Word: romane
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Inside the imposing episcopal palace of the Alpine town of Chur, Switzerland, 112 cardinals, archbishops and bishops representing 18 countries gathered last week to discuss the crisis in the Roman Catholic priesthood. The delegates to the second Europe-wide symposium of the Catholic hierarchy had hoped for an atmosphere of ecclesiastical calm. But out side the palace were 70 priests (some of them in sport coats and red ties), part of a protesting "shadow symposium" that had been hastily convened at a nearby hostel. Bullhorn in hand, French Dominican Jean Cardonnel, a fiery leftist whose Lenten address helped inspire last...
...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...
...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...
...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...