British Museum Accused of Celebrating Fascism and Sexism in Roman Army Exhibition

Competitive outrage is one of the most enthusiastically pursued pastimes du jour and no more than among academics seeking prominence. Being offended seems to be exciting, even intoxicating, not least because it comes with the warm glow of moral righteousness. There’s no point in being outraged without flaunting it, and also remembering that you’re only as good as your last outraged rant.

Outraged academics, especially woke ones, are also a gift to journalists desperate to fill their pages and give them free publicity.

The stories follow a familiar and tired track. They start with a rant on something like X by an outraged academic, which is picked up by some commentator or another academic who is outraged by the outrage, or equally outraged and keen to join. The next thing you know there’s yet another utterly pointless spat of screaming irrelevance to any normal person being laboured through in what passes for a news item.

The latest (in the Express, for whom woke outrage leads the field for top flight copy) comes from Dr. Claire Millington, “a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London”, who trotted along to the British Museum’s new exhibition on the Roman army called Legion: life in the Roman army.

Dr. Millington was appalled to discover the exhibition has a great deal of material in it belonging to the Roman army, which of course was the military force of the imperial Roman state used both for conquest and for the defence of frontiers. Like a lot of armies those days, they recruited men. Dr. Millington condemned the exhibition for its “unrelenting fascist imagery and sexism dolloped on top”, directing “girlies” (her word, not mine) to the Museum’s Instagram account so they can share her horror.

Another historian, Dr. Robin Douglas, decided to weigh in too, and is similarly concerned at an exhibition about the Roman army having militaristic content. “One can debate whether retweeting the BM’s post is wise, but the militaristic framing of this exhibition does seem quite problematic.” Problematic? What on earth does that mean? He adds that the knee-jerk responses are by “all men, from what I’ve seen”.

Not everyone agrees. The Express has sought out those who are outraged by the outrage:

Commentator Benedict Spence was unconvinced, writing: “An archaeologist has complained the Roman legionary exhibition at the British Museum contains ‘unrelenting fascist imagery’ and once again I am proposing we just close half the universities, the experiment has clearly failed.”

It’s undoubtedly true that the actual fascists of the 1930s found inspiration in Roman imperial and military imagery. Mussolini was especially keen. But it seems a bit of a stretch to condemn the British Museum for having the temerity to display items and material from an era that was what it was. The Roman Empire was a despotic militarised state whose wealth had come from conquest. It wasn’t a fascist state though it’s legitimate to argue that it had characteristics which resembled those of a modern fascist state.

That’s worth discussing, but what’s the point of condemning an exhibition for exhibiting the evidence from the period?

In any case, the Roman Empire was little different from any other ancient state except that it was better at the job, hence its success. It was also the case that the Roman army was actually quite small, given the vast territory it covered. Estimates vary over time, but the standing army of the Emperors probably approximated to about 400,000 distributed from northern Britain to Egypt and Spain to Syria.

The vast majority of people within the Roman Empire acquiesced in Roman rule, not because they were always being beaten up by soldiers (though there undoubtedly were episodes of spectacular brutality and oppression, as there have been at all times and places in history – and often reciprocated by Rome’s enemies). Why? Perhaps because for some of them, life in the Roman world was less slightly undesirable than many other ways of life available at the time. The proof is in the pudding. Vast numbers of provincials lined up to join the army.

Roman soldiers were also much more likely to be literate than other ordinary Roman people. They have left a vast archive of written material referring to their activities and lives, which included women and children. In Britain, a militarised province with an unusually large garrison of three permanent legions (about 15,000 men) and a similar number of provincial auxiliaries, the overwhelming majority of inscriptions come from the military zone, predominantly recording the soldiers and their families. These form a large part of the British Museum’s exhibition.

The Roman Empire was not a sophisticated modern state. It lacked a vast Empire-wide bureaucracy. Soldiers were utilised by the state as the main way in which the state interacted with the population, huge numbers of whom would have had a relative or father who had served at some point. Soldiers were used to collect taxes, to act as policemen and local justices and provide engineering and architectural services, which is another way of saying they were ubiquitous and highly visible in every walk of life. Once retired, they took money and experience into civilian communities, providing investment and trades as well as serving in local government. Hence the vast quantity of evidence for their lives and activities.

I have to confess I’m particularly puzzled by this story. Or am I? On Thursday March 7th I’m leading an online promotional event for the British Museum, at its invitation, for this exhibition. It’s called Vindolanda: a window on life in the Roman army. The PowerPoint I’ve prepared is about the wives, children, leisure pursuits, literacy and education and religion of the Roman army’s frontier in Britain, utilising a small selection of the evidence that has survived. I do hope that doesn’t seem unduly militaristic, fascist and sexist.

Let’s leave the last word to:

Tom Jones, a Tory councillor on North Yorkshire Council, [who] was similarly unimpressed in his reply to Dr. Millington’s post, commenting: “The majority of the population, who are normal, will enjoy this exhibition, because they are normal.”

Worth reading in full unless you have something better to do.

Guy de la Bédoyère is the author of Eagles over Britannia. The Roman Army in Britain (Tempus 2001), Hadrian’s Wall. A History and Guide (Amberley 2010), Praetorian. The Rise and Fall of Rome’s Imperial Bodyguard (Yale 2017), and Gladius. Living, Fighting, and Dying in the Roman Army (Little, Brown 2020). Just for the record, he is also author of Domina: The Women who made Imperial Rome (Yale 2018). He would not like to apologise for being male in advance to any offended readers or outraged academics and for featuring militaristic material in his books about the Roman army.