Roman siege warfare

The wheels of academic publishing often grind very slowly. Particularly with collaborative projects. I have just received the proofs of my chapter for Brill’s Companion to Sieges in the Ancient Mediterranean, which is due for publication in December.

The editors of the volume first contacted me in late March 2017 with an invitation to write a “Roman” chapter to sit between their existing Early Republican and Late Imperial chapters. As I then had a week’s annual leave coming up for Easter, I accepted. There were some points raised by Joshua Levithan’s book on Roman Siege Warfare that I wanted to address and some statements in The Encyclopedia of the Roman Army’s entry on “Siege Warfare” that I didn’t really go along with, so this seemed an ideal opportunity to state my case. I quickly ordered a copy of Yann Le Bohec’s La guerre romaine to get the latest Continental perspective, as well.

I decided to address Caesarian siege warfare, as our existing primary sources describe 29 sieges (a reasonable number for methodical analysis) carried out during the period from 58 BC to 45 BC. It was a tight schedule, but my chapter was submitted on 1 May 2017.

Luckily, two years down the line, there hasn’t been any new research on this topic, so I’m confident that my findings can stand. But at an estimated $155 per copy, I wonder how many people will be settling down in their armchairs to read my chapter this December.

A View of Ancient History

As an undergraduate, I supplemented the usual prescribed reading for my archaeology course with whatever volumes of Stephen Jay Gould’s “Reflections in Natural History” I could lay my hands on. For anyone who doesn’t know, Gould was, by trade, an evolutionary biologist and palaeontologist, but he became best-known for his essays in Natural History magazine from 1973 until 2000, which were periodically gathered into paperback editions.

Popular science?

Gould was hailed as a great exponent of “popular science”. He himself preferred to think in terms of “writing science for general consumption”, or producing “accessible writing for nonscientists” (as explained in the preface to his penultimate collection, The Lying Stones of Marrakech, published in 2000). And he clearly succeeded.

I was reminded of all of this while perusing the German Wikipedia entry on the Ninth Legion. My recent book, The Fate of the Ninth, is listed there as “populärwissenschaftlich”, or “popular science”. I’m not sure of the term’s nuanced meaning in German, but it made me smile, as two of the other works listed there – Frere’s Britannia and Todd’s Roman Britain – were quite definitely intended for a wide non-academic readership. So why had the Wikipedia author singled me out as populärwissenschaftlich?

I don’t know the answer to this question. It can’t be a footnote issue, as The Fate of the Ninth is fully annotated (though footnote-averse readers are encouraged to ignore all 324 of them). And in case you’re interested, Frere (the third edition, published in 1987) has about 500 end-notes, and Todd (I only have the original 1981 paperback on my shelf) has 149 end-notes. Nor can it be an issue of “dumbing down”, as there’s no simplification of intellectual content. If you read my book, you will find a closely argued, meticulously documented study of how and why scholars and researchers ever assumed that the Ninth Legion had been destroyed in Britain, with an accurate and reliable account of why this was — and remains — an unlikely conclusion to draw from the available evidence. And along the way, you’ll meet an interesting cast of characters, many of whom don’t often get mentioned in Anglophone histories.

Whatever the reason for the German Wikipedia verdict on The Fate of the Ninth, I am rather pleased to be included (even if mistakenly) in the same category as Stephen Jay Gould. For the last 20 or so years, I have consciously attempted to follow my “historical-archaeological” version of Gould’s “scientific” philosophy, which I paraphrase from the preface to The Lying Stones of Marrakech: that, as the evidence speaks directly to unprejudiced observers, accessible writing for non-academics therefore simply requires clarity, suppression of professional jargon, and a desire to convey the excitement of fascinating facts and interesting theories. I’m gratified to learn, from the comments posted by four or five readers, that I seem to have succeeded in my own small way.

A tribune of the Triumphant Ninth

My book The Fate of the Ninth describes the journey of discovery, from the eighteenth century to the present, that finally revealed the likely explanation for the curious disappearance of Rome’s Ninth Legion.

The Ninth Legion’s early days

In chapter 3, I sketched in the early history of the legion. However, not much is known of its movements prior to its arrival in Pannonia under the emperor Augustus (r. 27 BC-AD14). Its epithet Hispana points to service in Spain, no doubt during Augustus’ wars there from 25 BC until 19 BC. But it is only with the events of AD 20 that the legion enters the pages of history, with its famous march down through Italy, crossing over to Africa for the war with Tacfarinas (Tacitus, Annals 3.9).

Researchers mostly take their cue from Emil Ritterling, the careful scholar who compiled the history of the legions for the German-language Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft in the 1920s. He thought it quite likely that the imperial Ninth Legion traced its history back to a legion with this number in the army of Julius Caesar in the 50s BC. Then, the future emperor Augustus, during the civil wars that brought him to the throne, will have called up the veterans from their farms in Italy to re-form the legion, which then became a fixture in the imperial army. Inscriptions from this early period are few and far between.

A puzzling proconsul of Achaia

Between 1906 and 1911, the American archaeologist Bert Hill was supervising the excavations at the sacred spring in Corinth known as Peirene. (In the event, it took over 50 years for Hill’s report to reach publication, which is surely something of a record in archaeology -- though it might be a close-run thing.) In June 1910, a marble block was unearthed, which carried a badly damaged Latin inscription. Although only the top right-hand quadrant was legible, it was clearly the statue base of a Roman senator, whose name was already known to epigraphers from a bilingual dedication in Athens (CIL III, 551).

The senator was Lucius Aquillius Florus Turcianus Gallus, commemorated at Athens for his governorship of Achaia, which he was thought to have held under the emperor Augustus, chiefly because he was known to have been quaestor Imperatoris Caesaris Augusti (“quaestor of the emperor Caesar Augustus”) some ten years earlier. (New senators began their careers at the age of 25 as quaestores, with duties linked to the treasury, and might hope to hold the proconsulship of a province in their mid-30s.)

However, the Corinth inscription, eventually published in 1919 (as AE 1919, 1), caused some confusion, as Turcianus’ governorship was explicitly dated (on the final two lines) to the period when the two Tiberii Claudii, Anaxilas and Dinippus, were the duumviri quinquennales (the pair of city magistrates, appointed for a five-year period). They were known to have held office during the reign of Nero. If Turcianus had really been quaestor under Augustus, he would have been quite an old man by the reign of Nero (r. AD 54-68). What had gone wrong?

Actually, the early editors hadn’t considered that the title of Imperator Caesar Augustus applied equally well to Augustus’ great-grandson Gaius, the emperor Caligula (r. AD 37-41), who reigned a mere fifteen years earlier than Nero. Thus, the two inscriptions could be reconciled as being from the later Julio-Claudian period, and Turcianus’ career became a lot less odd.

A tribune of the triumphant legion

What has all this to do with the Ninth Legion? In fact, prior to his entry into the Senate, Turcianus had served as trib(unus) mil(itum) leg(ionis) VIIII Mac(edonicae) (“military tribune of the Ninth Macedonica Legion”), a post that prospective senators normally held at the age of around 20. (This post can be seen at the end of line 3 of the inscription.) The early editors realized that this must be a reference to the later Ninth Hispana Legion, the otherwise unattested epithet Macedonica evidently alluding to distinguished service in Macedonia. What else could this be, other than (as Theodor Mommsen, the father of Roman history, put it) propter fortitudinem in proelio Philippensi exhibitam, “on account of bravery displayed in the Battle of Philippi” in 42 BC, when the army of Caesar’s assassins was crushed by the future emperor Augustus.

Thus, it turns out that a relatively obscure senator had inadvertently preserved an important (and hitherto unknown) episode in the life of the Ninth Legion. When Ritterling wrote in the 1920s, it was believed that Turcianus’ proconsulship of Achaia had been held in around 12 BC. This led to the rather neat theory that Turcianus had served his tribunate in around 25 BC, just as the legion was beginning service in Spain, so this was plausibly before it had acquired the title Hispana and was still known by the earlier title of Macedonica.

We can now be quite sure that Turcianus’ statue was actually erected in Athens in the early AD 50s (say AD 53, for there is a space in Athenian chronology to accommodate both Turcianus as proconsul and Anaxilas and Dinippus as duumviri in that year). Thus, his tribunate in the Ninth Legion, some fifteen years before, must have fallen around AD 40, with the legion firmly established in Pannonia. If Mommsen’s conjecture was correct, and the title Macedonica harks back to Philippi, its use here, almost a century after the battle, was perhaps a local conceit to give the legion a link with Greece.

The Lost Legion

Sometimes theories and ideas take on a life of their own. They become self-perpetuating. Quite often, nobody remembers where they came from, or why they appeared, so nobody can really say whether they are “a good idea” or “a bad idea”. But, equally often, we’re happy enough to go along with them.

The Fate of the Ninth Legion

The destruction of the Roman Ninth Legion at the hands of the wild Caledonian tribes north of Hadrian’s Wall is one such idea. You will find several web sites repeating this idea.


I wrote The Fate of the Ninth in order to try and explain where this idea came from. And also why, in my opinion, it’s “a bad idea”. I’ve also suggested a different scenario to explain the curious disappearance of the Ninth Legion.

Positive reception

I’m glad to see, from the positive comments posted by readers, that I seem to have done a good job.
If you want to get your own copy, you can get it here. US readers will find it here, and it’s available in Australia using this link.