Legions of Rome (70 page)

There was also the fact that another legion took the 9th Hispana’s place in Britain in
AD
122, and some authors have suggested that this indicated an orderly transition from one resident legion to another that year. It has also been pointed out that two officers known to have served as
laticlavius
tribunes with the 9th Hispana, Lucius
Aemilius Karus, around
AD
119, and Lucius Norvius Crispinus Martialis Saturninus, in
AD
121, both lived to enjoy long and distinguished careers, and therefore the legion could not have been wiped out in or before
AD
122 and must have existed after that time.

The latter point is worth examining in detail. With only one
laticlavius
tribune serving with a legion at any one time, Karus, who went on to become a consul and the governor of Arabia, would have left the legion by
AD
121, to be replaced by Saturninus as senior tribune and second-in-command of the 9th Hispana. Yes, Saturninus also lived to become a praetor, legion commander, consul and provincial governor. But here is the intriguing thing—following his posting as a tribune with the 9th Hispana Legion, Saturninus did not receive another official appointment for twenty-five years. Only then, after all that time, was he given command of a legion.

Normally, after leaving a legion, a man who had served as tribune could be expected to soon take a seat in the Senate and over the succeeding years work his way up the promotional ladder, with a legion command quickly following. After
AD
122, Saturninus’ career stopped dead. Hadrian would have nothing more to do with him. It was only in
AD
147, under the emperor Antoninus Pius, that Saturninus at last received his legion command, that of the 3rd Augusta in Africa. He was by that time around age 50. A legion commander of that maturity, at any time in Roman history, was rare. Two years later, Antoninus gave Saturninus a new imperial appointment, and his stalled career was on the move again, with a consulship not far off. [
CIL
,
VIII
2747, 18273.]

In contrast, Saturninus’ predecessor at the 9th Hispana, Lucius Karus, had joined the Senate, been a praetor, commanded a legion, been made a consul and become governor of Arabia by
AD
142. [
AE
1909, 236, Gerasa] All this had been achieved while Saturninus was ignored, with Karus’ peak career appointment as a provincial governor taking place five years prior to Saturninus’ career restarting with his appointment to the command of the 3rd Augusta Legion.

What was it that suddenly put the brakes on Saturninus’ career and would leave him in the official doldrums for a quarter of a century? Could it be that he was present at the annihilation of the 9th Hispana Legion in northern Britain in
AD
122? Was he, a mounted officer, among the few men of the legion to escape the slaughter, perhaps galloping away accompanied by a few cavalry, in the same way that Petilius Cerialis had escaped Boudicca’s British rebels in
AD
60 when he commanded the 9th
Hispana? Or was Saturninus taken prisoner, and later returned by the Caledonians? The disgrace of defeat, and of surrender or capture, hung like a dead bird around the necks of Romans. Many officers and enlisted men throughout Roman history committed suicide rather than live to face either. Was this why Lucius Saturninus was made to pay the price of ignominy for twenty-five years?

This was not the first time a senior officer had been banned from the promotion lists after his legion had suffered at the hands of the enemy in Britain. In
AD
51, during the reign of Claudius, “the legion under Manlius Valens had meanwhile been defeated” by the Silures in Wales. [Tac.,
A
,
XII
.40] Neither this battle nor its location was described by Tacitus. The legion in question was not identified, but it is likely to have been the 20th, which had recently arrived in the west of England after being transferred from Colchester in the late
AD
40s. The legion’s commander, Manlius Valens, survived the battle, but the defeat of his unit saw him removed from the lists for the next seventeen years.

Through the remainder of the reign of Claudius and the entire reign of Nero, Valens received no further official appointments. Only in
AD
68, when Galba came to power, was Valens restored to the promotional ladder, starting, uniquely, with a second legion command, that of the new 1st Italica Legion. Valens went on to become a consul much later, in his ninetieth year. His case demonstrates a precedent for a senior legion officer being sidelined by the Palatium for many years as punishment for the defeat of his legion when serving in a command position.

Now consider the evidence of the two 9th Hispana inscriptions in Holland. At Nijmegen, tile stamps of the 9th Hispana put men of the legion there, on the Lower Rhine, sometime between
AD
104 and 120, according to one authority. [Web.,
IRA
, 2] Nearby, at Aachen, there is an altar dedicated by Lucius Latinius Macer, camp-prefect of the 9th Hispana Legion. [Ibid.] There is no numismatic evidence to show that the legion as a whole ever left Britain. That the altar at Aachen was dedicated by the legion’s camp-prefect indicates that he was leading a vexillation of the unit on detached duty on the Lower Rhine. If the entire legion had been present, its legate or tribune could have been expected to make the dedication.

Another authority has proposed that a detachment of one or more cohorts from the 9th Hispana Legion was transferred from Britain to Nijmegen in
AD
113 when Trajan was preparing for his
AD
114–116 Parthian campaign in the east. [Hold.,
RAB
, 1] The theory is that the 9th Hispana detachment replaced troops
taken from the Rhine and sent to the East for Trajan’s Parthian operation. [Ibid.]

It has been pointed out that several auxiliary units including the Ala Vocontiorum were transferred from Britain to the Lower Rhine in around
AD
113, and so probably accompanied the 9th Hispana detachment. [Hold.,
RAB
, 1] All these auxiliary units that had transferred with the 9th Hispana vexillation were back at their old stations in Britain by
AD
120. [Ibid.] This suggests that by
AD
120, the 9th Hispana detachment had also rejoined the mother legion in Britain, where numismatic evidence put the 9th Hispana that year.

There is another intriguing fact. Five auxiliary units known to be based in Britain up to this time, a cavalry wing and four light infantry cohorts, also disappeared from the face of the earth in Britain in the same year,
AD
122—the Ala Agrippiana Miniata, and the 1st Nervorium Cohort, 2nd Vasconum CR Cohort, 4th Delmatarum Cohort and the 5th Raetorum Cohort. [Hold.,
DRA
, ADRH] There is no record of the existence of these units after
AD
122, just as there no evidence of them being transferred or disbanded. They simply disappeared. And this ala and these cohorts constitute the type and minimum number of support units that a legion on campaign might be expected to take with it.

Were the 9th Hispana Legion and its auxiliary support units ambushed by Caledonian tribes in Scotland in the late summer of
AD
122 as they marched unsuspectingly through the lowlands of Scotland? Was the legion exterminated by the Caledonians, with the bodies of the fallen Romans stripped and the 9th Hispana’s sacred eagle and all its other standards carried away by the victorious tribes? And did the legion’s second-in-command Lucius Saturninus survive the bloody battle and escape back to Roman lines, only to live in shame for the next twenty-five years?

In the spring of
AD
122, the new emperor Hadrian arrived in Britain as part of a long inspection tour of the empire. That same year, work began on the construction of an east-west wall across southern Scotland, from one coast to the other, to keep the barbarian tribes out of Roman Britain. It might be suggested that the annihilation of the 9th Hispana Legion that year sponsored the order to build Hadrian’s Wall. But, during his tour of the empire, Hadrian ordered the construction of strengthened defenses including walls on frontiers in numerous places, not just in Britain.

Here is another interesting fact. In the summer of
AD
122, men from thirteen cavalry alae and thirty-seven auxiliary cohorts stationed in Britain were given honorary discharge after serving the required twenty-five years in the Roman military. [Birl.,
DRA
, CEO] It is hardly likely, with a legion just recently destroyed on the province’s frontier, that the emperor would permit any such discharges. Could it be that these discharges took place prior to the annihilation of the 9th Hispana, and also played a part in it?

Via traders, word would have reached the tribes of Scotland that the Roman emperor was touring Britain and had ordered the construction of a wall to keep them out. They may well have also known that many Roman auxiliary units would be discharging men that summer, with the auxiliaries concerned looking forward to their retirement. Here was a window of opportunity for the tribes—before the wall was erected and while the auxiliary units were weakened by the discharge of experienced men.

The 9th Hispana Legion had moved up to Carlisle from Eburacum (York) sometime after
AD
108. In all probability the move took place in the summer of
AD
122, to permit the legion to commence the earthworks on the wall that Hadrian had ordered to be erected; this brief occupation would explain why the legion left no epigraphic evidence at Carlisle. The move made the 9th Hispana the most northerly based of the legions stationed in Britain and the Empire. The Roman fortress at Carlisle, which occupied a site alongside the town that served as the capital of the local Carvetti tribe, became a military base second only in the province to the capital Eburacum. [Tom.,
DRA
, DRAC]

Perhaps in the late summer, once Hadrian had left Britain, the Caledonians sent a message to the commander of the 9th Hispana Legion, to entice him north of his base at Carlisle. Perhaps that commander was told that his emperor’s wall would not be necessary, that the tribes were prepared to sign a lasting peace with Rome—but the commander must come quickly, while the chieftains were all of one mind, and he should bring as many troops as he could to awe the locals and ensure that wavering tribes did not back out of the treaty.

The officer commanding the 9th Hispana would have been well aware that Hadrian was all for consolidating the empire’s borders; in some cases Hadrian had given up territory acquired by his predecessor Trajan and withdrawn troops from what he saw as untenable positions. Unlike Trajan, Hadrian had no desire to expand the Roman Empire; he preferred making peace to making war. So, taken in by the Caledonians, and imagining how pleased his emperor would be with him if he could give him a peace treaty with the Caledonians, the commanding officer of the 9th Hispana marched his legion, four auxiliary cohorts and a cavalry wing north from Carlisle. And in doing so, he led 7,500 men into a trap.

The tribes of Caledonia had assembled more than 30,000 fighting men in
AD
84, to take on the Romans at the Battle of Mons Graupius in Scotland. [Tac.,
A
, 29] It is conceivable that a similar number would have taken part in the ambush of the 9th Hispana thirty-eight years later, among them survivors of Mons Graupius and the
sons and grandsons of men who had fallen in that battle, all thirsting for revenge. And in a short, sharp bloodbath, these men surprised and destroyed the 9th Hispana—a legion that had taken part in the Mons Graupius defeat of the Caledonians—and its accompanying auxiliary units. With their ambush, the Caledonians had avenged their people for the defeat at Mons Graupius.

In late
AD
122, before the last salary payment period of the year, the 6th Victrix Legion marched out of its base at Vetera on the Lower Rhine. Soon the legion arrived in southern Britain aboard the ships of the Britannic Fleet, then hurried north to make its new headquarters at Eburacum. It had come to fill the gap left by the 9th Hispana. Soon, too, three new auxiliary units freshly raised by Hadrian arrived in the province. [Hold.,
DRA
, ADRH] Replacements for the men discharged at the beginning of the summer would also have been rushed to Britain. And work on Hadrian’s Wall took on a new urgency.

Yet no one said a word about what had happened to the 9th Hispana Legion, the legion that had served Julius Caesar and eight emperors through the Roman Empire’s rise to its zenith. Officially, it was as if the annihilated 9th Hispana had never existed.

AD
132–135
XLVII. SECOND JEWISH REVOLT
Shimeon bar-Kokhba’s uprising

If Trajan had been a soldier emperor, Hadrian was a tourist emperor, spending more time visiting the provinces and seeing the sights than he did in Rome. In
AD
131, his latest travels brought him to Judea. Hadrian was now 55. He had been emperor for almost fourteen years. He had consolidated Rome’s frontiers, inspecting garrisons and forts, abolishing some installations and relocating others. And he had lectured his legionaries and auxiliaries, and drilled them, reforming practices that he felt were too luxurious for soldiers. He tightened the discipline governing his men, and “taught them all that should be done.” [Dio,
LXIX
, 9]

By the time he had climbed up into the Judean Hills in the summer of
AD
131 to the site of the once mighty Jewish city of Jerusalem, Hadrian was thinking about his legacy to history. In
AD
70, following the defeat of the Jewish rebels holding Jerusalem, Roman general and future emperor Titus had ordered the 10th Fretensis Legion to raze the city to the ground and then build themselves a permanent camp amid the ruins. When Hadrian and his entourage, including men of the Praetorian Guard and Singularian Horse, reached Jerusalem, they found a devastated landscape where once stood a city that had hosted more than a million people at the Jewish Passover every year.