Authors: Stephen Dando-Collins
AD
84
XXXVI. BATTLE OF MONS GRAUPIUS
Rome’s most northerly victory
“The cavalry do not use swords, nor do the wretched Britons mount in order to throw javelins.”
O
FFICER OF
1
ST
T
UNGRIAN
C
OHORT
,
Vindolanda Writing Tablets
Roman general Gnaeus Julius Agricola celebrated his forty-fourth birthday on June 13. Yet this was a somber time for him; at beginning of that summer, Agricola and his wife Domitia had lost a son, born the previous year, to illness. It was “a grievous personal loss,” said Agricola’s son-in-law Cornelius Tacitus. But “the conduct of the war was one means he used to distract his mind from his sorrow.” [Tac.,
Agr
., 29]
That war had been waged by Agricola, governor of Britain, for seven years. Following in the conquering footsteps of his predecessors Cerialis and Frontinus, Agricola had begun by completing the subjection of Wales and had then advanced his troops inexorably into Scotland, defying the piecemeal attempts of the Caledonian tribes to stop him. Now, in the last days of the summer of
AD
84, the general watched from the camp tribunal as 20,000 troops assembled in their neat ranks in front of him. [Some authors suggest
AD
83
*
.]
In the northern distance, beyond the walls of the Roman marching camp, a bare hill rose up, the nearest of a rolling range that filled the horizon. On that hill, tens of thousands of Caledonian warriors could be seen milling; men of all ages, they had come to make a stand against the Romans. “Bodies of troops began to move and weapons flashed, as the most adventurous [Caledonians] ran out in front, and all the time their battle-line was taking shape.” [Tac.,
A
, 33]
Agricola, according to Tacitus a good-looking man but not striking, wore the armor of a senior officer, with the scarlet waistband of a legate tied around his midriff and the purple cloak of a commander-in-chief draped over his shoulders. He looked intently around his troops, and then began to speak. “This is the seventh year,
comrades,” he said, “since by loyal service, yours and mine, you began to conquer Britain in the name of imperial Rome’s divinely guided greatness.” [Tac.,
A
, 33]
Together, Agricola went on, soldiers and general had advanced further north than any previous Roman army. And as they trudged around marshes, crossed mountains and rivers, and warily threaded their way through forests, soldiers had repeatedly asked him, “When will we meet the enemy? When will they come out and fight?” Well, said Agricola, the Caledonians were coming now, for the Roman army had dug them out of their hiding places. [Ibid.]
Over the last four years, as Agricola’s troops had continued their inexorable advance north, the Caledonian tribes had used hit-and-run tactics, sending small groups of warriors to harass the Romans and slow their advance. But the previous year, when the Caledonians had heard that detachments had been taken away from all the Roman legions in Britain to serve in the young emperor Domitian’s war against the Chatti on the Rhine, they had found new courage, and had attacked the marching camp of the 9th Hispana Legion at night, in force. It had taken Agricola’s arrival with auxiliary units to relieve the embattled 9th to make the tribesmen withdraw.
Pointing to the tribesmen in the distance, Agricola told his troops, “These are the same men who last year attacked a single legion like robbers in the night, and acknowledged defeat when they heard your battle-cry.” [Tac,
A
, 34] Agricola said that he had long ago made up his mind that generals and armies could not avoid danger by running away. But there would be glory, too, in dying, if die they must. Not that Agricola intended dying this day.
“We have our hands …” he slid his sword from the scabbard on his left hip, and held it high so that every man could see its gleaming blade, “and swords in them, and these are all that matter!” [Tac.,
A
, 33] In response, there was a deep-throated roar from legionaries and auxiliaries alike. With his troops impatient to come to grips with the enemy, Agricola urged them, “Have done with campaigning. Crown fifty years with one glorious day!” [Tac.,
Agr
., 34] The fifty years referred to the time that Roman troops had been in Britain—it had actually been forty-one years.
The general’s speech was met with a “wild burst of enthusiasm,” and the troops hurried off to arm themselves. [Tac.,
Agr
., 35] Before long, a camp gate opened, and the Roman army marched out to meet the Caledonians. Agricola had given explicit orders for the positioning of his troops. The auxiliary light infantry went first—8,000 auxiliaries in 16 cohorts. They formed the first battle line. The 3,000 cavalrymen of
6 auxiliary alae filed out of the gate next, on foot, leading their horses, then mounted up and divided, with 1,500 troopers swinging out to occupy each wing of the Roman line. Last of all, Agricola’s legionaries marched out, to form a second battle line with their backs to the camp ramparts. [Ibid.]
The complete 9th Hispana Legion was here, with all its cohorts now that the detachments from Domitian’s Rhine campaign had returned in the spring. Tacitus says that Agricola had “legions” here, so there would have been cohorts from one and probably two other legions in the battle line. With the 2nd Augusta Legions based in Wales, the two other legions in Britain, the 2nd Adiutrix and the 20th (Valeria Victrix), had their bases closer to the northern frontier and both possibly contributed vexillations of four cohorts of some 2,000 men.
Mounted and in full armor, the general and his staff also came out of the camp together with the men of the gubernatorial bodyguard, and positioned themselves between the two battle lines with all the legion standard-bearers. Close by the general were his mounted trumpeter, and, also on horseback, his own standard-bearer, holding
aloft the pole bearing the general’s large, square personal banner with his name and title displayed on it in purple letters.
Flavianus Arrianus, a consul in
AD
130 and governor of Cappadocia during the reign of Hadrian—known as Arrian to later generations—had 200 legionaries and an unspecified number of auxiliary spearmen in his gubernatorial bodyguard. [Arr.,
EAA
] Agricola can be expected to have employed a similar escort. It is known that, around this time, the 1st Tungrian Cohort provided forty-six men to serve with the governor of Britain’s infantry bodyguard. [
VWT
] Several other cohorts are likely to have also contributed men to the escort. As for the mounted members of the bodyguard, the
equites singulares
, it is known from a letter that at least part of Agricola’s escort was provided by Gauls of the Ala Gallorum Sebosiana. [Tom.,
DRA
]
Tacitus says that Agricola’s auxiliary light infantry units came from Germany and Gaul and included two Tungrian cohorts and at least four Batavian. [
Agr
., 35] The two Tungrian cohorts were the 1st Tungrorum and the 2nd Tungrorum. Both had been raised in Gallia Belgica in
AD
71 following the Civilis Revolt and brought to Britain by Petilius Cerialis. [Hold.,
RAB
, App.]
Nine Batavian units, Cohorts I to IX Batavorum, were created in Batavia, modern Holland, in
AD
71, from the remnants of Civilis’ surrendered rebel army, and all were also taken to Britain by Cerialis. [Ibid.] At least four of those cohorts now served in Agricola’s field army; one was the 1st Batavorum. [Hold.,
DRA
, ADRH] Tacitus also indicates that there were British auxiliaries serving in Agricola’s army. [
Agr
., 32] There is no record of any British auxiliary unit serving in Britain until very late in the Roman period. [Hold.,
RAB
, App.] Until that time, units recruited in Britain were shipped off to serve in other parts of the empire. If Tacitus was correct, the only conclusion can be that some British replacements were added to Gallic or German units that had been stationed in Britain for many years.
The men of the Tungrian and Batavian cohorts in Agricola’s army were mature and experienced soldiers. Not only had they served thirteen years in the Roman army by this point, a number would have previously served with the auxiliary units that had taken part in the Civilis Revolt. This put many of them in their forties, and even older in some cases. “These old soldiers had been well drilled in sword-fighting,” Tacitus said of them. [
Agr
., 36] From the way Agricola was to employ the men of these six units in the upcoming battle, he clearly considered them his toughest auxiliaries.
As for the six cavalry wings in Agricola’s army, the Ala Gallorum Sebosiana, the
unit which supplied part of Agricola’s bodyguard, would have been one. Named after an early commander of the ala, the unit had been raised in Gaul before the reign of Tiberius. It had fought for Vitellius during the war of succession, and would also have been brought to Britain by Cerialis. [Hold.,
RAB
, App.] The identities of Agricola’s five remaining cavalry wings are unknown. There were some fourteen cavalry alae serving in Britain at the time, units from Gaul, Spain, Pannonia and a Thracian ala whose members were recruited from far and wide.
Agricola was prepared to let his foreign auxiliaries take the brunt of the fighting; that was why he put them in his front line. His reason was simple. As his son-in-law Tacitus pointed out: “Victory would be vastly more glorious if it cost no Roman blood.” [
Agr
., 35] Many Roman generals showed little faith in their auxiliaries, putting them in the rear or on the wings and assigning the front line and the hard fighting to their legions. Agricola, a student of Roman military history, knew that successful generals had put their auxiliaries in the front line to blunt the enemy attack, reserving their legions for the killer blow. According to Tacitus, Agricola felt that if the auxiliaries were repulsed by the Caledonians after they went forward to the attack, “the legions could come to their rescue.” [Ibid.]
From his saddle, Agricola watched approvingly as his units were marshaled by their centurions and optios into tight formations facing the enemy. “To impress and intimidate its enemy,” the Caledonian army had occupied the distant hill, with its first line on the plain below it. “The other ranks seemed to mount up the sloping hillside in close-packed formations.” [Ibid.] Tacitus called this hill Mons (Mount) Graupius and the battle here would take its name from it. In modern times Mons Graupius was taken to refer to the Grampian Mountains, which slant down the middle of Scotland, with the battle thought to have taken place “at the foot of the Grampian hills,” as eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon wrote. [Gibb.,
I
] More recent opinion has put the battle site in a variety of locations in the northeast of Scotland, with no site yet reliably fixed.
“The flat space between the armies was taken up by the noisy maneuvering of the chariots,” said Tacitus. [Tac.,
Agr
., 35.] This would
be the last time that an imperial Roman army faced war chariots in battle. Vegetius was to write that when the Romans first encountered the chariots employed by eastern armies, such as those of Mithradates the Great in the first century
BC
, they were terrified. But, he said, they later came to laugh at them. [Vege.,
III
] Arrian, who must have seen them first hand while serving in Britain in his youth, said that British chariots were light and so could be operated in all kinds of terrain. [Arr.,
TH
, 19] Vegetius felt that the main problem with a chariot was that if it did not operate on level ground “the least obstruction stops it.” [Vege.,
III
]
Arrian wrote that the Britons—the term used by Romans to describe all the native inhabitants of Britain including the Caledonians—normally used pairs of “small and scruffy” horses to draw their chariots. Despite their looks, these horses were capable of “harsh labor.” [Arr.,
TH
, 19] Yet, as Vegetius was to remark, there was a sure-fire way to render a chariot useless as a weapon of war: “If one of the horses is either killed or wounded, [the chariot] falls into the opponent’s hands.” [Vege.,
III
.] Similarly, it was probable that Agricola’s troops had orders to aim their missiles at the horses, not at the chariots.
“The terror inspired by the horses and the noise of the wheels are enough to throw their opponents’ ranks into disorder,” Julius Caesar had written of his encounter with chariots in southern Britain 130 years earlier. “In chariot fighting the Britons begin by driving all over the field, hurling javelins.” [Caes.,
GW
,
IV
, 33]
Here were the Caledonian chariots now, perhaps several hundred of them, racing up and down on the flat between the two armies with pounding hooves and churning wheels, their yelling crews shaking spears in the air as their vehicles careered along. “The nobleman drives; his dependents fight in his defense,” said Tacitus. [Tac.,
Agr
., 12] In Caesar’s day, British chariots had made their way through their own cavalry to deliver one or two fighting men to the battle front, and these men jumped down to engage the opposition on foot, with the chariots waiting to carry them out of the fray if the tide turned against them. [Caes.,
GW
,
IV
, 33]
Tacitus does not identify a role for Caledonian cavalry at Mons Graupius, but it is likely some were present. “There are very many cavalry,” said an officer of Agricola’s 1st Tungrian Cohort, possibly Julius Verecundus, the unit’s prefect, in a letter about the natives of northern Britain. “The cavalry do not use swords, nor do the wretched Britons mount in order to throw javelins.” [
VWT
] In hit-and-run skirmishes, the mounted Caledonians, like the chariot-borne noblemen, would merely use their
horses as a means of rapidly delivering them to the fight. There they would dismount and launch their javelins before riding away again.