Something There Is, Etc.

HADRIAN'S WALL by David Divine. 244 pages. Gambit. $8.95.

It is a relic, really, of a classic blunder. Perdomita Britannia et statim omissa, noted Tacitus scornfully--"Britain was conquered and then thrown away." He blamed the Emperor Domitian, who in A.D. 84 suddenly ordered his brilliant field commander Agricola to return to Rome just when a wholly Roman Britain seemed within grasp of the legions. Thereafter, year by year, the troops that had pressed nearly to the top of Scotland fell back under guerrilla attacks from the Britons. At last, in A.D. 119, Rome decided to stem the retreat and make the best of things by building a wall.

Today, from Solway Firth to the North Sea, through places with amiable country names like Milking Gap, Castle Nick, Twice Brewed, Bogle Hole and Lodhams Slack, the overgrown and tumbled remains of the wall still snake across the neck of Britain. For generations, antiquaries have poked at it and puzzled over it as antiquaries will, especially if they are British. The latest is David Divine, a military correspondent for the London Sunday Times, who prefers strategy to stones. He has wrung from the grassy ruins evidence to show how Domitian's mistake, and the very existence of the wall, prefigured the eventual doom of Roman Britain.

On the Line. That the doom was a long time coming--more than 250 years--may be credited in part to the tactical genius of another, greater emperor. Hadrian had been ruling barely five years when, in A.D. 122, a frontier tour brought him to the site of the wall. He evolved (personally, according to Divine) a radical new defense plan that helped in part to lend his name to the wall. Previously, Roman soldiers had been stationed in fortlets behind the barrier; from these they were ready to be rushed to threatened segments whenever an attack was mounted. Hadrian added cavalry, giving his forces far more flexibility and speed, and enabling them to meet any attack before it could gather full momentum.

With only three exceptions, Hadrian's plan worked perfectly. Like U.S. forces on search-and-destroy missions in Viet Nam, Roman cavalry patrols regularly harried the forested valleys and bare fells rising to the Scottish border. Caledones creeping through the furze or wheeling down on the moors in small war chariots soon learned the bloody lesson that the sector in front of the wall was as Roman as anything behind it. So manned, however, the wall was expensive. Divine estimates that no fewer than 35,000 troops, 63% of the entire garrison force of Roman Britain, were tied up along it.

Often bored, the troops were fair game for anyone with political ambitions. In A.D. 196 and again in A.D. 296, the legions left their posts to follow imperial pretenders. Each time the barbarians immediately swept south across the unmanned wall and ravaged towns and villas. Decaying loyalties were also responsible for the third--and last--debacle. Agents called the Arcani, or secret ones (whom Divine identifies as "part of the Roman CIA"), apparently took bribes, conspiring with enemy tribesmen who were forming a broad anti-Roman alliance in Britain. In A.D. 367, the wall fell by assault. This time the legions did not return. Within a few decades, they had left Britain altogether.

Fixed Folly. Divine argues that Rome's British venture was ultimately a failure because it made no money for the imperial exchequer, and it had no other purpose. It could barely pay for its own security--that is, for the wall. Hadrian's wall was not bad as a makeshift defense, but total conquest and no wall at all would have been better.

Though not a guidebook, Hadrian's Wall is a fine companion for any traveler contemplating a stroll around Castle Nick or Bogle Hole--or a stay-at-home who likes to ponder the philosophical folly of fixed defense in a politically volatile landscape. Its scattering of color photographs are mossily evocative. If the author would rather convince than charm (his prose style seems to have been honed in writing battlefield dispatches), he nevertheless has done more to bring a wall to life than anyone since Pyramus and Thisbe.

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