Category: History

Lindsey Davis’s Top Ten Roman books includes The Eagle of the Ninth | The Guardian

Anthony Lawton1 Comment

The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff was in Lindsey Davis’s top ten Roman books in The Guardian in February 2009. Davis has written the Falco Roman detective novels.

“Somewhere about the year 117AD, the Ninth Legion, which was stationed at Eboracum, where York now stands, marched north to deal with a rising among the Caledonian tribes, and was never heard of again.” Hooked? If not, there’s no hope for you. A wonderful novel, for children of all ages.

The full list of books was:

  1. Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jérôme Carcopino
  2. Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome by Lesley Adkins and Roy A Adkins
  3. Rome and Her Empire by Barry Cunliffe
  4. Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide by Amanda Claridge
  5. The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard
  6. Ancient Inventions by Peter James and Nick Thorpe
  7. The Lost World of Pompeii by Colin Amery and Brian Curran Jr
  8. Roman Britain by Keith Branigan.
  9. The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff
  10. I, Claudius by Robert Graves

Rosemary Sutcliff’s unique gift for character and description in The Lantern Bearers

Anthony Lawton3 Comments

The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff won the Carnegie Medal in 1959. An American reviewer has said …

I discovered Rosemary Sutcliff in my early teens, and she quickly became one of my favorite authors. I can still vividly recapture the magic of reading her books. It was a real pleasure to return to The Lantern Bearers, which I first read when I was about thirteen, and find the magic still intact…

The Lantern Bearers is a wonderful book. Sutcliff possesses a unique gift for character and description, evoking a sense of place and person so intense that the reader can almost see her characters and the world in which they move. She has a matchless ability to establish historical context without a surfeit of the “let’s learn a history lesson now” exposition that mars many historical novels for young people. Her books are never less than meticulously researched, but her recreation of the past is so effortless that one has no sense of academic exercise, but rather of a world as close and immediate as everyday.

…  The Arthurian theme was one of Sutcliff’s favorites: she produced several young adult books on the subject, as well as a beautiful adult novel, Sword at Sunset, to my mind one of the best ever written in this genre. But the Sutcliff‘s Arthur is rooted as much in history as in myth–not just the tragic king of Le Morte d’Arthur or the heroic/magical figure of traditional Arthurian fantasy, but a man who might actually have existed, heir both to the memory of Rome and to the last great flowering of Celtic power in Britain.
…  her enduring popularity … is richly merited: she is, quite simply, one of the best.

Copyright © 1997 Victoria Strauss

The Eagle conveys a real sense of the Roman past

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As a child Dr Miles Russell, now senior lecturer in Prehistoric and Roman Archaeology at Bournemouth University, “endlessly read (and re-read)” Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth . In fact he recalls that it was “to the point of being able to quote whole chunks of text verbatim. Not healthy, perhaps, but it meant that I approached the film The Eagle with both excitement and apprehension. That a film of Sutcliff’s book had finally been made was thrilling; but there is always the fear of cinematic disaster”. He has reviewed  The Eagle for the BBC History magazine.

The film is beautifully constructed and lovingly shot. Hadrian’s Wall has never looked so real (dirty and windswept, its garrison is cold and miserable), whilst the land beyond the reach of Rome has never seemed so alien and otherworldly (with its thick forests and landscapes of jagged stone).  Read More »

‘It would seem that Sutcliff was right after all” | The Eagle and The Eagle of the Ninth | More on The Roman Ninth Legion’s mysterious loss | BBC News

Anthony Lawton1 Comment

Ninth Legion stampRosemary Sutcliff‘s The Eagle of the Ninth is grounded in a view about what happened to the ninth Roman legion. The fate of the legion continues to be debated, most recently on the BBC website, by Miles Russell of Bournemouth University.

The British problem was of deep concern to Roman central government. Thanks to a tombstone recovered from Ferentinum in Italy, we know that emergency reinforcements of over 3,000 men were rushed to the island on “the British Expedition”, early in Hadrian’s reign. The emperor himself visited the island in AD 122, in order to “correct many faults”, bringing with him a new legion, the Sixth.

The fact that they took up residence in the legionary fortress of York suggests that the “great losses” of personnel, alluded to by Fronto, had occurred within the ranks of the Ninth.

Archaeological evidence of the legion’s fate is scarce

It would seem that Sutcliff was right after all.

It was the Ninth, the most exposed and northerly of all legions in Britain, that had borne the brunt of the uprising, ending their days fighting insurgents in the turmoil of early 2nd Century Britain.

Source: BC News – The Roman Ninth Legion’s mysterious loss.

See also on this blog a post on The symbolism of The Eagle of the Ninth | What happened to the ninth legion: Part IX?

The symbolism of The Eagle of the Ninth | What happened to the ninth legion: Part IX?

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Last week I met Professor Michael Fulford of Reading University archaeology department, who introduced me (and a crowd of film journalists covering The Eagle film) to some Roman history at Silchester – Calleva in Rosemary Sutcliff‘s The Eagle of the Ninth historical novel for children (of all ages!). I asked him for his take on the fate of the ninth legion, and he has written to me (with permission to reproduce his words – thank you Michael):

At the time Rosemary Sutcliff wrote The Eagle of the Ninth it was the general view that legio IX Hispana, based at York (Eburacum) had somehow come to grief in northern Britain.  There was no specific evidence for a disastrous battle but the record of the legion stopped with an inscription of AD 107-8, commemorating the construction of a building by the legion within the fortress at York.

Since the 1950s further evidence of the fate of the legion has come to light.  There is a tile and a mortarium (specialist pottery vessel) from the legionary fortress at Nijmegen in the Netherlands, each stamped by the legion (LEG VIIII; LEG VIIII HIS), which date to the early 2nd century.  There are also inscriptions of NCOs and officers of the legion whose career profiles are such that the legion must have still been in existence in the 120s, ie after work started on the construction of Hadrian’s Wall in Britain.  Although there can be no certainty about this until more evidence emerges, it is likely that, after a period in lower Germany (at Nijmegen), the legion was transferred to the East.  If it was not destroyed in the war against the Jews later in Hadrian’s reign, it might have met its fate in the war against Parthia in the early 160s.  The historian Cassius Dio mentions an unnamed legion which was destroyed at the siege of Elegeia in Armenia in 161.

Even if we can no longer associate the loss of the Ninth with Britain, the story, The Eagle of the Ninth can be seen to be symbolic of the fairly constant struggle between Rome and the tribes of northern Britain, from the time of the 1st century governors like Petilius Cerealis and Agricola onwards, through the construction of Hadrian’s Wall, the later building of the Antonine Wall between Clyde and Forth, the return to the previous frontier line, and so on.