the story of the Trust and our very own Roman charioteer…

Last week (on Friday 22nd April), a small plaster cast arrived here at the Roman circus centre – this has kindly been made for the Trust by Emma Hogarth of Colchester and Ipswich Museums. The cast is of four joining fragments of a Roman glass cylindrical cup, which we excavated from the site of Colchester ‘Building 47’ at our Balkerne Lane site in Colchester in 1976. The fragments show a victorious charioteer (auriga) in a racing-chariot (a quadriga) with four horses. The charioteer and his team of horses have clearly finished and won the race, as the charioteer is holding a victory wreath and palm frond. The Trust’s logo was based on the image on the four fragments when it was created in the late 1970s by the Trust’s then draughtsman Bob Moyes. Amazingly, over 25 years later – in 2004 – we identified the remarkable site of the Roman circus in Colchester, the only known Roman circus in Britain, which would have been the venue for chariot-racing. (In 2012, of course, we opened our Roman circus centre and part of the circus site to visitors.)

The four fragments represent a Roman glass cup which was made of pale yellow/green glass and which would have been mould-blown, in a three-part mould. The cup was decorated in relief and, if you rotated it, then you would have seen the sequence of a Roman chariot-race, rather like a modern strip-cartoon. The cup has been dated to AD 60/1-circa AD 75-80. The four fragments consist of part of the rim and body of a Roman glass cup of a type which is classified as a ‘one-frieze chariot-race cup’ (see Colchester Archaeological Report or CAR 8: Roman vessel glass from excavations in Colchester, 1971-85). The cup would have been a luxury table-ware item in Roman Colchester. It actually has three friezes and two borders of small pellets: the friezes are an inscription frieze at the top, the main chariot-race frieze in the middle, and a lower frieze which shows a tree with branches and fruits and wild animals, ie an attacking lion and parts of two other wild animals, one of which is a deer. The fragment of the inscription reads ..OLYMPE VA… or ‘Olympus farewell’. The middle frieze shows part of the chariot-race: in full, this would have shown four racing-chariots and charioteers. This frieze would also have shown elements of the Roman circus, probably the Circus Maximus in Rome (you can see part of an obelisk in our fragments).

Olympus, the victorious charioteer, holds a wreath in his right hand and the reins in his left hand, and he is doing his lap of honour around the arena. (The scenes of wild animals and hunting are included on the cup because Roman circus games included chariot-races and the hunting of wild animals.) On this type of chariot-race cup, the four charioteers are named as Pyramus, Ierax and Eutycus, as well as Olympus, and they were all famous actual charioteers in Rome. Olympus was a charioteer of the Red faction, one of the four Roman chariot-racing factions. Chariot-racing was the most popular sport in the Roman empire and images of the sport occur on domestic and personal items such as lamps, finger-rings and, of course, glass cups, as well as in murals and mosaic floors. The tiny details on the cup are stylised but surprisingly accurate: for example, the chariot seems to be made of wickerwork and the charioteer is wearing a helmet and is roped around the body. The cup belongs to a group of vessels of which 30 examples had been found when CAR 8 was published, ie 24 on the Continent and six in Britain (from Colchester, York and London). The Colchester cup may have been imported from the Rhone valley or the upper Rhineland, or even made locally.

We retrieved the four fragments from a dumped deposit dating to immediately after the Boudican revolt of AD 60/1, on our Balkerne Lane site in Colchester, just outside the Roman town wall. The dumped deposit formed part of the site of Colchester ‘Building 47’ in our numbered series of buildings. The remains of Building 47 represented one to three Roman strip-houses which fronted onto the Roman street. On the site of Building 47, we uncovered burnt daub floors, stumps of daub walls, slots and small pits, the remains of an oven, the remains of a baby burial, three votive pots, and the rare (in Colchester) evidence of wooden floor joists (see Colchester Archaeologial Report or CAR 3: Excavations at Lion Walk, Balkerne Lane, and Middleborough, Colchester, Essex). The site of Building 47 also produced Roman pottery fragments. Building 47 had been destroyed during the Boudican revolt of AD 60/1, when the native Britons rebelled against the Roman occupation of Britain: they burned the Roman towns of St Albans, London and Colchester to the ground and massacred their inhabitants. Colchester’s Roman circus seems to have been built later, in the early 2nd century AD, and to have been in use for about 150 years, until towards the end of the 3rd century. These four small fragments of glass are fascinating and also, now, very interesting in the context of Roman Colchester and its Roman circus – they are also very important to the Trust…

Trust director Philip says: ‘We liked the image so much that we chose it for our logo. The racing-chariot is iconically Roman, so that fits the bill, and the victorious charioteer with his symbols of victory encourages achievement.’  The new plaster cast has been made to form part of a special new display at the Roman circus centre, which you must come and see for yourself… (Although we will post an item about the new display in the blog soon!) You can see the four fragments of glass on display at Colchester Castle Museum.

All the Trust’s fieldwork and specialist reports, including CAR 3 and CAR 8, are published online at http://cat.essex.ac.uk/ .

The images show: the Trust’s logo (above); the drawing of the four fragments published in CAR 8; a recent photo. of the four glass fragments (kindly provided by Emma Hogarth of Colchester and Ipswich Museums); and the new plaster cast.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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