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The Ninth Legion and Our Hunger for a Final Answer
The Edge of the World: The Psychological Dread of Roman Britannia Welcome to The Historian's Crucible. What does it do to a soldier's mind to march beyond the frontier of civilization into the untamed unknown? In the early second century AD, one of the most battle-hardened formations in the Roman military machine—five thousand heavily armored legionaries—marched north past the frontier of Eboracum (modern York) into the swirling mists of Caledonia. They were never seen again. Their vanishing left such a wound on the Roman psyche that Emperor Hadrian traveled in person to Britain to build a…
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