innocuous turn. “Roman troops lived primarily on vegetables, bread, and porridge. They disdained eating flesh.”
The conversation proceeded on about several other aspects of Roman history until at last Melanie said, “That comb you found was Roman, wasn’t it.”
David nodded.
“What did you say the inscription said?”
“Bringing you this last gift for the dead, accept this offering wet with tears,” David replied.
“And what did you interpret that to mean?”
“Since the evidence suggests that the girl is Celtic and the comb is Roman and a considerably more costly object than we would expect a girl of this region and time period to possess, we believe her sacrifice might have been witnessed by a Roman woman, and that she presented the girl with the comb as a sort of offering.”
“What would a Roman woman have been doing here?” Melanie asked.
“There were Romans all over the country during that time period. The woman was probably the wife of an official who was sent here on some political mission.”
“And she gave the girl the comb as some sort of votive?”
“Exactly,” David returned.
Melanie looked puzzled. “But why was the comb wet with the Roman woman’s tears?”
“That’s the fifty-dollar question,” Brad broke in. “But it could be any number of reasons,” David added. “We know that Caesar first conquered Britain in about 55 B.C. This comb is an expensive enough object that the woman it belonged to had to be the wife of a Roman official reasonably high up in Caesar’s political hierarchy. If she had accompanied her husband to England it means that they must have arrived here at least several years after the skirmish, when things had settled down enough that it would have been safe for a wife to accompany her officiary husband to a conquered land. They were here, most likely, to set about the more mundane task of the political and social reorganization of the Celtic people. A woman separated from her native soil and forced to travel with her husband to a totally foreign environment might have any number of reasons to be unhappy.”
Melanie was caught off guard by this and stood blinking at her husband for several moments, but soon saw that he did not realize that an analogy might be drawn between what he had just said and their own situation. She started to take the hamburgers out of the skillet and lay them on a plate with paper towels to drain. As the chat continued on behind her, it once again returned to the subject of sacrifice, and she looked at each of her children anxiously, wondering if the talk was having any adverse affect on them. To her great relief it did not seem to be. Now that no attempt was being made to conceal the conversation from Tuck, he was paying not the slightest bit of attention, and instead, was moving his fork around the table like a tractor-trailer with several sugar cubes on the back of it as cargo. And Katy, Melanie quickly observed, had something entirely different on her mind. Her daughter seemed to be paying an unusual amount of attention to Brad. She was gazing at him attentively and virtually hanging on his every word. And whenever he said anything even remotely resembling a joke, she laughed heartily. It suddenly hit Melanie that her daughter was developing a crush on her husband’s graduate student, and for some reason this surprised her.
Perhaps it was simply that she was not yet used to her daughter becoming a sexual being. As she considered the matter she realized her surprise was equally due to the fact that she had never really viewed Brad as a sexual being either. True, he had once mentioned a brief liaison with a woman named Jean, but it had been a comment made in passing, with no other details added, and she had long ago accustomed herself to the fact that Brad was far less interested in relationships with women, or for that matter anyone, than he was in his work.
Now as she looked at him, however, she realized that he really
The conversation proceeded on about several other aspects of Roman history until at last Melanie said, “That comb you found was Roman, wasn’t it.”
David nodded.
“What did you say the inscription said?”
“Bringing you this last gift for the dead, accept this offering wet with tears,” David replied.
“And what did you interpret that to mean?”
“Since the evidence suggests that the girl is Celtic and the comb is Roman and a considerably more costly object than we would expect a girl of this region and time period to possess, we believe her sacrifice might have been witnessed by a Roman woman, and that she presented the girl with the comb as a sort of offering.”
“What would a Roman woman have been doing here?” Melanie asked.
“There were Romans all over the country during that time period. The woman was probably the wife of an official who was sent here on some political mission.”
“And she gave the girl the comb as some sort of votive?”
“Exactly,” David returned.
Melanie looked puzzled. “But why was the comb wet with the Roman woman’s tears?”
“That’s the fifty-dollar question,” Brad broke in. “But it could be any number of reasons,” David added. “We know that Caesar first conquered Britain in about 55 B.C. This comb is an expensive enough object that the woman it belonged to had to be the wife of a Roman official reasonably high up in Caesar’s political hierarchy. If she had accompanied her husband to England it means that they must have arrived here at least several years after the skirmish, when things had settled down enough that it would have been safe for a wife to accompany her officiary husband to a conquered land. They were here, most likely, to set about the more mundane task of the political and social reorganization of the Celtic people. A woman separated from her native soil and forced to travel with her husband to a totally foreign environment might have any number of reasons to be unhappy.”
Melanie was caught off guard by this and stood blinking at her husband for several moments, but soon saw that he did not realize that an analogy might be drawn between what he had just said and their own situation. She started to take the hamburgers out of the skillet and lay them on a plate with paper towels to drain. As the chat continued on behind her, it once again returned to the subject of sacrifice, and she looked at each of her children anxiously, wondering if the talk was having any adverse affect on them. To her great relief it did not seem to be. Now that no attempt was being made to conceal the conversation from Tuck, he was paying not the slightest bit of attention, and instead, was moving his fork around the table like a tractor-trailer with several sugar cubes on the back of it as cargo. And Katy, Melanie quickly observed, had something entirely different on her mind. Her daughter seemed to be paying an unusual amount of attention to Brad. She was gazing at him attentively and virtually hanging on his every word. And whenever he said anything even remotely resembling a joke, she laughed heartily. It suddenly hit Melanie that her daughter was developing a crush on her husband’s graduate student, and for some reason this surprised her.
Perhaps it was simply that she was not yet used to her daughter becoming a sexual being. As she considered the matter she realized her surprise was equally due to the fact that she had never really viewed Brad as a sexual being either. True, he had once mentioned a brief liaison with a woman named Jean, but it had been a comment made in passing, with no other details added, and she had long ago accustomed herself to the fact that Brad was far less interested in relationships with women, or for that matter anyone, than he was in his work.
Now as she looked at him, however, she realized that he really
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