Hadrian's wall (33 page)

Thirty-nine years after the battle of the Wall, on the last day of the Year of Our Lord 406, the Rhine River froze solid during the coldest winter in memory. Hundreds of thousands of waiting Vandals, Alans, Suevi, and Burgundians emerged from the forests of Germania and marched across the ice into Gaul.

A thin and dispirited Roman and Frankish army mustered to meet them but was easily brushed aside. With that, the world was open to pillage.

Some of the barbarian invaders claimed new lands in Gaul. Others struck south toward Italy, Spain, and Africa. In 410, the Gothic warlord Alaric sacked Rome. It was the first conquest of the city in eight centuries.

In that same year as the sacking, the province of Britannia sent an urgent plea to the emperor Honorius to seek military assistance against barbarian invasion.

The inheritor of Caesar replied that the island would have to look to itself.

No other communication from the empire was ever received.

Hadrian's Wall is a work of fiction based on real events. There was a "Great Barbarian Uprising" in a.d. 367 that convulsed northern Britain, though the details of this war are obscure. There was a famed cavalry called the Petriana. There was a great tidal mixing of migrating tribes, religious faiths, new ideas, and old dissatisfactions in both Roman Britain and the empire as a whole in the fourth century, a prelude to the storm that would break in the fifth century. Above all there was Hadrian's Wall, today one of the most evocative ruins of Rome's imperial glory. Some have declared that a walk along its length is the greatest hike in Britain.

Despite the fame of what is today a World Heritage Site, many of the most basic questions about Hadrian's Wall remain unanswered. Because it has been mined for building stone for more than a millennium, all that remains in most places are its foundations. While its thickness of six to ten feet can be deduced from the surviving stone stump, its height can only be estimated. Most authorities believe- based on the angle of fragmentary steps found at one spot, the wall's necessary height at another place to join a bridge top, and so on- that the Wall averaged about thirteen to fifteen feet high, its dimensions likely varying with location and terrain. This would not have included any protective crenellations that soldiers could have stood behind, which would have added several feet more to its imposing appearance from the Celtic side. This is only an estimate, however. While there are re-creations of the Wall's gates and towers in the English city of Newcastle, and numerous speculative drawings, they represent only educated guesses. They are based on Roman architecture elsewhere in the empire and a couple of crude depictions of the Wall found on a Roman bowl and cup uncovered by archaeologists. Simply put, we moderns don't know exactly what the Wall looked like or how it changed over its three centuries of use. The whitewashing of the structure described in this novel is based on the findings of a lime paint on some stones, but whether Hadrian's Wall was truly painted for its entire length-Roman construction was often colorfully painted-remains a matter of speculation for historians. We do know its western half began as a turf wall that was later mostly replaced with stone.

There is no written record of an actual assault on the Wall, though it certainly could have happened. As barrier and landmark, it undoubtedly figured in periodic conflicts such as the a.d. 367 uprising, since any invading army would have had to cross it. There is little evidence, however, of the kind of fire or destruction that might have accompanied an Alamo-like attack. Did the Wall deter all assault? Was it so easily pierced that invaders left no mark? Or has time erased all evidence of past battles?

Above all, experts are uncertain how the wall functioned. It seems impossible that the estimated five thousand Roman soldiers who permanently manned the Wall-stretched out for eighty Roman miles, or seventy-three modern miles-could have hoped to defeat a determined attack at any one point. They were simply spread too thin. What was the Wall's purpose, then? Simply to mark civilization's boundary in an emphatic way? To control trade and immigration, like the Iron Curtain of our recent times? To collect tariffs and taxes by funneling travelers through gates? Or was the Wall and its forts a mixture of all these things, a barrier that was both physical and psychological? The only thing we can surmise with confidence is that to a certain extent it worked at protecting Roman Britannia from raid and invasion and at sustaining different cultures south and north. The historic division between England and Scotland (Britannia and Caledonia in this book) was set by this Wall.

It is unlikely the Romans would have referred to the fortification as "Hadrian's" Wall. We don't know what name they gave it. Still, modern-day attribution to that energetic, gifted, eccentric, generous, ruthless, rugged, and sensual emperor is accurate. The Wall was started during Hadrian's reign, after he visited the province of Britannia, and a scene much like that of the prologue may indeed have occurred. Remains of a fifty-room wooden "palace" have been found at the Roman fort of Vindolanda that date from Hadrian's visit to Britain, and archaeologists think it may have been constructed for his entourage. We can only guess at what the emperor said or ordered, however: the only specific line in ancient literature that refers to the Wall's construction is a much later fourth century imperial history by Aelius Spartianus that states, "Having reformed the army (in Gaul) in the manner of a monarch, Hadrian set out for Britain. There he corrected many faults and was the first to build a wall, eighty miles long, to separate the Romans from the barbarians."

This is not the only ancient writing I relied on. Many of the Roman aphorisms in this novel are taken from history. The poem of Florus in the prologue is close to one that has actually come down to us from antiquity. So is Clodius's poem from the emperor Julian, about the dubious merits of British beer.

The Romans were aware of the great civilizations of India and China far to the east, trading with both: Valeria's silk gown would have originated in China and is based on the fact that Rome imported such luxuries. Historians thus believe it is possible that Hadrian would have heard of the Great Wall of China, which had taken continuous shape about three centuries before Hadrian's Wall was started. Did China's wall inspire his idea to protect the Roman Empire behind permanent fortifications? We don't know.

One of the challenges of this novel was to convey the prejudices Romans had toward the world outside their empire while suggesting that Celtic tribes were not quite the troglodytes that Roman commentators would have us believe. First of all, the word barbarian did not carry to the Romans the rather savage, uncouth, and filthy image that Hollywood movies give us today. It more accurately meant "outsider," and to apply it to the Celts or Germans creates an image in the modern mind that is not altogether fair. There is no question that the Mediterranean civilizations were for centuries militarily and culturally superior to the peoples of the north, but it was superiority of social organization more than advanced technology. The Romans were supremely disciplined and had centuries of experience in military strategy and governing conquered peoples. But the Celts were farmers of equal skill, superb artisans, ferocious fighters, and had an intricate religion and complex oral literature. The Romans borrowed from them some techniques of wagon-making, metalworking, and plowing. They incorporated many Celtic weapons. The outlying tribes did lag behind the Romans in writing, tactics, strategy, architecture, engineering, and ancient artillery, but appear to have been in no hurry to adopt such advances. The slow progress of ideas-including Christianity-in the ancient world is one of its most alien features, so accustomed are we to mass communication and quick change.

The Celts were a very old people, with a culture that stretched from the Black Sea to Ireland. They sacked Rome early in the city's history and at one time occupied northern Italy before being conquered there by the Romans shortly before the Punic Wars with Carthage. The fact that their remnants were ultimately pushed into Wales, Ireland, and Scotland should not negate the fact that they resisted the Romans for eight centuries. Portrayals we have of them come entirely from Latin sources, and some-such as Caesar's account of his conquest of Gaul-are part history and part deliberate political propaganda. Depictions of the "barbarism" of non-Roman outsiders should thus be taken with a grain of salt, given the incredible artistry of Celtic works that have been uncovered. Whether a Roman of Valeria's station would have reacted favorably to Celtic culture is debatable, of course, but intriguing to speculate about. In the American West, white captives of Indian tribes frequently preferred to stay with their captors when "rescued" by the cavalry. I have imagined a somewhat similar reaction in this novel. Nor should we forget that Rome, ultimately, was overcome in its western half by the very barbarians it disdained, for reasons still vigorously debated. While in many ways the fall of the empire was a catastrophe for civilization, it also cleared away the encrustation of a classical Mediterranean culture that had fossilized. The Dark Ages, however miserable they must have been to live in, were a necessary prelude to a new kind of light: an eventual marriage of northern energy and southern ideas.

None of the characters in this novel are based on real people, except for brief mention of such high-ranking figures as the emperor Hadrian and his governors, the emperor Valentinian, Duke (or Dux, in Roman usage) Fullofaudes at Eburacum (or modern-day York), and Theodosius, the Roman general who landed reinforcements and eventually drove the a.d. 367 uprising back. So is Valeria a probable figure? Would we even find Roman women at so remote a place as Hadrian's Wall?

The answer is certainly yes. A remarkable find of writing scraps in a Roman dump at the military fortress of Vindolanda, about midway along Hadrian's Wall, includes letters between military wives of commanding officers stationed at nearby forts. Also found have been children's shoes in the vicinity of the commander's residence, and we know commanders were allowed to live with their families during their standard three-year tour of duty. Julia Lucilla was a senator's daughter married to a commanding officer at High Rochester. And while Rome was in general a patriarchal society based on military power, with wives legally subordinate to their husbands, upper-class women received some education, generally led comfortable lives, and sometimes wielded considerable political influence through their mates.

While soldiers below the rank of centurion were not allowed officially to marry until after an edict of a.d. 197-a change made to combat lagging recruitment-even before that time there is documentary evidence of legionaries being accompanied by unofficially recognized "wives." There were also brothels, of course, and male-female relationships were undoubtedly as complicated then as they are now. Any reading of surviving Roman correspondence suggests that while technology has changed greatly in the past two millennia, human nature has not changed at all.

Though movies and books have given us a mental picture of the Roman Empire at its height, Rome's incredibly long history means that artistic and archaeological records represent a few surviving snapshots of a long scrapbook that has been mostly lost. The period from the legendary founding of Rome to the city's sack by Alaric in a.d. 410 is an astounding 1,163 years. We can add another thousand years for the persistence of the Byzantine successor to Rome's eastern empire. Simply the time span between the assassination of Julius Caesar and the events in this book is 411 years, or longer than the period between the founding of the English colony at Jamestown, Virginia, and the present day. While technological and social change was incredibly slow by modern standards, change nonetheless took place, and the Rome of Hadrian's Wall was different from the Rome of such films as Cleopatra, Spartacus, or Gladiator. The widespread adoption of more flexible chain mail and the mobility of the horse anticipated the dress and armor of the early Middle Ages, far from the classic Roman soldier we are so familiar with. The horse gave the Roman army the mobility to meet fast-moving barbarian raiding parties, and the height of a horse meant that the short stabbing gladius sword was gradually eclipsed by longer slashing swords, eventually evolving from the cavalry spatha of Galba to Excalibur-type weapons. Exactly when and how these transitions took place is unclear. Our mental picture is blurry because ancient literary and archaeological sources decline sharply after about a.d. 200. The late 300s present an author with both a paucity of detail and considerable room for novelistic imagination. The next few centuries in Britain-the probable time of King Arthur, if he really existed-are even foggier.

We do know that Hadrian's Wall provided a three-centuries-long solution to a vexing military and technological problem that Rome continually struggled with: defending an empire 3,000 miles long and 1,750 miles wide. Despite the superb construction of 48,500 miles of Roman roads, transportation in ancient times was extremely difficult. At the time of Valeria's journey, the stirrup had not been invented, horseshoes were mostly unknown, wagons had no suspension to even out bumps, and "horsepower"-horses, mules, donkeys, and oxen-had to be fed. The practical limit of economical land transport away from water was about seventy-five miles, which helps explain why the empire was oriented around the Mediterranean and why major new cities grew up along such waterways as the Danube, the Rhine, the Seine, and the Thames. Yet the empire's land area was the size of the United States. Hadrian's revolutionary solution was to halt the expansion that his predecessors had pushed and establish a defensible boundary. In Britain it was Hadrian's Wall, in Germany it was a log palisade two hundred miles long between the Danube and Rhine, and in North Africa and Arabia it was a series of forts in trackless desert. Where possible, the Romans used rivers, canyons, and ridges to make their stopping point as defensible as possible. A precipitous gorge near the headwaters of the Middle East's Euphrates River was one such barrier.

Still, the Roman army, even with as many as 300,000 men, never had sufficient numbers to firmly guard such lengthy boundaries. As time went on, the Romans were increasingly forced to recruit the barbarians they had conquered into their army to sustain its numbers. These new warriors brought new methods, such as heavy cavalry and long swords, with them. While border fortifications provided bases and a fixed boundary, it was relatively easy for a determined barbarian horde to pierce Rome's long line. The solution was infantry that could march quickly on Roman roads to crisis points, or cavalry that could run raiders to ground. The analogy between the Petriana and the U.S. cavalry that patrolled the American West is obvious. Hadrian's Wall was not just a fixed fortification but a base for patrol.

While Petrianis may have been a real fort, I have moved it in my imagination from its likely flatland location near modern-day Carlisle (Uxello durum), where cavalry would have been most effective, to a more evocative but fictional setting of hill and river: a place that borrows from the geography of the Roman fort at today's Birdoswald, called Banna by the Romans, and that near Corbridge, called Onnum. Arden's fort of Tiranen is not based on any specific Celtic hill fort, but its design is typical of those found across Britain, and its described terrain is typical of the increasingly rugged Scottish countryside north of Hadrian's Wall.