New evidence for annihilation of Ninth Legion in Britain?

[Nathan Ross]

I would not be surprised if the VIIII Hispana affair is an attempt to gove Scotland its own Arminius + Teutoburg Forest + national myth, lauding the destruction of the legion as the founding of the nation. Mens sana qui mal y pense.

Also, I think, a continuation of the perennial struggle between history and 'heritage' - history being what we believe probably happened in the past (based on evidence, debate and method), and 'heritage' being what we would like to have happened in the past (because it makes us feel good about ourselves).

I see on wikipedia that this Miles Russell cites Fronto as a source for a disaster of some sort in Britain.

He's not the first to do so by any means - I notice that Thomas Hodgkin, in his History of England from the Earliest Times to the Norman Conquest, cites the quote from Fronto in connection with the ninth legion (although even he doesn't draw a certain parallel)... Hodgkin was writing in 1808 :wink:
'New' evidence must be sought elsewhere.

One other point springs to mind about disappearing legions - it's assumed that legions were struck from the lists only after disbandment for some heinous offence or total destruction in battle. In the latter case the eagle would be lost, although even then the legion could be reconstituted if enough men survived (as happened, I think, with V Alaudae at one point and XII Fulminata too). Since there are no occasions for legion disbandment between the last mention of the ninth in Britain and their absence from the list in 162, we must assume destruction in battle. In the cases that I can think of, however, when legions were destroyed and their eagles (presumably) captured, vigorous action seems to have followed to recover the lost standards: the various campaigns into Germany following the Varus disaster, up to Claudian times, for example, or the depiction of Fuscus' eagle in the Dacian camp on the column of Trajan (implying its recovery soon afterwards). If the 'Roman standards' scratched on the walls of a cave in Judea do indeed depict booty captured by the Bar Kokhba rebels, they cannot have kept the prizes in their keeping for long; the legion supposedly destroyed at Elegeia in 161 may have been revenged by Cassius very soon afterwards in his sack of Ctesiphon.

In the case of the 'losses in Britain' mentioned by Fronto, however, no such campaign of recovery seems to have taken place. Instead, we see a period of consolidation along the frontier. If an eagle really had been lost to the Caledonians early in Hadrian's reign, would the Romans really have been content to let the captors hang onto it?

- Nathan