Roman Spaces by Eric S. Morse

Author:Eric S. Morse [Morse, Eric S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-77180-089-1
Publisher: Iguana Books
Published: 2014-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

1 If you go on to look more deeply into Roman Britain, the strong impressions Sutcliff leaves can trip you up. I spent many years under the illusion that the breakaway Emperor Carausius had invented the camouflaged interceptor galleys of the classis Britannica. I would swear that I read this before I read The Silver Branch, in which she mentions ‘a sad-eyed individual in the sea-green tunic of the scouting galleys’.

In fact, a third-century source (Philostratus, Imagines) says that Mediterranean pirates used blue-grey camouflage, and Vegetius claims that Julius Caesar introduced blue-green camouflage into British waters. Carausius logically then would have had them, but it’s not documented. We can be sure he didn’t invent them. (Neither did Caesar.)

2 We are now pretty sure that the Romans actually called it Hadrian’s Wall (Vallum Aelii) thanks to a nice piece of ‘regimental silver’ found in 2003. The reason we are only ‘pretty sure’ is because, as the British Museum notes, part of the inscription is ‘very significant but more difficult to interpret’. That’s the way it goes in Roman history.

3 Sutcliff may have described more truly than she knew. Dr. Bishop has kindly pointed out to me that recent air surveys suggest fairly substantial pre-Wall settlement and long-standing field boundaries in at least some sectors, and decreased crop production north of the Wall after construction. Which means that, if it wasn’t quite the assorted very nasty Demilitarized Zones of the present day, it was still probably not a fun place to spend time unless you were somehow connected to the garrison. Living too close on the north side was discouraged. The Regional Centurions would have refereed tribal elections, supervised markets, and enforced restricted-zone access.

4 Yes, Canadian Football League fans everywhere, Sen. Jules César owned a team called the Alouettes.

5 The description of legionary nomenclature here is based firmly on Lawrence Keppie, The Making of the Roman Army: From Republic to Empire, 1998.

6 This was one of the pretexts for invasion about twenty years before. They actually found more concrete evidence than George W. Bush did in Iraq, though the range and destructive capacity were probably overrated.

7 There is a theory that Nero’s government was conducting a serious cost-benefit analysis of the British involvement at the time, which may have led to the panic. Contemporary writers did question ROI in Britain.

8 Decisions like these are always highly political. Quite a number of years later, the Canadian government made an entire battle in the Balkans disappear.

9 Canadian military historian David Bercuson gives a very full account of the Airborne affair in Significant Incident. One of the problems was that they were dependent on other units for personnel.

10 The statement is made in an explanatory aside to his history of Crassus’ defeat in 53 BCE but Dio tends to retroject usages from his own experience three centuries later. But you can’t lose an Eagle that isn’t out there with you, and by the third century, the Romans couldn’t afford to lose any. The battlegroup system

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