Roman Brigetio, actual Komárom/Szőny in Hungary was one of the four legionary complexes in the province Pannonia, controlling the Danubian frontier of the Roman Empira from the 1st c. A.D. till the end of Antiquity. Concerning the life of the Roman settlement, which consists of three parts (legionary fortress, military town, civilian town), most aspects (social life, administration, religion, arts, etc.) were influenced by the strong military presence, which offered good economical and financial possibilities. The Roman army was a good and certain market not only for the local ceramic production, but also for products, which must have been transported by the long distance trade from the Aegean or Mediterranean world (wine, oil, olives, fish sauce, luxury pottery). All aspects of „real” Roman life were present even in such a relatively small town as Brigetio was: the civilian town was planned and constructed in a regular system of insulae, had a network of parallel and rectangular streets with stone pavement and canalisation. Also it probably had a forum and sanctuaries were erected and dedicated to Roman gods and goddesses, and finally, there was an intensive social life in the amphitheater(s?). The private houses were decorated with fascinating wall-paintings in a period (mid 3rd c. A.D.), in which qualitative decorative art even in the main centers did not exist any more. This lecture gives us a view into the tight interaction between soldier and civilian in Brigetio, and shows how far qualitative arts with complicated pictural programs existed in the everyday life of the inhabitants of the settlement.
László Borhy is professor of Roman provincial archaeology at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Since 1992 he has been director of the excavations in Brigetio. His main fields are Roman military history, Latin epigraphic, Roman art (wall-paintings, glypthic) and history of Roman Pannonia. He published not only the interpretation of a cosmological vault, found by his team in 1994-1996 (Par domus est caelo, Pytheas, Budapest 2007) in Brigetio, but he also identified a second, civilian amphitheater on base of the analysis of a Latin inscription (Brigetiói amphitheatrumok? Pytheas, Budapest 2009). He is editor in chief of the archaeological catalogue Acta Archaeologica Brigetionensia of the Klapka György Museum in Komárom (founded in 1996), where he published the guide to the stone monuments and Latin inscriptions of the lapidary (2006), and composed further catalogues of different artefacts in the collection of the same museum (bone carvings, 2001; gems, 2003; wall-paintings, 2010).