Holding out for a Nero: redefining the Chichester / Rome Connection

Conference: RAC/TRAC (Roman Archaeology / Theoretical Roman Archaeology)

Dates: 12/04/2024

Publication Date: 13/04/2024

Abstract:

Recent archaeological fieldwork in West Sussex, combined with new survey of sculpture and a reanalysis of museum archive material, has not only shed new light on the nature of (and form taken by) early Roman settlement in central southern Britain, but has also helped better define the intimate relationship between the Julio Claudian first family of Rome and the British Iron Age ruling elite. It has long been recognised that first century Chichester (NOVIOMAGVS) originally possessed a large number of important inscriptions, but the immediate area has also produced sculptured images featuring both the princeps and other members of his immediate family. These, when combined with the muscular, imperial-inspired architecture of palatial buildings at Fishbourne, Pulborough, Southwick and Eastbourne, suggest that our current understanding of Roman activity in Sussex and eastern Hampshire is deficient, the area in fact being critical to the transmission of Romanitas and formal creation of the new province. The Sussex coastal plain was not some provincial backwater, Fishbourne palace acting as a “beacon of civilisation in a landscape otherwise devoid of Mediterranean culture”, but something altogether more significant. This slice of Britannia was, it seems, a favoured place for both old and new money as well as for those Britons who were simply holding out for a Nero.

Source: Manual