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).
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?
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.
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.
