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For so much of our knowledge of the Roman period we are indebted to ancient literary sources that have been used and abused over the centuries. They have been copied and recopied, with mistakes creeping in, and even where the text remains accurate, in many cases we must acknowledge that the original author may have had an axe to grind. Moreover, just occasionally we have two accounts of the same event – such as Caesar’s final battle with Pompey – and they differ. Caution is the watchword – and this is certainly the case with the document that we call the Historia Augusta. This is a collection of biographies of Roman emperors, probably compiled in the 4th century. It is recognised that the earlier entries are, broadly speaking, authentic, but the accounts of the reigns of later emperors are fictitious. Fortunately for our purposes, its ‘Life of Septimius Severus’ belongs to the earlier group.
So, how did it come to be believed that Severus visited Carlisle? One of the main sources for the translation of ancient texts is the Loeb series, for which the Historia Augusta was published in three volumes 100 years ago. The translator for that edition was David Magie, Professor of Classics at Princeton University, and his rendering of the key passage relating to Severus’ visit followed a medieval source. The Latin text that Magie cites reads post murum apud Luguvallum visum in Britannia, which he translates as ‘from an inspection of the Wall at Luguvalium in Britain…’. Luguvalium was the Roman name for Carlisle, and such is the authority of the Loeb series that this translation held the field for a century – that is, until a new Loeb edition of the Historia Augusta was published in 2022. There, David Rohrbacher offers a different translation of the same phrase: ‘from an inspection of the defensive wall on the British frontier’. Luguvalium has vanished!
When is a wall not a wall?
How, then, did Luguvallum creep into Magie’s translation, and why has it been removed in the newer edition? To answer this, we have to go back to the Middle Ages. The oldest-known manuscript of the Historia Augusta dates to the 9th century: it is in the Vatican library (available online as Codex Palatinus 899), and the key section of its Latin text reads: post maurum apud vallum missum in Britannia. The appearance of maurum has led some to speculate that Severus actually met a Moor on Hadrian’s Wall, perhaps a soldier from the Aurelian Moors, an auxiliary unit known to have been based at Burgh-by-Sands fort, just to the west of Carlisle. Some suggestions have also conflated a later reference in the same chapter in the Historia Augusta to the emperor encountering an Ethiopian. However, such an individual would have come from the other side of Africa to the area that the Romans called Mauretania. Rather, it is generally accepted that maurum is a slip by a copyist, and should instead read murum.
What about the appearance of Luguvalium in the translation? To answer this question, we have to travel forward a little further in time, to the 14th century. In 1356, the great medieval scholar Petrarch acquired a copy of the Historia Augusta and edited it, introducing two amendments to the passage that we are exploring. He judged that maurum was a copyist’s error for murum and that missum (‘sent’) was an error for visum (‘seen’ or ‘inspected’). More importantly, he appreciated that murus and vallum were usually both translated as ‘wall’, and so in order to make sense of the apparent tautology he changed vallum to Luguvallum, the alternative spelling to Luguvalium in the Antonine Itinerary manuscripts.
In David Rohrbacher’s recent translation, he acknowledges that vallum can mean ‘frontier’, too. The Antonine Wall in Scotland was described on two of its building inscriptions as a vallum, even though it was a turf rampart. In the same way, the word vali appears on the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan (also known as the Ilam Pan), whose inscription names four Hadrian’s Wall forts, including Uxelodunum (Stanwix), the other military base at Carlisle. Several inscriptions on stone, too, refer to the vallum, including RIB 2034, part of a dedicatory text on an altar, which records successful operations beyond the vallum. Finally, the late Roman Notitia Dignitatum lists frontier forts under the heading of per lineam valli.
We can therefore see that the Historia Augusta’s original author was stating that Severus inspected the wall on the frontier in Britain; the text does not explicitly say that the emperor visited Carlisle. However, the statement that he inspected the Wall is followed by the words cum ad proximam mansionem rediret – that is, ‘when he was on the way back to the nearest mansio…’ This building could well be the palatial complex with imperial-stamped tiles which Frank Giecco and the Uncovering Roman Carlisle team are excavating.
