Matthew Nicholls, lecturer in classics and senior tutor at the University of Reading  said today in the Guardian that Rosemary Sutcliff’s “wonderful” book The Eagle of the Ninth helped turn him on to Roman history. He was responding to the question posed by the Guardian newspaper in its regular notes and queries “Was a Roman legion (the ninth) really wiped out in Scotland in AD117?”

The conjecture that it was wiped out by Britons and perhaps prompted the building of Hadrian’s wall has been attractive to many authors, including Rosemary Sutcliff (whose wonderful children’s book The Eagle of the Ninth helped turn me on to Roman history), but the more prosaic truth is that inscriptions show that the legion seems to have been moved elsewhere in the empire and continued to serve at least into the AD120s. It may finally have met its end in Jewish or Danube frontier revolts later in the second century.

Source: Notes and queries | The Guardian.