Sunday, February 11, 2007

Letters from the Roman past


"gruel ...

pork-crackling ...

trotters ..."


Longtime readers of this blog know that a certain small mouse stoked my interest in Vindolanda, a Roman outpost by Hadrian's Wall where fate preserved some intriguing correspondence. In their banality these letters give a vivid glimpse of life along what seemed to the foreign-born residents of Vindolanda to be the distant frontier. The missives can be accessed here.

[noticed via Tirincula]

2 comments:

Gabriele Campbell said...

The Vindolanda tablets are a fascinating ressource for a writer of novels set in Roman times, and in the north of Britannia in particular. :)

Have to get my hands on that Minimus book, just for fun.

theswain said...

NOw of all places that an old school closet classicist/medievalist like me expected to find reference to Vindolanda and its letters about socks from Egypt and the like would be this blog!! There's got to be a theory related comment in there about the survival of the "banal" into the present....