Guest-curated exhibition exploring class and status in Roman Britain through seven pairs of imagined ancient Verulamium inhabitants and archaeological objects.
The Superior: Inferior is running at Verulamium Museum in St Albans until Monday 11 November, as part of the museum's Revisiting the Romans series. It's an exhibition that looks at class and status in Roman Britain, and it does it by putting the social hierarchy of Roman Verulamium up against how we think about status today.
The whole thing is guest-curated by ancient historian Andrew Deathe, and the way you experience it is more of a journey than a static display. You follow an interactive path and meet seven pairs of imagined ancient Verulamium inhabitants, brought to life by St Albans illustrator Simon Maskell. For each pair, you're given archaeological objects and imagined conversations to work with, and from those you're asked to judge who held the higher status and who the lower.
It's a good way to see how the Romans actually marked status. The exhibition draws on things like occupation, possessions, and property — the kind of markers that still carry weight now. It also doesn't shy away from the harsher side of the Roman social order: under Roman law, women were almost always considered inferior to men, and citizens were seen as superior to freeborn non-Romans. Seeing those distinctions spelled out makes the whole thing feel less like a history lesson and more like a look at how a society decides who counts for more.
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There's one final thing to do before you leave: you're invited to drop a token into a box representing your own class today, so you can place yourself within the same kind of conversation. The exhibition runs until Monday 11 November at Verulamium Museum in St Albans.
