Nonetheless, to support the theory that the 9th Hispana had been wiped out in Judea some time during the revolt, and to scotch the idea that the 9th Hispana had been destroyed in Britain in AD 122 or earlier, some authors pointed to the evidence of two inscriptions in Holland which, they said, put the 9th Hispana out of Britain and on the Lower Rhine after AD 122. It was assumed that, as the legion had been based in Britain since AD 43 and had never previously been stationed on the Lower Rhine, these inscriptions must have dated from some time after AD 122, meaning the legion had been transferred out of Britain not long after AD 120, the dating of the last numismatic evidence of the legion’s presence in Britain.
There was also the fact that another legion took the 9th Hispana’s place in Britain in AD 122, and some authors have suggested that this indicated an orderly transition from one resident legion to another that year. It has also been pointed out that two officers known to have served as laticlavius tribunes with the 9th Hispana, Lucius Aemilius Karus, around AD 119, and Lucius Norvius Crispinus Martialis Saturninus, in AD 121, both lived to enjoy long and distinguished careers, and therefore the legion could not have been wiped out in or before AD 122 and must have existed after that time.
The latter point is worth examining in detail. With only one laticlavius tribune serving with a legion at any one time, Karus, who went on to become a consul and the governor of Arabia, would have left the legion by AD 121, to be replaced by Saturninus as senior tribune and second-in-command of the 9th Hispana. Yes, Saturninus also lived to become a praetor, legion commander, consul and provincial governor. But here is the intriguing thing—following his posting as a tribune with the 9th Hispana Legion, Saturninus did not receive another official appointment for twenty-five years. Only then, after all that time, was he given command of a legion.
Normally, after leaving a legion, a man who had served as tribune could be expected to soon take a seat in the Senate and over the succeeding years work his way up the promotional ladder, with a legion command quickly following. After AD 122, Saturninus’ career stopped dead. Hadrian would have nothing more to do with him. It was only in AD 147, under the emperor Antoninus Pius, that Saturninus at last received his legion command, that of the 3rd Augusta in Africa. He was by that time around age 50. A legion commander of that maturity, at any time in Roman history, was rare. Two years later, Antoninus gave Saturninus a new imperial appointment, and his stalled career was on the move again, with a consulship not far off. [CIL, VIII 2747, 18273.]
In contrast, Saturninus’ predecessor at the 9th Hispana, Lucius Karus, had joined the Senate, been a praetor, commanded a legion, been made a consul and become governor of Arabia by AD 142. [AE 1909, 236, Gerasa] All this had been achieved while Saturninus was ignored, with Karus’ peak career appointment as a provincial governor taking place five years prior to Saturninus’ career restarting with his appointment to the command of the 3rd Augusta Legion.
What was it that suddenly put the brakes on Saturninus’ career and would leave him in the official doldrums for a quarter of a century? Could it be that he was present at the annihilation of the 9th Hispana Legion in northern Britain in AD 122? Was he, a mounted officer, among the few men of the legion to escape the slaughter, perhaps galloping away accompanied by a few cavalry, in the same way that Petilius Cerialis had escaped Boudicca’s British rebels in AD 60 when he commanded the 9th Hispana? Or was Saturninus taken prisoner, and later returned by the Caledonians? The disgrace of defeat, and of surrender or capture, hung like a dead bird around the necks of Romans. Many officers and enlisted men throughout Roman history committed suicide rather than live to face either. Was this why Lucius Saturninus was made to pay the price of ignominy for twenty-five years?
This was not the first time a senior officer had been banned from the promotion lists after his legion had suffered at the hands of the enemy in Britain. In AD 51, during the reign of Claudius, “the legion under Manlius Valens had meanwhile been defeated” by the Silures in Wales. [Tac., A, XII.40] Neither this battle nor its location was described by Tacitus. The legion in question was not identified, but it is likely to have been the 20th, which had recently arrived in the west of England after being transferred from Colchester in the late AD 40s. The legion’s commander, Manlius Valens, survived the battle, but the defeat of his unit saw him removed from the lists for the next seventeen years.
Through the remainder of the reign of Claudius and the entire reign of Nero, Valens received no further official appointments. Only in AD 68, when Galba came to power, was Valens restored to the promotional ladder, starting, uniquely, with a second legion command, that of the new 1st Italica Legion. Valens went on to become a consul much later, in his ninetieth year. His case demonstrates a precedent for a senior legion officer being sidelined by the Palatium for many years as punishment for the defeat of his legion when serving in a command position.
Now consider the evidence of the two 9th Hispana inscriptions in Holland. At Nijmegen, tile stamps of the 9th Hispana put men of the legion there, on the Lower Rhine, sometime between AD 104 and 120, according to one authority. [Web., IRA, 2] Nearby, at Aachen, there is an altar dedicated by Lucius Latinius Macer, camp-prefect of the 9th Hispana Legion. [Ibid.] There is no numismatic evidence to show that the legion as a whole ever left Britain. That the altar at Aachen was dedicated by the legion’s camp-prefect indicates that he was leading a vexillation of the unit on detached duty on the Lower Rhine. If the entire legion had been present, its legate or tribune could have been expected to make the dedication.
Another authority has proposed that a detachment of one or more cohorts from the 9th Hispana Legion was transferred from Britain to Nijmegen in AD 113 when Trajan was preparing for his AD 114–116 Parthian campaign in the east. [Hold., RAB, 1] The theory is that the 9th Hispana detachment replaced troops taken from the Rhine and sent to the East for Trajan’s Parthian operation. [Ibid.]
It has been pointed out that several auxiliary units including the Ala Vocontiorum were transferred from Britain to the Lower Rhine in around AD 113, and so probably accompanied the 9th Hispana detachment. [Hold., RAB, 1] All these auxiliary units that had transferred with the 9th Hispana vexillation were back at their old stations in Britain by AD 120. [Ibid.] This suggests that by AD 120, the 9th Hispana detachment had also rejoined the mother legion in Britain, where numismatic evidence put the 9th Hispana that year.
There is another intriguing fact. Five auxiliary units known to be based in Britain up to this time, a cavalry wing and four light infantry cohorts, also disappeared from the face of the earth in Britain in the same year, AD 122—the Ala Agrippiana Miniata, and the 1st Nervorium Cohort, 2nd Vasconum CR Cohort, 4th Delmatarum Cohort and the 5th Raetorum Cohort. [Hold., DRA, ADRH] There is no record of the existence of these units after AD 122, just as there no evidence of them being transferred or disbanded. They simply disappeared. And this ala and these cohorts constitute the type and minimum number of support units that a legion on campaign might be expected to take with it.
Were the 9th Hispana Legion and its auxiliary support units ambushed by Caledonian tribes in Scotland in the late summer of AD 122 as they marched unsuspectingly through the lowlands of Scotland? Was the legion exterminated by the Caledonians, with the bodies of the fallen Romans stripped and the 9th Hispana’s sacred eagle and all its other standards carried away by the victorious tribes? And did the legion’s second-in-command Lucius Saturninus survive the bloody battle and escape back to Roman lines, only to live in shame for the next twenty-five years?
In the spring of AD 122, the new emperor Hadrian arrived in Britain as part of a long inspection tour of the empire. That same year, work began on the construction of an east-west wall across southern Scotland, from one coast to the other, to keep the barbarian tribes out of Roman Britain. It might be suggested that the annihilation of the 9th Hispana Legion that year sponsored the order to build Hadrian’s Wall. But, during his tour of the empire, Hadrian ordered the construction of stre
ngthened defenses including walls on frontiers in numerous places, not just in Britain.
Here is another interesting fact. In the summer of AD 122, men from thirteen cavalry alae and thirty-seven auxiliary cohorts stationed in Britain were given honorary discharge after serving the required twenty-five years in the Roman military. [Birl., DRA, CEO] It is hardly likely, with a legion just recently destroyed on the province’s frontier, that the emperor would permit any such discharges. Could it be that these discharges took place prior to the annihilation of the 9th Hispana, and also played a part in it?
Via traders, word would have reached the tribes of Scotland that the Roman emperor was touring Britain and had ordered the construction of a wall to keep them out. They may well have also known that many Roman auxiliary units would be discharging men that summer, with the auxiliaries concerned looking forward to their retirement. Here was a window of opportunity for the tribes—before the wall was erected and while the auxiliary units were weakened by the discharge of experienced men.
The 9th Hispana Legion had moved up to Carlisle from Eburacum (York) sometime after AD 108. In all probability the move took place in the summer of AD 122, to permit the legion to commence the earthworks on the wall that Hadrian had ordered to be erected; this brief occupation would explain why the legion left no epigraphic evidence at Carlisle. The move made the 9th Hispana the most northerly based of the legions stationed in Britain and the Empire. The Roman fortress at Carlisle, which occupied a site alongside the town that served as the capital of the local Carvetti tribe, became a military base second only in the province to the capital Eburacum. [Tom., DRA, DRAC]
Perhaps in the late summer, once Hadrian had left Britain, the Caledonians sent a message to the commander of the 9th Hispana Legion, to entice him north of his base at Carlisle. Perhaps that commander was told that his emperor’s wall would not be necessary, that the tribes were prepared to sign a lasting peace with Rome—but the commander must come quickly, while the chieftains were all of one mind, and he should bring as many troops as he could to awe the locals and ensure that wavering tribes did not back out of the treaty.
The officer commanding the 9th Hispana would have been well aware that Hadrian was all for consolidating the empire’s borders; in some cases Hadrian had given up territory acquired by his predecessor Trajan and withdrawn troops from what he saw as untenable positions. Unlike Trajan, Hadrian had no desire to expand the Roman Empire; he preferred making peace to making war. So, taken in by the Caledonians, and imagining how pleased his emperor would be with him if he could give him a peace treaty with the Caledonians, the commanding officer of the 9th Hispana marched his legion, four auxiliary cohorts and a cavalry wing north from Carlisle. And in doing so, he led 7,500 men into a trap.
The tribes of Caledonia had assembled more than 30,000 fighting men in AD 84, to take on the Romans at the Battle of Mons Graupius in Scotland. [Tac., A, 29] It is conceivable that a similar number would have taken part in the ambush of the 9th Hispana thirty-eight years later, among them survivors of Mons Graupius and the sons and grandsons of men who had fallen in that battle, all thirsting for revenge. And in a short, sharp bloodbath, these men surprised and destroyed the 9th Hispana—a legion that had taken part in the Mons Graupius defeat of the Caledonians—and its accompanying auxiliary units. With their ambush, the Caledonians had avenged their people for the defeat at Mons Graupius.
In late AD 122, before the last salary payment period of the year, the 6th Victrix Legion marched out of its base at Vetera on the Lower Rhine. Soon the legion arrived in southern Britain aboard the ships of the Britannic Fleet, then hurried north to make its new headquarters at Eburacum. It had come to fill the gap left by the 9th Hispana. Soon, too, three new auxiliary units freshly raised by Hadrian arrived in the province. [Hold., DRA, ADRH] Replacements for the men discharged at the beginning of the summer would also have been rushed to Britain. And work on Hadrian’s Wall took on a new urgency.
Yet no one said a word about what had happened to the 9th Hispana Legion, the legion that had served Julius Caesar and eight emperors through the Roman Empire’s rise to its zenith. Officially, it was as if the annihilated 9th Hispana had never existed.
AD 132–135
XLVII. SECOND JEWISH REVOLT
Shimeon bar-Kokhba’s uprising
If Trajan had been a soldier emperor, Hadrian was a tourist emperor, spending more time visiting the provinces and seeing the sights than he did in Rome. In AD 131, his latest travels brought him to Judea. Hadrian was now 55. He had been emperor for almost fourteen years. He had consolidated Rome’s frontiers, inspecting garrisons and forts, abolishing some installations and relocating others. And he had lectured his legionaries and auxiliaries, and drilled them, reforming practices that he felt were too luxurious for soldiers. He tightened the discipline governing his men, and “taught them all that should be done.” [Dio, LXIX, 9]
By the time he had climbed up into the Judean Hills in the summer of AD 131 to the site of the once mighty Jewish city of Jerusalem, Hadrian was thinking about his legacy to history. In AD 70, following the defeat of the Jewish rebels holding Jerusalem, Roman general and future emperor Titus had ordered the 10th Fretensis Legion to raze the city to the ground and then build themselves a permanent camp amid the ruins. When Hadrian and his entourage, including men of the Praetorian Guard and Singularian Horse, reached Jerusalem, they found a devastated landscape where once stood a city that had hosted more than a million people at the Jewish Passover every year.
There were few structures of note here. Only the towering Temple Mount, from which the Jews’ Second Temple, built by Herod, had been removed. And the fortress of the 10th Fretensis Legion, apparently built in the vicinity of the former palace of Herod. A small ramshackle vicus, or civilian settlement, had also grown outside the legion base to house camp followers.
Hadrian now instructed his subordinates to build a new city on the site of Jerusalem. He would give it colonia status and settle retiring legionaries there. He named the new city Aelia Capitolina, incorporating his family name of Aelius. Meanwhile, the soaring Temple Mount begged a new adornment, and Hadrian ordered a Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter erected there. He also issued an edict that circumcision, a rite among the Jews which Hadrian considered a barbaric form of mutilation, was forthwith illegal throughout the empire. In addition to founding the new city of Aelia, said Eusebius, who was the Christian bishop of Caesarea in the fourth century, “before its gate, that by which we go to Bethlehem, he [Hadrian] set up an idol of a pig in marble, signifying the subjugation of the Jews to Roman authority.” [Eus., Chron., 2, HY 20]
Because Jerusalem was then the site of the base of the 10th Fretensis Legion, later historians would assume that this pig, or boar as they perceived it, was forthwith adopted as the new emblem of the legion. But with the 10th Fretensis’ old emblems of bull, dolphin and war galley reoccurring on its coins after it left Jerusalem and transferred to Arabia, it is clear that Hadrian’s pig identified the city, not the legion that occupied it. As Eusebius made clear, this idol of a pig at the city gate was intended by Hadrian to be a deliberate double-edged slight to the Jews, whose religion required them to avoid both the pig and graven images.
Hadrian, the emperor who prided himself on maintaining a state of peace, departed for Egypt. But he had lit a fuse under Judea. “The Jews deemed it intolerable that foreign races should be settled in their city and foreign religious rites planted there,” said Dio. [Dio, LXIX, 12] There was a leader among the Jews of Judea by the name of Shimeon bar-Kosiba who now directed Jewish anger at Hadrian’s acts into a well-planned resistance movement, with him at its head. His leadership was given credibility by his claim that he descended from King David, and by the most influential rabbi of the day, Akiva ben Yosef, who called him Bar-Kokhba, or “Son of the Star,” which implied that he was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah.
Calling himself nasi, or prince, Bar-Kokhba, as he was to become known far and wide, la
unched his revolt quietly, and cunningly. Through the remainder of that year of AD 131, according to Dio, while Hadrian remained close by, first in Egypt and then in Syria, Bar-Kokhba and his followers continued to make the weapons that their overlords required them to produce as part of their tribute to Rome; but they made them with faults, so that they would be returned to them to be corrected. In this way, they actually made arms for themselves. At the same time, the rebel leadership began to build underground strongholds in out-of-the-way places, “and they pierced these subterranean passages from above at intervals to let in air and light.” [Ibid.]
Had Roman officials in Judea been more observant, they would have realized that something was afoot among the locals, but they took no heed of the signs of looming insurrection. They would pay the price for their laxity. By the spring of AD 132, “all Judea had been stirred up.” [Dio, LXIX, 13] Jews were gathering everywhere, sometimes in public, sometimes in secret. Dio talks of overt and secret acts of Jewish defiance—among other things, Roman statues would have been torn down. And help for the rebel movement was coming from foreign countries—there were large Jewish communities east of the Euphrates in Parthia, and elsewhere. [Ibid.]
And then, one day in the first half of AD 132, the revolt exploded across the province, no doubt in a number of simultaneous and coordinated attacks, taking the Romans completely by surprise. The two legions stationed in the province, the 10th Fretensis at Jerusalem, or Aelia Capitolina as the Romans now called it, and the 6th Ferrata at Caparcotna in Galilee, took the brunt of the uprising.
The province’s governor, Tineus Rufus, survived the initial revolutionary outbreak by virtue of the fact that he was headquartered at Caesarea, on the coast, but it was a different matter for Romans inland. Meanwhile, anyone in the Jewish territories who did not support the revolt suffered at the hands of the rebels, who, according to the later Christian bishop, Eusebius, “killed the Christians with all kinds of persecutions” for refusing to help them against the Romans. [Eus., Chron., 2, HY 17]
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