There are moments when an ancient object emerges from the soil and seems, for a second, to close the gap between you and the deep and slumbering past. Then, almost as soon as a picture has shifted into bright focus, the illusion of connection passes: one is left with the same old sensation of puzzle, of seeing a long-distant world indistinctly and partially, as if through a misted-up pane of glass.
This week, one of those moments of brief and magical clarity arrived in the form of an unassuming shard of Roman terracotta, 6cm by 8cm, found in Andalucía’s Guadalquivir valley.
Once upon a time, the fragment formed part of a large, pear-shaped amphora. That in itself is not remarkable – these clay vessels were made on an industrial scale in the area, filled with olive oil and transported throughout the Roman empire.
What is remarkable about this fragment is that it is inscribed with words – and not just any old words. As a team of archaeologists reported this week in a scholarly journal, they come from Virgil’s long poem Georgics, about the skill, the abundance and the backbreaking toil of farming. It is a passage right from the start of the work, in which the great first-century BC poet invokes the gods Liber (Bacchus) and Ceres, describing how the Earth exchanged acorns for ears of wheat – essentially, the mythical invention of farming.
The lines are intriguingly misspelled, and fragmentary, owing to the size of the shard, but written in what Prof Alan Bowman, at the University of Oxford, approvingly calls “a very nice cursive hand, nothing sloppy about it”. Bowman is one of the distinguished scholars who has worked on deciphering the huge cache of fragmentary first-century AD letters and documents known as the Vindolanda tablets, discovered near Hadrian’s Wall. He agrees with the authors of the Spanish scholarly article that the handwriting suggests a date from the second or third century AD.
The lines were incised into the pot when it was still freshly thrown, almost certainly when it was lying upside down in the workshop to dry out. But by whom, and why? Such amphorae were not really meant to be seen. They were practical, ordinary. Often they were stamped or scratched with information about their manufacturer, but no one has found another that is inscribed with poetry. In Rome, there is a human-made hill called Monte Testaccio, largely formed of shards of Andalucían amphorae exactly like this one. It is sometimes open to visitors – occasionally the Guardian’s Roman food columnist, Rachel Roddy, leads special tours there with the expert guide Agnes Crawford. You can climb up the hill, crunching on the thick terracotta underfoot. If you examine a shard, you’ll find it still tacky from the remnants of 2,000-year-old oil. Sometimes you can see the fingerprints of the person who made it, and consider the backbreaking toil – likely the work of enslaved artisans – of throwing these immense, functional, single-use pots.
Oddly enough, though, bits and pieces of Virgil do turn up in curious places around the Roman world. There is a Vindolanda tablet that contains a neatly written line of Virgil’s Aeneid, perhaps from some young pupil’s writing exercises; another contains a stray line of his Georgics. Only last year, one of Bowman’s colleagues on the Vindolanda decipherments, Roger Tomlin, published details of a bit of roof tile found in the Roman town at Silchester, Hampshire, that had had a line of the Aeneid etched into it when wet. Another roof tile from Silchester is incised with the words “conticuere omnes” – “they all fell silent” – which is also from the Aeneid.
Tomlin points out that whoever scratched the Georgics lines into the Spanish amphora “was not copying from a book: he was writing from memory”. That can be inferred from the misspellings: they are likely the result of mishearings or misremembering, as you might slightly fudge the text of a song lyric. So: an educated, poetry-loving person, passing by a drying pot in a workshop in Spain, getting out a stylus and writing down a few lines of poetry. Why? It’s a mystery.
As Tomlin says, “The graffito was not part of the manufacturing or marketing process. It wouldn’t have sold the amphora or said what was inside.” When the pot was turned over and filled with oil, it wouldn’t even have been visible. But maybe we don’t need to think about why. Maybe we only need to think of its being done. In that fleeting moment of clarity, I imagine a young man holding his breath in concentration, his left hand steadying the bulk of the pot. In his right hand, the metal tip of his stylus meets the sticky resistance of half-dried clay, and his memory is obedient – mostly – to the beat of Virgil’s immortal lines.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
