As one of my characters says near the end of Return to Rome, ‘If Domitian had been merely a butcher or a sailor he only would have made life miserable for his small circle of family and slaves. A man like that should not be given the power to rule an empire.’

Domitian’s assassination in AD 96 was documented in gory detail by Suetonius Tranquillus, the great biographer of the Caesars who was about 27 years old at the time of Domitian’s death. You can read a vivid account in all its gruesome detail here. Other ancient authors who write bitterly about the eleventh emperor include Aelius Aristides, Dio Chrysostom, Dio Cassius, Eusebius, Martial, Pliny the Younger, Statius and Tacitus. 

Here are fifty bizarre claims about Domitian  – all made by ancient sources – that make him an irresistible opponent in a historical novel set at the end of the first century.

He was born on 24 Oct AD 51 in a house on Pomegranate Street in Rome.
This is one of the few ancient addresses that has come down to us.
He later turned the house into a temple dedicated to the Flavians, his family.
He grew up in poverty, although his father Vespasian later became emperor.
Once, before his father became emperor, he was forced to flee for his life.
He survived by dressing like a woman and hiding in the house of a friend.
He always plotted against his older brother Titus, who succeeded their father.
He was a skilled archer and often fired arrows through slaves’ spread fingers.
He often amused himself by spearing heat-drugged flies with a stylus. 
A steward once quipped that nobody was with him, ‘not even a fly’.
He became emperor in AD 81 after the mysterious death of his brother Titus.
An officer named Saturninus conspired against him in late 80s.
Domitian’s resultant paranoia led to a ‘reign of terror’ in the AD 90s.
He covered some walls with reflective stone so that nobody could sneak up on him.
He put the freedman who assisted Nero’s suicide to death.
Unlike Nero, he did not avert his eyes from torture.
He liked to watch people and terrify them with his gaze
He often pretended to befriend people just before he executed them.
He encouraged slaves to denounce their rich masters as traitors
He then confiscated the property and split the proceeds with the delator.
He accused a pantomime actor named Paris of having an affair with his wife.
He spared his wife Domitia but murdered Paris in the middle of a street.
He executed people caught leaving flowers at spot where Paris had died.
He was a notorious womaniser and called his lustful activity ‘bed wrestling’.
He seduced his niece Julia, daughter of his brother Titus, and got her pregnant.
He caused Julia’s death by demanding she have an abortion that went wrong. 
He terrified guests by inviting them to death-themed dinner parties
The dinner parties were held in pitch-black rooms draped in black cloth.
Guests’ name-tags resembled grave slabs and were lit by grave lamps.
He gave them food commonly served at banquets for the dead.
Guest were served by naked boys painted black to resemble ghosts
He liked to watch female gladiators and pygmies battle in the arena.
He collected freaks and was especially fond of a boy with a tiny head.
Late in his reign, he demanded to be addressed as ‘master and god’.
He erected a gigantic bronze equestrian statue of himself in Caesar’s forum
He changed the name of his birth-month October to Domitianus.
(This change of month name did not catch on.)
He added gold and purple to the chariot factions of red, white, green and blue.
(The new chariot factions did not catch on.)
He put a high podium in his palaces to lift himself above others.
He was obsessed with his hair loss and wore an expensive wig.
He wrote a book about curing baldness.
He revered Minerva above all other gods and considered her his protector.
Shortly before his assassination he dreamt that Minerva abandoned him.
From an early age he knew the exact day and hour of his foretold assassination.
He had several astrologers put to death in order to stop their prophecies.
On the fated day lying slaves told him the deadly hour had passed and he relaxed.
After the first assassin stabbed him, several others piled in, too.
His wife was out of town but reputedly knew of the planned assassination.
Rome’s initial reaction to his death was fairly low-key.
The Senate proclaimed Nerva emperor with suspicious rapidity.
The Senate also decreed that his name and image be destroyed.
Domitian’s body was removed and cremated by his childhood nurse Phyllis.
She mixed his ashes with those of his niece Julia, whose death he had caused. 

Domitian (erased) with his wife Domitia on a coin

These are only a few fascinating claims about the life and death of Domitian. You can read lots more of them along with a fictionalised account of his assassination in my fourth and final Roman Quests book, Return to Rome. He also appears in my Roman Mysteries, especially final book in the series, The Man from Pomegranate Street. 

The Gem of Your Heart's Desire by Caroline Lawrence

One of my motives in writing historical fiction is to take the reader back in time. A powerful way of making that world seem real is to fill it with artefacts of the day. An ancient object can tell us volumes about daily life in past times, especially about the different ways people saw the world. 

Children in primary school (my readership) particular love objects they can see, hold, taste, smell and hear. Whenever I go for a walk to the park with my grandsons, they pounce on dropped items such as a used scrunchy, a broken key ring and even an unusual twig. Then they will compare, boast and squabble over these treasures like magpies. 

When I use Roman artefacts to detail a different historical period, I try not to just plonk them in. I try to make them significant and memorable. So I ask myself ‘How does this object illustrate the different sensibilities and/or mind-set of the time? How can this artefact be used to define a character?’ And finally, ‘How could I make this artefact a matter or life or death?’ 

Signet ring 
In the very first chapter of my first Roman Mystery, The Thieves of Ostia, a Roman girl named Flavia Gemina discovers her gift for being a detective when her father’s signet ring goes missing in an ancient take on the ‘locked room’ trope: the ‘locked villa mystery’. 

How does this object illustrate aspects of the ancient world? 
It speaks of literacy, identity and bureaucracy. 
How can it be used to define a character? 
The intaglio (carving in a ring) shows the divine twins Castor and Pollux and hints at the cognomen of the owner, Marcus Flavius Geminus. 
It also showcases his daughter Flavia’s gift for sleuthing.
How could it be a matter of life or death? 
Flavia finds the signet ring in a magpie’s nest along with a gold and emerald earring which she sells to the goldsmith. Later, she uses the gold he gives her to buy a dark-skinned slave-girl in order to save her from a dire fate. Nubia will be come her best friend.

Oil-lamp

One of the most basic Roman artefacts is an oil-lamp. A hollow clay vessel, it had a hole for oil and a hole for the wick and almost always some kind of decoration. Mention of oil-lamps remind my younger readers that ancient Romans had no electricity. 

I use an oil-lamp to help define Flavia’s character in Trimalchio’s Feast and other Mini-mysteries. In a Roman Mystery short story called The Case of the Citruswood Table I have her examine the scene of a crime. She deduces from a greasy handprint on the wall that the crime was committed at night: the perpetrator had been holding a clay oil-lamp that ‘sweats’ oil.
How could I make this article a matter of life or death? 
Simple. Have a breeze extinguish the flame or let the oil run out at a crucial moment in order to plunge the hero into darkness. 

Wax tablet 

Romans used to take notes and make wills on wooden tablets with beeswax. You would use a stylus to write on it. An ancient Roman could sign it with a firm press of their signet ring into its layer of wax. 
In my first Roman mystery, I introduce a feral child whose tongue has been cut out because he witnessed a crime. By book 2, Lupus is learning to read and write. The wax tablet will become his main method of communication and often a matter of life and death. 

Bronze Mirror 

‘Through a glass darkly’, the famous phrase from the Bible, should be translated ‘in a metal disk vaguely’ as this replica bronze mirror demonstrates. 

We see ourselves all the time. In mirrors, shop windows, family photographs and a thousand selfies. From examining a replica mirror like this one I got the idea that identical twins separated at a young age might not have had a clear idea of their appearance. What if one twin grew up in Britannia in an iron-age round house? His only chance to see himself would have been in the blade of a sword or in the reflection of a pond. So he might not recognise his twin even face to face. If one twin were Roman and the other a Briton they might even fight each other! 

Beaker for breast milk 

A clay beaker like this one from the British Museum is a startling reminder that there were no sterilised baby bottles in ancient times. One end was placed against the nipple so milk could be expressed. The other is nozzle shaped; the baby would suck on this end. The grinning actor’s mask on it is apotropaic; it turns away evil and keeps the milk from curdling. Once full, the holes would have been plugged up, probably with beeswax. Or the beaker would have been set on a table or shelf in the baby’s room. Archaeologists think that these beakers would have been dangerous because they couldn’t be sterilised and might have harboured germs.

In my first Roman Quest, Escape from Rome, 12-year-old Juba flees Rome with his siblings – including his baby sister – in the middle of the night. His mother tells him to buy a slave-girl to be a wet-nurse once he gets to Ostia. In the meantime he has a clay beaker full of milk in case the baby wakes at night. But when their pursuers are almost upon them and Juba most needs the beaker to quiet his crying sister, he discovers that his other sister has fed the milk to a stray kitten she found by the Circus Maximus. Life or death!

Sardonyx cameo

My brother-in-law Stephen Pollock-Hill is a glass maker with a passion for cameo glass and cameo jewels. One day a few years ago he showed me (online) this stunning sardonyx cameo of Minerva from the time of the Roman emperor Augustus. It had just been sold at a Christie’s auction for $60,000. 
‘Why don’t you use this in one of your books?’ he asked. 
So I did. 
I made the so-called Minerva Gem one of the most important elements in Juba’s flight from Rome. It becomes a kind of talisman first for Juba and later, in Britannia, for a red-haired girl who befriends him.

When I teach a simple but powerful story structure to 8-year-olds, I always talk about step 2, the Desire, which is often the engine of the story, the thing that drives the protagonist. Screenwriters often use a concrete object to symbolise the hero’s desire. For example, in the 2014 film Paddington, the eponymous bear’s desire is to find a new home. But you can’t ‘see’ finding a new home, so the screenwriters give us a brief visual symbol. A snow-globe of Big Ben succinctly illustrates Paddington’s desire to travel to London and seek a new home there. 

Gem of Your Heart’s Desire

This month (April 2017) I’m been struggling to finish the first draft of my fourth and final Roman Quest book, Return to Rome. The protagonist of this book is Bouda, the 13-year-old British girl who was raised as a cutpurse in the back streets of Londinium. She has been taught that ‘Gold and gems and pearls are the only thing that will keep you happy in this world.’ So she naturally wants gold and gems and pearls. Most of all, she wants the Minerva Gem. 

But what really drives her? What is her desire? And what concrete object can I use to symbolise it? I closed my eyes and asked my subconscious to find the answer. It came almost at once, a signet ring. Then I sat on my meditation couch and went into my intuitive right brain to write a possible passage that would show (not tell) the reader about Bouda’s driving force. 

She felt him take her hands and when she turned to look at him, he held her gaze. ‘Bouda. My father was the richest gem merchant in Rome. He had gold and gems and pearls. But those things didn’t keep him safe. Or my mother.’ She saw his jaw clench as he tried to control his emotions. ‘The gold and gems and pearls are not the end. They are the means.’
‘The means?’ 
‘They are the means to get what you want.’ He took a breath. ‘Bouda. What do you want?’
‘Safety!’ she replied. ‘To be safe. To not always be on the run.’ She felt her eyes filling with tears. 
‘No!’ he said. ‘That’s negative. That’s what you don’t want. What do you want? What does your heart desire?’ He had been holding her hands and now he lifted the two fingers with the signet rings on them: the Capricorn and the thunderbolt. ‘You didn’t choose either of these rings. But what if you could? If you could carve your heart’s desire on a gem, what would the picture be? What do you really want in this life?’ 

In Roman times, the design on an intaglio hinted at the owner’s name, career or favourite deity. But what is more appealing than a gem in a gold setting with an image that symbolises your life’s desire or passion? 

Last week I met two young fans for tea at the British Museum. Anna and Naomi are about the same age as my protagonist Bouda. Afterwards I showed them some of the objects that inspire my writing and told them about my idea of using a ring to show a character’s desire. I asked what picture carved on a gem would symbolise their heart’s desire. Anna replied a heart (for love) and children (for family). Naomi replied a heart (for love) and animals. I was able to tell them that in Roman times a Cupid often stood for higher love and the dolphin sometimes represented the soul. 

What image carved on a gem would symbolise your heart’s desire? 

Caroline Lawrence is author of The Roman Mysteries and The Roman Quests. The fourth and final Roman Quest, Return to Rome, will be published early in 2018.  

images © RomanBaths, © 2008 The Little Entertainment Group, © Christies, © BritishMuseum

Caroline Lawrence's Top Roman Sites in London

A few days ago, a fan of my Roman Mysteries books emailed to ask which places I would recommend for a visit to the nation’s capital. It’s a good question. London has been almost continuously occupied since the paleolithic period and is crammed with history including a myriad of goodies from the four centuries of Roman occupation. There is history everywhere, especially in the City of London, the square mile that is now the financial district but once housed the Roman fort and port. These are my top half dozen Roman-related sites. Incidentally, they are all free of charge! 

1. The British Museum 
If you only have time for one stop, make it this one. I use it as a kind of club to meet overseas visitors. I go there at least once a month and take fans to the Roman Life Room (69) and also room 70. If you have time, check out the Roman Britain room (49) & the Enlightenment Gallery, where you can touch an exact replica of the Rosetta Stone.
Tip: Go in the back way, via Montague Place; they are now doing bag searches and you will avoid the worst queues. 
Related blog: The Riddle of the Roman Vase

2. Museum of London 
London’s other great museum will soon be moving to Old Smithfields Market and might have a train passing through it. At the time of writing it is near St Paul’s tube station in the Barbican. There is a wonderful section devoted to Roman London. 
Tip: Look out for bits of London’s Roman wall outside and indeed, all over the City of London. Related blog: Visualising Roman London

3. The Victorian & Albert 
Did you know you can see Trajan’s column in London? It’s a plaster cast, but still gives you a good view and lovely detail. It was recently cleaned but reopened in December 2018 and looks better than ever. You can also see a life-sized plaster cast of Michelangelo’s David. Yes, it’s Renaissance not Roman, but still worth visiting. 
Tip: Visit the tea rooms across the courtyard and marvel at their beauty. 
Related blog: Trajan's Column at the V&A

4. Petrie Museum 
Not far from the British Museum in the maze of UCL (University College London) is this delightful gem of a museum. Egypt was important in Roman times and you can see many Roman era artefacts on display. Look out for ancient fabric, palm leaf sandals, charms for turning away evil and portraits of some Romans who lived there. It is open from 1-5 on Tuesdays through Saturdays.
Tip: combine this with a visit to the British Museum nearby. 
Related blog: Roman Egypt at the Petrie

5. The Thames Foreshore
If you are brave, descend steep steps on the north side of the Thames beside the Millennium Bridge. Wear Wellingtons or sturdy boots and gloves. Go at low tide and you will be amazed at the artefacts literally covering the foreshore, including lots of Roman brick. If you are very lucky you might find a Roman hairpin, votive figurine or coin. You can keep anything you see on the surface. This is called ‘Mudlarking’
Update: You now need a PLA permit to go on the foreshore. 
Tip: Don’t touch anything you pick up with bare hands until you’ve washed it. 
Related blog: Mudlarks on the Foreshore

6. The Roman Amphitheatre 
Like most of Roman London, the amphitheatre is underground, below street level. Access is free via a lift in London’s Guildhall Gallery. If you look across the guildhall courtyard you can see the location of the amphitheatre marked out in different coloured paving stones, like an intentional urban crop mark. Down below, only a few fragments remain of the stone amphitheatre that replaced the wooden one, but there is a stylised indication of seating and competitors.
Tip: Plan your visit to coincide with the next re-enactment of Roman games.  
Related blog: Gladiator Fun Facts

P.S. I have now added London's Mithraeum, a fab immersive experience. For more info, go HERE! 

Caroline Lawrence’s book The Roman Quests: Escape from Rome, is partly set in Roman London, AKA Londinium. 

Leeches, Lepers & Anal Surgery by Caroline Lawrence

You wait for ages for an exhibition on Ancient Medicine and then two come along at once, both in Chester, no less. It started when I decided to make a flash visit to Chester, AKA Roman Deva, site of some scenes in Death in the Arena, the latest in my Roman Quests series of books for kids set in Roman Britain.  

I tweeted about my planned day trip and a Chester historian named Emma Stringfellow tweeted back, offering to be my guide for the day so that she could show me her town. Why such generosity towards an author she has never met? Because Emma loves history, archaeology and Chester. She even coaxed the usually manically busy Dean Paton into giving up a few hours of his precious Saturday morning to show me In Good Humour, a Roman medicine exhibition mounted by his organisation Big Heritage, as well as his exhibition of Medieval Medicine called Sick to Death. 

Emma was waiting for me bright and early at Chester Rail staton at 8.45 on Saturday 23 July 2016. We walked into town, and she helped me find my bearings, pointing out Wales to the west and the road towards Northwich that my characters would be taking on their road trip. On my request we stopped at the partially-excavated amphitheatre with its modern mural and replica of an ancient tethering block for criminals or beasts. 

As we walked on, Emma gave me an idea of the layout of the town and the three-dimensionality, something you can only get from being there. She showed me the (modern) Roman garden and took me up onto the ramparts of the Saxon Wall. Chester, known as Deva in Roman times, boasted one of the three big legionary fortresses in Roman Britain. Built on a sandstone plateau, the fortress and area behind the amphitheatre would have overlooked the river Dee, which Emma said was carved out by glacial ice-melt. I was impressed by her knowledge of Chester. 

After a walk along the ramparts to get a feel for the shape of the fortress – the city streets still reflect its basic layout – we met Dean Paton at the Watergate Deli. He generously bought me tea and a croissant and told me about himself. Dean is the director of a company called Big Heritage which gets grants from organisations like the Wellcome Institute to put on historical and educational exhibits.  A man after my own heart, he wants to get families interested in history and does this by making exhibitions that are informative and fun.

Refreshed and briefed, I followed them to the Grosvenor Museum for its permanent Roman exhibition including one of the biggest collection of Roman tombstones, all recovered by the Victorians while repairing a later Medieval wall. One tombstone of a centurion Marcus Aurelius Nepos, was erected by his wife, but her own epitaph is missing. It’s a mystery! 

Big Heritage’s Roman medicine exhibition – In Good Humour – strongly references the four humours, the most important aspect of Graeco-Roman Medicine and one that is ignored by almost all authors of historical fiction. I love that the introduction to the exhibit shows the four humours (Latin for ‘liquids’) that each manifest qualities of the four elements. The coloured tubes represent red blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm (mucus). 

The ancients believed that everyone had one (or two) dominant elements and that these determined a person’s temperament. E.g. Someone with too much yellow bile is ‘choleric’ HOT & DRY. They might be hot tempered but decisive and often need cooling foods and environments. A doctor aimed to help his patients find a balance of the humours. At the simplest level you could treat a fever by prescribing cool cucumber and cure a cold with hot peppers. 

I have blogged elsewhere about the humours and cupping and I’ve even posted a test for kids – Which Temperament Are You – so I was thrilled to see not only a mention of cupping vessels, but some live leeches. Dean put his hand on a wire grill above a tank of water and within moments skinny black leeches sensed the heat and began to curl up to the surface in the hopes of gorging on warm, sweet blood. They offered an alternative to wet cupping which involved cutting the arm (in the crook of the elbow) or hand (between the fingers) and letting blood flow into the cup. 

The exhibition boasts some marvellous skeletons showing examples of Schmorl’s node. This is a growth on the spine of someone who has been working too hard, probably – but not necessarily – a slave. More bones offered clues: a badly broken leg, an amputated arm bone and a skull with a hole in it from trepanning, some of which showed signs of healing and therefore indicated that the patients survived.  

There was a wooden toilet seat (Oh joy!) which reminded me that another method of balancing the humours was the clyster (enema). This might possibly be the oldest Roman loo seat from Britannia. Dean and I posed on replica toilets nearby. Just the sort of thing to grab the interest of a child. Some other notable items in the exhibition were amulets to keep away evil, various herbs to be smelled and a fine inscription in Greek by a doctor from Asia Minor to Asclepius, the god of healing.

Emma and Dean then took me along the ramparts of the upper walls to Big Heritage’s second exhibition on ancient medicine. Still in preparation the day I went, Sick to Death is now open. As you enter the spooky 14th century Water Tower, you pass the lifelike model of a medieval dysentery sufferer sitting on the loo and suffering a bad case of ‘the runs’. Just the sort of thing to delight children and make their parents go Ewww! 

But what’s inside is even more gruesome: a realistic leper begging for alms, a partly dissected criminal with his organs in bowls below him, and a life-sized placard of The Wound Man. A creepy plague doctor with his beak-like nose to be filled with aromatic herbs looks like something out of Star Wars. The exhibition is interactive so you can smell bowls of herbs and touch replica skulls showing the pockmarks of syphilis or the hole made by an arrow. 

More serendipity: a roving Roman doctor arrived when I was there. He showed me his bag of Roman instruments, so beautifully made that it would be hard for an expert to tell them from the real thing. Dean pulled out a Roman doctor’s probe and told me how the second century doctor Galen could tell by tapping what was going on under the skin. 

Surgery was a tricky proposition back in Roman times, and only used as a last resort. So I hesitated when the doctor invited me to try out a little anal surgery. In the end I agreed. He handed me a finely balanced replica scalpel and watched as I bent over a man’s (thankfully) replica backside and excised a bright red fistula (Latin for ‘ulcer’). The fistula looked a lot like one of those maraschino cherries they put in cocktails. I won’t be drinking one of those for a while. 

At the end of a satisfyingly squirmy morning I offered to treat Emma and Dean to lunch. To my surprise, Dean suggested Spud-U-Like at 39 Bridge St. He wasn’t just being considerate of my wallet; he knew that in their basement dining room you can sit next to sandstone hypocausts from the huge Roman bathhouse in the 2nd century fortress. After our jacket potatoes Dean said goodbye but Emma took me to the Dewa Roman Experience and then dropped me at the Chester Tourist Centre so I could buy a copy of Roman Chester, the book she had been brandishing like a talisman all day. As I travelled home from Chester, my mind was buzzing with ideas and my heart was full of gratitude, thanks to the generosity of two of its most passionate resident historians.

Thank you, Emma and Dean! 

In Good Humour at the Grosvenor Museum is on until 6 November 2016. 
Sick to Death at The Water Tower, Chester Walls, is on open every day in August 2016 from 10.30 to 4.30pm

Death in the Arena, book 3 of the Roman Quests, will be published in 2017. Escape from Rome, book 1, is out now.