History’s greatest mysteries: what happened to the Roman Ninth Legion?
HistoryExtra podcast
HistoryExtra
4.3 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 28 December 2021
⏱️ 34 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | There are some things you should always check, like the hygiene rating on your local takeaway, |
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| 0:57.9 | Hello and welcome to the History Greatest Mysteries. |
| 1:02.4 | I'm Rob Atar, the editor of BBC History magazine. |
| 1:04.9 | This is episode two of this series, |
| 1:08.3 | and today we'll be heading back almost 2,000 years and exploring one of the most puzzling events from Roman history, |
| 1:12.9 | the disappearance of the 9th Legion. The last record of this elite army unit is in Northern |
| 1:19.2 | England in the early 2nd century AD, after which it simply vanished. Since then, numerous theories |
| 1:27.1 | have been put forward by historians, novelists and |
| 1:29.9 | filmmakers, and to pick through those, I was joined by Miles Russell, a senior lecturer, prehistoric |
| 1:36.5 | and Roman archaeology based at Bournemouth University. I began by asking him to explain |
| 1:43.1 | the history of the Legion prior to its disappearance. |
| 1:46.5 | The Ninth Legion is one of roughly on average about 30 elite army units in the Roman Empire |
| 1:53.7 | throughout the late 1st century BC and 1st century AD. The Roman army is quite unusual in that |
| 2:00.5 | it has two grades of soldier. You've got |
| 2:03.5 | the legionaries who are the ones, which you always see on TV and film today. They're the ones with |
| 2:08.0 | the plate armour, which are really quite distinctive. And they're basically citizens. They've got |
| 2:12.9 | the full rights of citizenship in the Roman Empire. They can own land and property and so on, they're |
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