[105] Tacitus, Ann. xii. 31 (P. Ostorius) cuncta castris ad …ntonam (MSS. read castris antonam) et Sabrinam fluvios cohibere parat. So the passage is to be restored, only that the name of the river Tern not elsewhere given in tradition cannot be supplied. The only inscriptions found in England of soldiers of the 14th legion, which left England under Nero, have come to light at Wroxeter, the so–called “English Pompeii.” The epitaph of a soldier of the 20th has also been found there. The camp described by Tacitus was perhaps common at first to the two legions, and the 20th did not go till afterwards to Deva. That the camp at Isca was laid out immediately after the invasion is plain from Tacitus, Ann. xii. 32, 38.
[106] A worse narrative than that of Tacitus concerning this war, Ann. xiv. 31–39, is hardly to be found even in this most unmilitary of all authors. We are not told where the troops were stationed, and where the battles were fought; but we get, instead, signs and wonders enough and empty words only too many. The important facts, which are mentioned in the life of Agricola, 31, are wanting in the main narrative, especially the storming of the camp. That Paullinus coming from Mona should think not of saving the Romans in the south–east, but of uniting his troops, is intelligible; but not why, if he wished to sacrifice Londinium, he should march thither on that account. If he really went thither, he can only have appeared there with a personal escort, without the corps which he had with him in Mona—which indeed has no meaning. The bulk of the Roman troops, as well those brought back from Mona as those still in existence elsewhere, can, after the extirpation of the 9th legion, only have been stationed on the line Deva—Viroconium—Isca; Paullinus fought the battle with the two legions stationed in the first two of these camps, the 14th and the (incomplete) 20th. That Paullinus fought because he was obliged to fight, is stated by Dio, lxii. 1–12, and although his narrative cannot be otherwise used to correct that of Tacitus, this much seems required by the very state of the case.
[107] Tacitus, Hist. i. 2, sums up the result in the words perdomita Britannia et statim missa.
[108] The imperial finance–official under Pius, Appian (proem. 5), remarks that the Romans had occupied the best part (τὸ κράτιστον) of the British islands οὐδὲν τῆς ἄλλης δεόμενοι, οὐ γὰρ εὔφορος αὐτοῖς ἐστὶν οὐδ’ ἣν ἔχουσιν. This was the answer of the governmental staff to Agricola and such as shared his opinion.
[109] The opinion that the northern wall took the place of the southern is as widely spread as it is untenable; the cohort–camps on Hadrian’s wall, as shown to us by the inscriptions of the second century, still subsisted in the main unchanged at the end of the third (for to this epoch belongs the relative section of the Notitia). The two structures subsisted side by side, after the more recent was added; the mass of monuments at the wall of Severus also shows evidently that it continued to be occupied up to the end of the Roman rule in Britain.
The building of Severus can only be referred to the northern structure. In the first place, the structure of Hadrian was of such a nature that any sort of restoration of it could not possibly be conceived as a new building, as is said of the wall of Severus; while the structure of Pius was a mere earthen rampart (murus cespiticius, Vita, c. 5), and such an assumption in its case creates less difficulty. Secondly, the length of Severus’s wall 32 miles (Victor, Epit. 20; the impossible number 132 is an error of our MSS. of Eutropius, viii. 19—where Paulus has preserved the correct number; which error has been then taken over by Hieronymus, Abr. 2221; Orosius, vii. 17, 7; and Cassiodorus on the year 207), does not suit Hadrian’s wall of 80 miles; but the structure of Pius, which, according to the data of inscriptions, was about 40 miles long, may well be meant, as the terminal points of the structure of Severus on the two seas may very well have been different and situated closer. Lastly, if, according to Dio, lxxvi. 12, the Caledonians dwell to the north and the Maeates to the south of the wall which divides the island into two parts, the dwelling–places of the latter are indeed not otherwise known (comp. lxxv. 5), but cannot possibly, even according to the description which Dio gives of their district, be placed to the south of Hadrian’s wall, and those of the Caledonians have extended up to the latter. Thus what is here meant is the line from Glasgow to Edinburgh.
[110] A limite id est a vallo is the expression in the Itinerarium, p. 464.
[111] The chief proof of this lies in the disappearance of this legion, that undoubtedly took place soon after the year 108 (C. I. L. vii. 241), and substitution for it of the 6th Victrix. The two notices which point to this incident (Fronto, p. 217 Naber: Hadriano imperium obtinente quantum militum a Britannis caesum? Vita, 5, Britanni teneri sub Romana dicione non poterant), as well as the allusion in Juvenal, xiv. 196: castella Brigantum, point to a revolt, not to an inroad.
[112] If Pius, according to Pausanias, viii. 43, 4, ἀπετέμετο τῶν ἐν Βριτταννίᾳ Βριγάντων τὴν πολλὴν, ὅτι ἐπεσβαίνειν καὶ οὗτοι σὺν ὅπλοις ἦρξαν ἐς τὴν Γενουνίαν μοῖραν (unknown; perhaps, as O. Hirschfeld suggests, the town of the Brigantes, Vinovia) ὑπηκόους Ῥωμαίων, it follows from this, not that there were Brigantes also in Caledonia, but that the Brigantes in the north of England at that time ravaged the settled land of the Britons, and therefore a part of their territory was confiscated.
[113] That he had the design of bringing the whole north under the Roman power (Dio, lxxvi. 13) is not very compatible either with the cession (l.c.) or with the building of the wall, and is doubtless as fabulous as the Roman loss of 50,000 men without the matter even coming to a battle.