INTRODUCTION
During 2016–17, the largest archaeological excavation in Roman Leicester (Ratae Corieltavorum) for over a decade took place on the site of the former Stibbe and Maxim Building north of Friars Causeway, off Highcross Street (National Grid Reference SK 5826 0473), encompassing parts of three insulae in the northern part of the city (fig. 1).Footnote 1 Undertaken by University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS), the excavation revealed a complex of Roman town houses in insulae IXa and IXb, and part of the Roman theatre in insula XVI, to the south. Within a room of a large town house, beneath a later Roman floor surface, an unusually decorated, cast copper-alloy key handle (fig. 2) was excavated.
Location of the Friars Causeway site within Leicester (G. Speed). (© ULAS)
The Friars Causeway key handle after conservation (length 120 mm) (G. Speed). (© ULAS)
The discovery extends the known types of elaborate Roman key handles bearing figural decoration and offers, we argue, a significant addition to the corpus of representations of damnatio ad bestias: the killing of captives and criminals as punishment and spectacle. It is novel both in terms of its composition and participants, and in its exploitation of a three-dimensional medium to enhance the drama and pathos of the scene. It is also one of a very small number of Roman key handles found in situ, within a documented stratigraphic context.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONTEXT
The key handle comes from a room in the southern wing of a large town house. This high-status dwelling, built in the later second century, was over 40 m in length, and the main reception room contained the finest mosaic to be uncovered in Leicester in over 150 years (fig. 3).Footnote 2 At the western end of the southern wing was a large square room adjacent to the street, which, during the fourth century, probably became a workshop. The earlier tessellated floor had become worn and was replaced by one of compacted mortar; the key handle was inserted into the top of the make-up layer in between (fig. 4). This layer contained fourth-century pottery, including Lower Nene Valley colour-coated ware bead-and-flange bowls and plain-rimmed dishes, and an Oxford red colour-coated ware mortarium; the latter tends not to occur in Leicester assemblages before the mid-fourth century.Footnote 3 A coin of Constantine dated a.d. 330–35 was recovered from the layer overlying the mortar floor.
Mosaic pavement in main reception room of the town house (G. Speed). (© ULAS)
The Friars Causeway key handle in situ (G. Speed). (© ULAS)
The handle was found in two (joining) pieces, with the hilt, with its calyx moulding, having been separated from the rest of the object (fig. 5). The iron shank of the key itself appears to have been deliberately sheared off before the object was placed in the ground, leaving the stub of a substantial square-sectioned tang emerging from the handle and continuing for perhaps about 50 mm into it. The main part of the handle lay on its side, whilst the hilt was found, nearly vertical, next to it, suggesting that the complete object was set upright in the substrate but then broke when the floor subsided.
Pie-crust moulding forming the hilt of the key handle and showing sheared end of square shank (G. Speed). (© ULAS)
DESCRIPTION
When the two pieces are joined, the handle has a complete length of 120 mm and weighs 304 g. It tapers in width from the hilt to the tip and is slightly curved, so that it sits well in the palm of the hand; the rear of the figural composition is slightly flattened. The figures on the handle are cast in high relief and form two groups. Towards the tip, an adult human male, half naked and wide eyed, grapples with a male lion (fig. 6); below, four naked youths are arranged around the base of the handle, staring outwards but embracing one another in a protective manner (fig. 7). The following paragraphs first describe each group in turn and then consider how the scene may be interpreted.
Upper half of the key handle showing rear and front of man and lion (G. Speed). (© ULAS)
Lower half of the key handle: youths 1–4 from left to right (G. Speed). (© ULAS)
In the upper pair of man and lion, the former wears trousers and sandals but appears naked above the waist, although the creases on his left elbow, created by the pressure of the lion's left foot above, may be suggestive of clothing rather than muscle (fig. 6). He stands with legs bent at the knee, one more than the other, and his outsized head turns to his right, away from the lion's mouth. He sports a full beard and moustache, with individual strands differentiated, and his projecting eyeballs, with indented pupils, as well as his broad nose, are clearly rendered. His ‘leonine’ hair sweeps in corrugated ridges down to the back of his neck. Little of the torso detail is visible, whilst, at the waist, a broad leather belt or band of cloth supports the trousers, the existence of which is indicated by creases in the fabric across the thighs and buttocks. The trousers appear to extend to below the knee, but the lower shin and ankle on the right foot are exposed, the latter defined by the thick leather strap of the sandals curving below it. Regarding the sandals, the straps over the top of the right foot and behind the heel are most clearly distinguishable. The feet rest on the heads of two of the youths in the group beneath. Dress and facial features clearly identify the figure as a barbarian, though not of an easily recognisable ethnic type (see below).
The lion's upper body presses against the chest of the barbarian, while its lower body curves around his left side. Its head reaches upwards, a ridge extending from the brow to the tip of the nose, with eyes and ears clearly rendered. Teeth are just visible in the jaws, which open to bite the left side of the human's head. The tufted fur of the mane, arranged in rows of curving locks, spreads in high relief halfway down the creature's back and down its left front leg. This leg reaches for the barbarian's upper-right arm and ends in a rather hand-like paw. The thin front right leg crosses the human's upper-left arm. On its lower back, the lion's haunches are clearly modelled; its left back leg extends into the space beneath the barbarian, whilst the right leg claws upwards to find a purchase on the waistband or belt. The left haunch rests on the head of the right-hand youth (4) below, whilst the tail curls around the base of the human's left leg and obscures his foot.
The group below comprises four overlapping young, naked males (Youths 1–4) standing on a hemisphere above the devolved calyx moulding at the junction between the shank and handle; they stare outwards to the front and sides (fig. 7). The figures share clean-shaven youthful features, with disproportionately large heads, hands and feet, and relatively small torsos with limited indication of musculature. Their facial features are precisely modelled, with large eyeballs projecting from their sockets and pupils indented, prominent brows, broad noses, closed mouths with pursed lips and full cheeks. In all cases their abundant hair stands proud in separate large, loose curls; this is especially visible in the case of Youth 4. The hairstyle of Youth 3 differs a little from that of the others, since at the apex of the brow a top-knot-like curl seems to rise.
The two youths (1 and 4) who flank the central, front-facing pair appear older, with larger heads and torsos; the right-hand one (Youth 4) extends a protective arm around the midriff of his younger neighbour (3). The left leg of Youth 3 is bent awkwardly to his right across Youth 2, with the foot resting on the lap of the seated Youth 1, who holds it in his hands. This suggests an arrangement of linked protective gestures afforded by the outer to the inner members of the group.
The description of individual figures begins with the seated Youth 1, on whose head rests the left foot of the man above him, and then proceeds to his left. Beneath Youth 1 is an arched moulding that is difficult to interpret (fig. 8) but is most logically read as the legs of a chair on which the youth sits. The seat of the chair is defined by a row of oblique, wavy incisions above the arch, probably representing wickerwork (fig. 7, left). Within the arch formed by the legs there is an arc of oblique slashes, perhaps again indicating wicker, framing a faintly incised central motif that resembles foliage. On this reading, only one leg of the chair is fully visible, the outer edge of which is straight and the inner one curved. This curve continues to form an arch that supports the seat and defines the inner edge of one of the rear legs of the chair. Alternatively, this feature might be read as an architectural detail, such as external arcading or the entrance to a public building. Only the right leg of Youth 1 is visible, his foot resting on a hemisphere which emerges from the calyx moulding at the joint with the shank. The left leg is hidden and may provide support for Youth 2, whose small feet appear to emerge below Youth 3 and dangle slightly above the hemisphere.
Hilt of handle showing (left) arched moulding forming legs of seat for Youth 1 and (right) detail of seat for Youth 1 (R. Small). (© ULAS)
Youth 2 stands, holding his right arm across his upper chest; on his head rests the right foot of the man fighting the lion above. The left side of his body is covered by Youth 3, who is the most prominent figure in the composition. His head is tilted to his right and his right hand holds a spherical object against his chest, perhaps a stone for defence. His right leg stands on the hemisphere below. Youth 4 emerges from behind Youth 3, with his extended protecting left arm parallel to and below Youth 3's right arm, which holds the spherical object. The lower body of Youth 4 is twisted unnaturally to the left to expose his genitals and both legs, the right foot resting on the hemisphere and against the chair on which Youth 1 sits. The left buttock and lower back of Youth 4 press against the shoulder and back of seated Youth 1 as they stare in opposite directions, thus completing the circle. Stylistically, the composition echoes that of many bronze objects from Britain in its rather simplified and schematised modelling of human and animal anatomies.Footnote 4
PARALLELS AND INTERPRETATIONS
Lions are among the most common zoomorphic motifs to decorate Roman furniture and objects. The preference stems from the opportunities for textural difference offered by the mane and body, the striking modelling offered by the head and, above all, the apotropaic potential of the head or protome, which lent its prophylactic power to the object it decorated and to the activity during which it was used. Some objects with lion decoration are documented in recurring types, such as the fittings in lion-head form for the wooden caskets placed in some cremation burials in south-east England.Footnote 5 Lion (-head) symbolism seems to have been especially favoured for decorating fittings for locks and doors; the finely modelled example recently excavated at Châteaumeillant (Cher), either a door or vehicle fitting, represents a spectacular instance of a wider phenomenon.Footnote 6 Such fittings may exemplify the translation of leonine and related images onto smaller objects from larger media, for example the burial monuments on which stone lions may be paired as stele acroteria, perch on precinct corners or crown larger mausolea, or the sarcophagi where the lion's aggression serves to counterpoint the virtus of its hunters.Footnote 7 Whether large or small, the visible ferocity of the lion serves a usefully ambivalent purpose, being an apotropaic motif par excellence for protecting the integrity of the object or monument from which it glares as well as an embodiment of death's unyielding embrace.
The large key handles with complex decoration of the type exemplified by the Friars Causeway object are found in small numbers across Rome's northern provinces. Stratified examples suggest a second- to third-century date, though most instances lack detailed contextual information, including several reported through the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS).Footnote 8 Zoomorphic decoration on these handles is common and mostly comprises the heads and sometimes also the bodies of aggressive animals, including lions, wolves and horses. Sometimes these are the sole decoration, bursting from a calyx at the junction between the handle and the shank. Sometimes the composition also involves a subordinate figure, most often pairing a lion with a human or animal head in its mouth.Footnote 9
Where these handles were made is not known; the variety of styles and motifs suggests the existence of more than one manufacturing centre, perhaps mainly concentrated in northern Gaul and the Rhineland.Footnote 10 The stylistic affinities of the figures on the Leicester key handle might point (weakly) towards its having been made in Britain.Footnote 11 The Leicester handle is significantly different from most examples carrying zoomorphic decoration, however, because of the form and complexity of its iconography, which shows a combat between a human and a lion rather than a lion with dismembered prey and comprises two discrete groups of figures rather than a single principal figure. Two key handles from Switzerland represent slightly closer parallels. On a 17.7 cm-long handle from Venthône, canton Valais, one of several bronzes in a likely structured deposit, a lion's mouth envelops the head of a standing naked youth as it rests its paws on his shoulders. Unlike the Leicester figure the human has his back to the lion.Footnote 12 On the second handle, from nearby Sierre, a panther holds an animal's head in its jaws while a naked youth, facing away from the animal and having no direct connection with it, holds his hands above his head.Footnote 13 Although the Leicester find shares the spirit of these handles, pairing an aggressive animal with a (vulnerable) human, its decoration lacks clearly analogous pieces. To make sense of the composition, it is necessary to compare it with images in other media (see below), although even then no single image provides the key to unlocking a single and unambiguous meaning for our object's iconography.
Nina Crummy and Mark Lodwick suggest that the combination of predatory animal and human on many key handles might have prompted their identification by a viewer as scenes of damnatio ad bestias: the execution of criminals and captives in the arena through mauling by wild animals.Footnote 14 This seems especially apposite in this case, where such a scenario may be more directly evoked, with one such execution perhaps in progress and another anticipated. The most famous surviving representations of damnationes are those on mosaics from North Africa. These include well-known arena scenes on the borders of a pavement at Zliten in Libya, the panel showing the mise à mort by a bull of three victims at nearby Silin and the two surviving corners of an arena scene originally extending across an entire mosaic at the domus Sollertiana in El Djem/Thysdrus (Tunisia).Footnote 15 A further partially published spectacle mosaic discovered at Wadi Lebda, Leptis Magna, includes the mauling by bears of naked humans who are seemingly fenced in with the animals and tied to posts.Footnote 16 In these, and other scenes, attendants push or drag bound victims towards the animals who act as their executioners. In one instance from Zliten, and in both domus Sollertiana examples, the feline has already sprung on to its standing victim's torso, as it has on the key handle. The apparent specificity of the victims’ features in some scenes, as well as the presence at Thysdrus of bears, discarded weapons from a hunt and a square podium or scaffold (catasta) in the middle of the mosaic with a trophy in each corner, have prompted Katherine Dunbabin and others cautiously to interpret the domus Sollertiana and Zliten scenes as showing the destruction of captives, perhaps of northern European origin in the former case and Saharan or sub-Saharan origin in the latter.Footnote 17 One of the arena scenes in the cryptoporticus mosaic from the villa at Torrenuova on the via Casilina outside Rome, found in 1834 and now in the Galleria Borghese, also appears to show a heap of dead or dying damnati; they are distinguished from nearby fighting venatores by their uniform drab tunics and exposed postures. Their lifelessness is in keeping with the unrelenting emphasis of this mosaic on the deaths of spectacle participants in a likely munus sine missione.Footnote 18 In similar fashion to the Zliten and Torrenuova mosaics, stone reliefs from Asia Minor portray execution by animals as components of wider spectacle scenes.Footnote 19 The commonest damnatio scenes are, however, reproduced on portable media, particularly relief-moulded terra sigillata and African Red Slip Ware, as well as on the ceramic appliques made in the Rhône valley. In the ceramic scenes, the captives are typically tied to posts while one or more animals advance on them; the hand-carts on which they were wheeled towards their unmaking also occasionally feature, as on the mosaics.Footnote 20 In other cases, the victims have been thrown by a bull or are in the act of being tossed.Footnote 21 Unlike most of these damnatio scenes, however, the adult male assaulted by the lion on the Leicester key handle does not have bound hands and thus is able to fight the lion, which, perhaps deliberately, is rendered at less than life-size. In the first respect, a small figurine from Clifton Campville (Staffordshire), a PAS find, shows a pairing more similar in spirit to the Leicester find, though the human's head is fully in the beast's mouth.Footnote 22 The belt of the Leicester adult figure, if rightly interpreted as such, also echoes the dress of some protagonists of beast combats, such as the armed figure, naked above the waist, on a Campana plaque from Rome who is under attack from both sides by big cats; another naked figure has already fallen victim to one of them in the same scene, as part of a group of figures whose status as performers or damnati is ambiguous.Footnote 23 On a late antique marble relief from Serdica, animals fight a range of active combatants, some of whom appear unarmed.Footnote 24 However, the absence of protective padding from the Leicester figure, and of weapons, speaks against it representing a skilled venator; instead, it seems more plausible to identify him as an execution victim with some limited capacity to fight back, due to the apparent lack of restraints.Footnote 25 Some parallels to this can be noted. In this respect, for example, he resembles one of the Zliten mosaic figures, who is depicted naked save for a loincloth with his right hand across his abdomen and his left raised at the onrushing lion, towards whom he is propelled by a tunic-clad figure with a whip, or the unarmed figures among the combatants on a stone relief from Nysa.Footnote 26 The Leicester figure also perhaps echoes the Part(h)u(s) on a second-century terra sigillata cup from Gaul, who is shown being attacked by two lions in one of several scenes likely showing Trajan's victory games; his counterpart is ‘Decibalus’, who prepares to kill himself with a sword as animals approach.Footnote 27 On the key handle the fearful state of the youthful figures, anticipating a violent demise, is signalled by their gestures and tangled poses. This grouping is very difficult to parallel, but it does display an echo in spirit, perhaps, with the tunic-clad figures on a stone relief from Sestinum, Umbria, who hold their hands raised in apparent terror at the emergence of a beast from a trapdoor or similar.Footnote 28
The most striking characteristic of all the human participants is their likely barbarity. In particular, the adult male figure who fights the lion shows ‘barbarian’ traits seen on other portable objects from the northern provinces: for example, his bare torso, belted waist (or trousers rolled at the waist), trousers and sandals.Footnote 29 Most of these take the form of ‘bound-captive’ objects: tiny, perforated figurines bound around the neck, hands and feet, and linked by Ralph Jackson to slave dealing. Twenty examples of these are now documented, including four from the PAS.Footnote 30 On one sub-type (III), the ‘leonine’ features of the Leicester adult figure are also reproduced, as they are intermittently in other media. Examples include the tombstone for the eques Longinus Sdapeze from Colchester, on which a barbarian cowers beneath the trooper's horse, and the Hutcheson Hill distance slabs from the Antonine Wall, where kneeling figures of this same kind frame a standard.Footnote 31 The features of the victims on the domus Sollertiana mosaic, likely northern barbarians, also somewhat resemble those of this ‘leonine’ type.Footnote 32 In the Leicester case, however, the barbarity, even quasi-bestiality, of the victim seems more significant than the indication of a specific ethnic type. The difficulty of confident ethnic attribution for such small-scale figures has been noted elsewhere.Footnote 33
Other barbarian figures on triumphal and related monuments share the beardless nudity of the younger figures on the Leicester handle: for example, that beneath the Roman cavalryman on the left panel of another Antonine Wall slab from Bridgeness.Footnote 34 The curls of the Leicester figures are quite pronounced, especially on Youth 4, but the coiffure is difficult to parallel specifically. For example, it does not closely match the African hairstyles seen on human figures on small bronzes from Britain and other provinces, where the hair is much more tightly curled and sometimes rendered in layered, corkscrew curls.Footnote 35 Thus there is not a clear departure here from Roman art's ‘somatic norm’, and so we cannot be confident that representation of African individuals is intended.Footnote 36 Some participants of African origin have been identified in spectacle scenes in other media, with varying degrees of confidence, but the Leicester figures do not easily parallel these.Footnote 37
A stronger affinity with the youths on the key handle, regarding both their physiques and dishevelled coiffure, can be seen in the Cupids and wingless boys who hunt, harvest and fish their way across mosaics and sarcophagi, sometimes as embodiments of the youthful Dionysus or of the Seasons.Footnote 38 However, the Leicester figures otherwise lack any specific attributes that might link them to the Seasons or other quadripartite groupings. In this case, what seems most important is the clear differentiation of the four youths from the adult made by the striking difference in their hair; the latter has a carefully contrived, albeit alien, coiffure, whilst the former are ungroomed. A frequently used visual type (i.e. Amor) has been adapted to represent youths whose destruction is anticipated; perhaps this is a parallel in spirit to the enslavement of the children of defeated enemies seen in triumphal imagery, especially as presented on the column of Marcus Aurelius.Footnote 39 By these means, a barbarian group is denied its posterity and, in this context, the nudity of the group emphasises its humiliation as an object for the gaze of the viewer, like that of other noxii.Footnote 40 In contrast with some scenes involving naked barbarians and Roman violence, there does not, however, seem to be an obvious sexualised component to the nudity in this case.Footnote 41 The fear that can be read from the protective gestures of the youths and their chaotic interweaving of limbs, one perhaps with an improvised weapon (a stone), recalls the disordered anguish of Rome's opponents manifested in some monumental depictions of warfare, again as represented on the column of Marcus Aurelius.Footnote 42 Their terror echoes, perhaps, that of Frankish captives described by the panegyricist as they anticipated their slaughter in the arena at Trier on Constantine's orders: the ‘ungrateful and faithless men experienced no less suffering from the sport made of them than from death itself’ – a source of joyful reassurance for the emperor's subjects according to the Panegyrici Latini.Footnote 43 The nearby theatre in Leicester offers one potential context in which such a spectacle (albeit necessarily on a much smaller scale) might have been performed, given the adaptations to theatres that sometimes allowed them to house violent spectacle, as recurrently documented in the eastern Mediterranean, at least.Footnote 44 The arch on which Youth 1 sits might be read pars pro toto as a reference to the arcading that typically formed the outer face of spectacle buildings, but on balance, however, it seems more likely to indicate an item of furniture (see above).
Other elements of the Leicester handle, however, qualify its affinity to damnationes in other media. Indeed, the parallels are not so direct or straightforward that other possible interpretations of the key handle images do not deserve brief exploration. Naked young athletes figure, for example, on mosaic pavements in North Africa and Italy, and young acrobats and mimes pirouette above the victims of ursine mauling on the Wadi Lebda mosaic.Footnote 45 However, the Leicester figures lack the physiques, coiffures and sporting gear of these performers.Footnote 46 Furthermore, their youth and nudity do not make them plausible candidates for the spectators occasionally included in spectacle scenes, such as a third-century mosaic from Thelepte.Footnote 47
Another genre that offers more fruitful opportunities for comparison may be the Nilotic scenes mainly preserved on mosaics and wall-paintings which feature combats between exotic fauna and naked humans, with caricatured rather than realistic body types, commonly referenced as dwarves or pygmies.Footnote 48 Here and there on these scenes, the participants are also differentiated as bearded (mature) and beardless (immature) figures. Examples include the outer panels on a late second-century black-and-white mosaic from Italica (House of Neptune), a three-colour mosaic from a bath-house at Collemancio, Cannara, Umbria, the likely site of Urvinum Hortense, and a third-century polychrome mosaic from the Dubroff Collection displayed as a loan in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, said to be from North Africa.Footnote 49 In the latter case, both bearded and beardless humans fight the attacking animals, but, in the former, the bearded figures more commonly fight the crocodiles, cranes and hippos, while one terrified youth climbs a palm tree to escape a crocodile and others dance. Similarly, on the Collemancio mosaic a beardless figure flees by sailing away on an amphora. The conversion of this human-animal encounter into drama has been used to explain the subject of a fourth-century mosaic in a multi-apsed room of a southern Spanish villa (Fuente Álamo, Puente Genil, Andalusia). The centre of the mosaic shows the Nile personified, with attendant cranes, crocodile and hippopotamus. Two apsidal scenes are preserved: in one, an older male human is attacked by a crane while his son comes to the rescue and his wife is in comic disarray; in the other, a (the same?) bird's corpse is dragged away. The panicked speech of the participants, presented in captions, suggests the scene's likely derivation from a mime.Footnote 50 The human figures’ light skin and the apparent references to myth with an Iberian location in the captions may show this, additionally, to be a version adapted to local taste.Footnote 51 Might the Leicester key handle, with its age-differentiated reactions to encountering a wild animal, its representation of at least one individual of exotic appearance and its heightened emotions, be inspired by a performance of similar type, in the adjacent theatre? This is difficult to assess, given how little is known of performances in provincial spectacle buildings and the absence of common conventions for visual representations of mimes.Footnote 52 The confrontation specifically with a lion is also not a characteristic of Nilotic scenes. On balance, therefore, the parallels with execution scenes seem strongest.
The last aspect for discussion concerns the context of the deposition of the handle. It appears to have been broken deliberately and then placed into a make-up layer, prior to the laying of a new floor of a room within the late Roman town house (see above). The deliberate deposition of complete, or near-complete, single or multiple objects, sometimes deliberately damaged, as ‘structured’ or ‘placed’ deposits on Roman sites is now a widely recognised phenomenon. Such deposits have been explained as the products of actions linked to the life cycles of the structures within which they were placed. They might, for example, be foundation deposits, made auspiciously to initiate a new or changed use of a given space, or termination deposits, placed to close symbolically an episode of human activity.Footnote 53 Was the object recognisable as a key and thus a symbol of security against an uncertain future, or did its significance lie more in the lion as a protective symbol (see above)? It would appear that the house, or part of it, was past its heyday by the time of the handle's deposition during the fourth century, and that it was being refloored for a more utilitarian purpose. Was the handle an heirloom, by now of some age (given the conventional dating of these handles to the second to third century), and thus an appropriate symbol of continuity with past occupation, an apotropaic object directed at future preservation of the space and those within it? Alternatively, the breaking and burying may have been directed at neutralising the agency of an object that resonated with unacceptable memories of past episodes (real or perceived) of violence in the adjacent theatre, which was already abandoned at the time of deposition as investment in public entertainment ended and spectacles linked to pagan cult were perhaps marginalised.Footnote 54
CONCLUSION
Before offering some final thoughts on the significance of the handle and its decoration it is essential to emphasise our caveats. Whilst the object is of a recognised type, the scenes it carries lack direct and straightforward parallels in any one medium. Our uncertainty over how to interpret them may have been shared by Roman viewers, whose readings will have been conditioned by their lived experience and familiarity with visual media. It is quite possible that the translation of scenes into a new medium, by a maker located in a province on the margins of the Empire (if our suggestion of its manufacture in Britain is correct) and perhaps responding to localised and particular circumstances (a commission for a specific event, perhaps), brought into being an idiosyncratic representation that is difficult to classify with certainty. Nonetheless, while aspects of the scene do not lend themselves to easy classification, the composition seems most likely to represent a damnatio, perhaps as part of a show celebrating imperial victory, which did not necessarily need the presence in person of an imperial sponsor.Footnote 55 In the general absence of epigraphic (or literary) evidence for munera in Roman Britain, scholars have turned to visual representations to understand the spectacles put on in arenas and theatres. Folding knife handles, figurines, glass vessels and relief-decorated terra sigillata and colour-coated ware vessels show varied performers;Footnote 56 representations in sculpture, mosaic and painted plaster are rarer.Footnote 57 However, such images are mostly generic and give little sense of the specificity of provincial spectacle culture, occasional exceptions notwithstanding.Footnote 58 A cautious reading of the handle would see it as a similarly generic representation of damnatio, albeit an unusually vivid one. However, recent osteological studies give grounds for suggesting that spectacles of this kind involving lethal violence were familiar to British audiences. In particular, the analyses of fragmentary human skeletal material from London Wall and of skeletons from graves in the cemetery south-west of Roman York have linked them plausibly to arena violence. In both cases the remains are those of adult males of geographically diverse origins and show signs of frequent violent trauma, both over their lifetimes and as the cause of their deaths.Footnote 59 One York individual's pelvis bears possible puncture wounds from an as yet unidentified animal, and so takes us a little closer to a likely spectacle context in which humans met their deaths through violent contact with animals.Footnote 60 Taking this evidence into account, and noting the evidence described above for destruction of captives in the provinces as well as in the metropolis, it is not impossible that the handle's creation was inspired directly by a spectacle located in Britain, even perhaps in the adjacent theatre.
Whether or not this is the case, more generally the handle reflects the likely identification of some provincials with the Roman perspective of contempt for, and fear of, archetypal barbarian ‘Others’, the ‘enemies of civilisation’.Footnote 61 For those who had witnessed damnatio scenes the key may have recalled the psychologically intense experiences crucial to the ingraining of such dispositions.Footnote 62 In its complementary victims, a mature figure engaged in a doomed struggle and the youths destined for death, the handle presents a spectacular obliteration of a present and future threat through physical annihilation. One symbolic enemy of order from the margins of the Empire, the lion, serves as the agent of destruction of another.Footnote 63 The handle adds a further frisson of uncertainty regarding the outcome of the encounter, a ‘sporting’ element to enhance the spectacle.Footnote 64 Its focus on the youths’ fear of violent death, as embodied in their contorted poses, echoes the emphasis of Christian martyrdom narratives on the moments before an animal encounter when the victims’ expected terror contributed as much to the crowd's satisfaction as the killing itself.Footnote 65 The Leicester key handle exploits its three-dimensional form and its mimetic possibilities to engage the viewer with the scene through touch as well as sight. The arrangement of the figures privileges the view of one face: i.e. that from which both the younger figures and the older bearded figure all gaze, the latter turning away from the lion's bite. These parts are in the highest relief (leaving the flatter face in the palm), and the figures’ outward gazes enhance the scene's pathos, connecting to the spectator of the scene. Turning the key exposes the fear-driven intertwining of the lower group and follows the movements of human and lion above with the man flinching as the animal twists to secure its prey.Footnote 66
How the handle might have been read would have depended, as noted above, on familiarity with visual conventions and spectacle culture. For many, the key would have been simply a highly decorated and richly textured object that carried a motif familiar from other furniture fittings and related pieces. As Fraser Hunter notes of funerary lions, there are also non-classical perspectives from which this decoration might be read.Footnote 67 Perhaps for some it recalled the anthropophagous creatures of Iron Age origin whose forms are sometimes echoed in monstrous images on Roman media. Crummy and Lodwick suggest, for example, that the triple heads on other similar key handles may depict the indigenous deities of north-western Europe.Footnote 68 However, the resonances in detail and in spirit of damnatio scenes suggest a commission executed with specific knowledge of Roman spectacle.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The archaeological investigation at Stibbe, Friars Causeway, Leicester (Leicester City Museum Service Accession No: A.12.2016) was undertaken as part of a planning condition, in advance of redevelopment of the land. The project is currently undergoing extensive post-excavation analysis, the full results of which will be published in due course. The University of Leicester Archaeological Services would like to thank Charles Street Buildings Group for funding the project. The initial cleaning of the object was undertaken by Heidi Addison and latterly by Graham Morgan. John Pearce would like to thank Gavin and Nick for the opportunity to collaborate in research on the Friars Causeway handle. He is indebted to Sinclair Bell for many helpful observations and bibliographic pointers on executions and related scenes of violence and to Sally Worrell for comments on key handles; neither is responsible for misunderstandings or omissions. Mary Harrsch and Riyana Khiroya are likewise thanked for practical help obtaining references to the Dubroff Collection and Wadi Lebda mosaics. Finally, we are grateful to the referee for their helpful suggestions.
