These are two very different studies of the Roman remains at Bath, emanating from different traditions of scholarship, though each with its own virtues. Although a few bare facts were known about Bath from Roman sources, and Bath was surely the subject of the elegiac Anglo-Saxon poem, The Ruin, most of our knowledge has had to be gleaned from archaeology and epigraphic sources. In the medieval period the legend of King Bladud, which accompanied the Roman spring reservoir being morphed into the King’s Bath, provided a fanciful history of origins. The remains that have been revealed to us are for the most part the work of the late eighteenth-century discovery of part of the temple pediment, although the gilt-bronze head of Sulis Minerva had been found below Stall Street earlier, in 1727. The baths were mainly uncovered in the second half of the nineteenth century by Charles Davis and Richard Mann, with the invaluable help and meticulous recording of James Irvine. A hundred years later the excavations of Barry Cunliffe in the area of the spring, recovering a considerable number of finds to add to those found by Davis and Mann, most importantly the lead-pewter ‘curse tablets’, has allowed a number of scholars to assess the meaning of the site. Meanwhile archaeology, much of it directed by Peter Davenport, has continued, as rescue excavations, much of it at some distance from the Bath-temple complex itself.

Both the books under review tell something of the same story, but from rather different perspectives, and the contrast between them is valuable. For Cousins, Bath in the Roman period was a major religious sanctuary site; for Davenport, Bath was a town, although it lacked the formal forum and basilica or, in all probability, the regular constitution and magistrates of the chartered city Bath would certainly become in the medieval period, and indeed Ptolemy, whose work dates from the early second century, describes it as a polis of the Belgae, even if in Aquae Sulis the priests of the sanctuary were in charge rather than an elected ordo, as in Gloucester or Cirencester for example.

Cousins’s great achievement is to situate the sanctuary of Sulis in both its local context and in that of the Empire as a whole, and to question a number of assumptions that others have made about it. After the first chapter – an entertaining account of the early excavations – she proceeds to her second chapter dealing with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century development of Bath as a spa, which has led to both earlier antiquaries and modern archaeologists seeing Aquae Sulis in the same way as a healing site; at the same time, she takes a swipe at the smaller sanctuary north of the Severn at Lydney Park, questioning whether the hound figurines have anything to do with healing, as the Wheelers believed. It is true that neither sanctuary, indeed no British sanctuary, has produced the wealth of healing votives as have been found on some Gaulish sites, but both have provided sufficient evidence in terms of structures (at least in Lydney) and of medical votives, while at Bath I would still maintain that the tenor of a few inscriptions points in that direction. Fuller discussion of what the sanctuary, or at least its hot spring, was for is reserved for chapter five, and it is plausible that the objects thrown into the steaming, churning, silt-filled water of the basin emphasise that Sulis had, at least in part, a chthonic character. The imprecations on the famous tablets urging her to punish malefactors remind us, as do the many other such tablets found across southern Britain, that gods can punish as well as heal.

In her third chapter, Cousins describes the sanctuary as it would have appeared at the end of the second century: its classicising grandeur, the monumentality of the spring building, the temple itself, with its ancillary structures such as the figured monument (whether or not it was an altar), the so-called Façade of the Four Seasons, the Great Baths, other baths and beyond them perhaps a tholos (although Davenport provides good reasoning for a theatre on that site), all in the centre of a ditched enclosure that can surely only be described as a sacred temenos. There was nothing quite like it in Britain, and that of course raises questions of purpose and of patronage, which Cousins addresses in chapter four.

The resources to build could only have come from a ‘powerful and wealthy local figure’, and the character of the sculpture of the pediment of the temple – for all that it echoes themes of victory that had their origins in Augustan Rome – has its closest affinities with north-east Gaul. Cousins attempts to distance herself from my theory that the patron was none other than King Togidubnus, ‘because it is tempting’, although there are a few further factors that point in his direction. One of them is Ptolemy’s ascription of Bath to the Belgae. It is likely that the territories allotted to his Atrebatic client kingdom were ultimately extended to the west as far as Bath, even if it is likely that the Bath area was returned to the Dobunni during the second century. Further, a client king in Britain is likely to have encouraged building and have built extensively, just as the client kings in the East did (such as Herod), and, apart from the temple of Neptune and Minerva at Chichester, which he sanctioned, Togidubnus also seems to have rebuilt the temple on Hayling Island in Roman style at the same time that Fishbourne ‘palace’ reached its greatest extent – both at Chichester and in the imagery of the Bath pediment the conjoining of the two gods in the Medusa and Neptune masks recalled the twinning of Athena with Poseidon on the West pediment of the Parthenon at Athens. In any case, I do not think that the temple with its wonderfully expressive pediment can be seen in anything like the Temple of Claudius erected in conquered territory as an arx aeternae dominationis, especially as these southern Britons were, from the very first, allies of Rome. Incidentally, I tend to believe that the temple was certainly not completed until Domitian’s reign, and both the star in the apex and the comet in the architrave are more probably allusions to Divus Vespasianus than to Divus Claudius. Nevertheless, Bath, which lay on the frontier of the civil zone early on, certainly continued to be popular with military officers and was patronised by the army well into the future, as shown by altars, dedications and objects thrown into the spring, including a catapult washer, a possible cavalry-horse trapping and a votive pan from Hadrian’s Wall – and, indeed, those votive breasts were re-commissioned from the hilt of a gladius.

The spring assemblage as a whole is discussed in chapter five, where not only the tablets are discussed but also the evidently worn-out temple plate and, of course, the very many coins thrown into the sacred waters, Finally, in chapter six, the divine images from Bath are described. The head of Sulis does indeed have both physical and structural similarities to the Apollo of Vaupoisson (Aube) in north-east Gaul and, as noted, there are links with Gaul, not least in one or two dedications. Just as sculptors came from Gaul to work in Bath stone, surely it is possible that a Gaulish or Gaulish-trained bronze worker cast the Bath statue in situ. The remarkable images of deities generally published as being from the corners of the main altar, but with affinities to the Viergötterstein from the Rhineland, may well be part of some other monument, as Cousins suggests, an idea first proposed, I think, by our late Fellow, Tom Blagg. Other sculptures are equated with local dedications from other places in the Cotswold region of south-west Britain. Dedications to the Suleviae at both Bath and Chichester by a sculptor called Sulinus and the identical style and epigraphy inscribed on tablets by one Docili(a)nus at both Bath and Uley reveal not only an individual intent on bothering the gods, but connectivity and pilgrimage within the province and, indeed, beyond, as is implied by Solinus’s mention of what can only be coal being burnt on the altar of Minerva’s temple at Bath.

While there is so much to admire in Cousins’s work, Davenport gains in his descriptions of the actual archaeology of the structures as well as in fairly lavish use of colour. He inevitably builds on Barry Cunliffe’s Roman Bath Discovered published twenty years ago (Cunliffe Reference Cunliffe2000), but more has been discovered since and of particular importance is a raft of masonry to the east of the temple court, which he interprets as a theatre on the same magnificent scale as the baths. It will require a chance to excavate in the area of the putative cavea to prove it. If so, either the blocks identified as from a tholos will have to have been sited elsewhere, or they were, indeed, part of the ornamentation of the theatre. Also of great interest has been the excavation of houses; whether or not Bath is best described as a sanctuary, it developed urban features, including houses with mosaic floors. Of especial interest is the very rare discovery bust of a woman, unfortunately now headless, carved in local stone and found in a second-century house excavated in Hat and Feather Yard; it presumably came from a house shrine and is indicative of the Romanitas of the owner. The sanctuary certainly required many people to service it, and that meant dwelling places, guest houses, shops and cemeteries for the dead – and beyond the urban area Bath was ringed by suburban villas.

Many exciting discoveries have been made in Bath, including the enormous Beau Street hoard of coins deposited in the late third century and never recovered. In short, both of these books are to be warmly commended as valuable contributions not just to the study of Roman Britain but to Classical archaeology in general.