04-25-2010, 03:21 PM
Quote:My favourite theory to date is the one proposed by Tom Stanier in the 1965 essay noted above (The Brigantes and the Ninth Legion, Phoenix 19, no.4), which is quite a masterpiece: Stanier suggests that the Brigantes, fed up with the bossy Romans, decamped en masse to the north - furthermore, the soldiers of the ninth legion, who by this time were very friendly with the charming Brigantian ladies, deserted in a body to go and live with them... Hadrian then built his wall and ditch to stop this sort of irregular conduct... :wink:Hmmm ... we're straying towards the fringe again! To be fair, in 1965, this essay probably seemed fairly plausible. And Stanier has a nice prose style. But historical study marches on, leaving out-of-date theories in its wake (although I know, to my cost, that there are RAT members who dispute the concept of "out-of-date"! :wink: ).
EDIT: Oops -- just realised that you were probably being ironic, Nathan. Sorry -- brain's tired today. Too many late nights. But I'll leave my comments in case anyone else wishes to see what Stanier was on about:
Stanier began with three pieces of evidence that he wished to explain: the famous "Genounian district" passage of Pausanias (Descr. Greece 8.43.4); the fragmentary Jarrow inscription (now RIB 1051); and the existence of the vallum running along behind Hadrian's Wall.
The Pausanias passage, although hopelessly problematic (where is the Genounian district?), surely refers to the Antonine advance into Scotland, and not to anything during Hadrian's reign. (Pausanias explicitly mentions Antoninus Pius.) And it is surely special pleading to link the "dispersal" of ?barbarians on RIB 1051 (the inscription is broken here) with a Hadrianic mass migration of the Brigantes. First prove your migration; then link the "dispersal".
When Stanier writes that "we have now made some sense of the Pausanias passage", he is deluding himself and his readers, because he hasn't! When he writes that "the coinage of 119 points emphatically to Britain and includes several victory issues", we have seen (above) that he is mistaken; it should properly be dated "AD 119/128" and includes no explicit victory issues. And when he writes that "Q. Roscius Falco, the governor, went on in 122 to be governor of Asia -- a post offered only to the most successful of governors", he is referring to the man usually known as Pompeius Falco, and his governorship of Asia (currently dated 123/4) was the result of a ballot of qualified consulars, so it should not be attributed to any specific military success.
Finally, his theory that the vallum was intended to stem the trickle of refugee Brigantes and disaffected Ninth legionaries from escaping to the north seems positively bizarre to me. (Although it would make a great premise for a movie.)
