In Our Time - Hadrian's Wall

Episode Date: July 12, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Hadrian's Wall, the largest Roman structure and one of the most important archaeological monuments in Britain. Stretching for eighty miles from the mouth of the River Tyne to the Solway Firth and classified today as a World Heritage Site, it has been a source of fascination ever since it came into existence. It was built in about 122 AD by the Emperor Hadrian, and a substantial part of it still survives today. Although its construction must have entailed huge cost and labour, the Romans abandoned it within twenty years, deciding to build the Antonine Wall further north instead. Even after more than a century of excavations, many mysteries still surround Hadrian's Wall, including its exact purpose. Did it have a meaningful defensive role or was it mainly a powerful emperor's vanity project? With: Greg Woolf Professor of Ancient History at the University of St AndrewsDavid Breeze Former Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments for Scotland and Visiting Professor of Archaeology at the University of DurhamLindsay Allason-Jones Former Reader in Roman Material Culture at the University of NewcastleProducer: Victoria Brignell.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 117 AD, the Roman Emperor Trajan died and was succeeded by his adopted son, Hadrian. His first biographer, the author of the Augustan history, wrote of Hadrian, once he had reformed the army in truly regal manner,

he went on to Britain, where he corrected many abuses, and was the first to build a wall 80 miles in length to separate the barbarians and the Romans. Adrian's walls, stretching from the mouth of the River Tyne to the Solway Firth, is the most important and substantial Roman relic in Britain. Today it's a world heritage site, and one of the most dramatic features of the landscape of Northern England. Archaeological discoveries made in the last century

have given us new insights into how the wall was built, and the effect it had on people's lives. But was it a meaningful part of the Roman Empire's defences or an enormous act of imperial vanity? With me to discuss Hadrian's wall are Greg Wolfe, Professor of Ancient History at the University of St. Andrews. David Breeze, former Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments for Scotland, and visiting professor of archaeology at the University of Durham,

and Lindsay Alison Jones, former reader in Roman material culture at the University of Newcastle. Greg Wolf, what do you know about the life of Hadron and how he became emperor? He was an unexpected emperor. He can't have expected to grow up into that role. When he was 10 years old, his parents died. He was adopted by a relative, a fairly distant relative.

In time, that relative was adopted by an emperor. And so, Hadrian at that point, probably saw it was maybe on the cards. He became emperor in his early 40s. And then reigned for 20 years and died when you're 62. Do we know anything about his childhood? Was he particularly clever? Was he well educated, well school? He comes across in everyone who writes about him

as a very passionate individual and I think that's why often we think of him as rather romantic. He loved hunting, he loved Greek literature, he loved women, he love boys. He's a very sort of dramatic figure. But Romans distrusted that and all the things that make us think he's romantic, worried them

because the Roman ideal is that you control your passions. There's a strange story about him attacking a slave with a writing style and putting out his eye in a fit of anger. And then immediately he's grit with remorse and he hauls the slave back and says, I'm so sorry, what can I do to make it up to? Name anything at all you'd like.

And the slave eventually says, I'd like my eye back. It's a great story about how empress can do anything and how there are some things even empress can't do. But it also portrays a man who's completely at the swear of his passion, moment to moment. And this comes across in story after story, architect Exar, because they hated his buildings,

a 90-year-old man forced to commit suicide because he'd finally fallen from grace. So he's a very unpredictable figure. But it's a time of the Roman Empire when Edward Gibbon, the great historian, said it was the time it most preferred to live in in the Roman Empire because it was so peaceful and so splendid in many ways. That must have been partly because of a hedgeron. I think it's, that view of Gibbon is, I think,

probably most ancient historians would subscribe to it. That it's, there has been a great period of economic growth, provincial industries and agriculture have grown. There's more monument building in this period than ever before. So yes, it's a rich empire. It has lots of income. And most important, it's not having to spend huge amounts of it defending itself because the frontiers are not under great threat.

So yes, it's a very prosperous and peaceful time. Whether it's to do with Hadrian or whether he's riding the wave and using this prosperity to sponsor his pet projects, to build a new city for his lover, in his lover's memory in Egypt, and to build a great library in Athens. I think he's probably a creative spender rather than a wealth creator. But he does seem to, from what I've read, being a man who said, look, the empire is big enough.

My job is now to consolidate it, not to extend it. Yes, and there's a huge contrast in him and his adopted father Trajan. Trajan had carried on the campaigns across the Danube, conquered most of what's now Romania, had then invaded the person. Persian Empire, got as far as the Persian Gulf, dreams of being Alexander the Great Reborn and so on, and Hadron pulls it all back. He withdraws from what's now Iraq, settles the frontiers. He'd fought a lot in his earlier career, but in his early 40s, he goes for retrenchment,

defence, consolidation. So you've heard about his almost eccentricities or bad temper. Was he known as a fine military commander, for instance? I don't think he was thought of as a bad military commander. But all Roman generals had their military service from the time when they're 18 onwards and he was, he campaigned along with Trajan, he got drunk with him, he knew the soldiers

very well, he drilled the soldiers, but he had no great campaigns to his credit. He didn't march into Scotland or down the nile or anything and he didn't take Rome to place it hadn't been before. But obviously he was a startlingly effective man in his own way. They were 20 stable years, yes. David Brise, why did Hadron decide to build this wall?

Well, almost uniquely in the Roman world, we are told the reason why this frontier was built. As you said, it was built to separate the Romans from the barbarians. So we can interpret this as it's about control, control along the frontier, putting down a marker. And from that, we can see perhaps that the Romans were seeking security in their frontier area. And I would see these as the main reasons

for the wall being constructed. But of course it fits into a wider pattern. It doesn't come uniquely from nowhere insofar as the Roman Empire was largely bounded by rivers. They said that themselves, the Rhine, the Danube, the Euphrates, or the sea. Or of course, in the southern part of the empire, by desert or occasionally mountains.

In North Africa? In North Africa, well, the Atlas Mountains, yes. And then the Caucasus and the Carpathians in around Romania. But there are places where there were sort of gaps. So in Germany and in Britain, there was no big river, there was no desert, obviously. So they filled in the gap with forts and towers. And Haydron's unique contribution to this was to add the final defining element which was a linear barrier.

It seems one way we're looking at it is that those beyond the wall, were they such a great threat that demanded this enormous expenditure of time, money, effort? Well, this is very difficult to say. Certainly the people beyond the frontier at this time when the war was built, who were the predecessors of the Picts, the Caledonians, they were troublesome. We have regular accounts of warfare from the late 1st century, right the way through the second century.

The best generals of the Roman Empire was sent to govern Britain, and that may be because it had a large army, and it may also be because the enemies beyond the frontier were troublesome. So that's certainly a very potent point. of the argument as to why Hadron's wall was built. But you don't stop invasions by building a wall in itself. You stop the invasions by having a lot of well-disciplined armed soldiers to do that for you. And there's a very interesting, almost parallel to this.

We all know about Spartacus, but Krasus built a great earthen bank to try to pen him into the corner of Italy. he'd retreated to. And Spartacus' army just burst out of this and rode over it completely. And we know this happened with other Roman frontiers. So the frontier itself is not going to stop invasion. What stops the invasion is having a powerful army. Do we know that...

How much for certain do we know that it is Hadrian's Wall? Well, for a long time it wasn't thought to be in Hadrian's Wall because most of the literary sources actually say that it was built by an emperor, eight years later called Septimius Severus. And it was only in the 1840s that local vicar, John Hodgson,

in his history of Northumberland, penned an enormously long footnote where he presented all the evidence and demonstrated convincingly which nobody's challenged over the last hundred years and more, that it was indeed Hadron that built Hadron's wall.

And we have the literary evidence and we have inscriptions from the wall which show convincingly that Hadrian's army built the various structures along the wall. So it is really Hadron's wall. It was part of a programme of building that he went in for, wasn't it? Yes, he was a great builder. He built a frontier in Germany. He built the temple of Venus and Roma in Rome.

It's an enormous temple. It still staggers me every time I go to Rome today, the sheer size of this. And Greg mentioned his discussions and quarrels with architects, and this created one with the great architect of his predecessor, Trajan, Apollodorus, which is a lovely anecdote which comes down to us. So he was a great builder, and part of our problem with trying to decide why Hadron's wall is so massive

is the question of, is it because the people beyond the wall were so fierce, as has been argued by the great story, Momsen, for example, or is it because Hadrian was a great megalomaniac builder and liked to build big things? Lindsay Alison Jones what was the existing Roman frontier like in Northern Britain before Hadrian got to work on it in about 1-22 AD?

It wasn't anywhere near as magnificent. It was just basically a road, a road called the Staingate in the medieval period which ran from Carlisle to Corbridge, stopping at Vindalander and Karl Foran on the way. and, no the Denton rather, and it was really a line on a map and it provided a basis

for the troops who were trying to conquer Scotland so they would come back to that line but there was no wall or barrier. So you're talking about a road that carriage could drive along and so it was an effective road and with forts along it as well? With forts along it, we know four forts and the occasional lookout tower, such like.

But it was basically a supply route so you can get your supplies backwards and forwards so that your army can keep on going north, knowing that there was a good supply base behind. So do we know why he decided to go from a road with a few forwards to this extraordinary structure? Not really, no. I think basically he seems to have had a burst of common sense,

which was quite rare with the Roman emperors, and realised that they couldn't keep on expanding that they had to draw a line literally. And whereas in, for example, Germany, they would have built a frontier out of turf and timber. There's not a lot of turf and timber in Northumber at the time, and therefore he builds out of stone, which is the basic building material which is there.

Would you say something about the... Can you tell listeners about those few who haven't been to this magnificent place? About the placing and the root of the wall? On the map, It looks like a very sensible place to put a wall. It's at the now as part of England between the River Tyne and the Sawaway Firth.

But it also takes advantage of a natural geological fault in the central sector called the wind sill. So the wall runs along the top of this wind sill. The wind sill being? Being a geological fault. So you've got a major cliff face facing north. So anybody trying to... And gentle undulations to the south.

And it sinks off gently towards the south, yes. So from the north, it would have been a macro... magnificent site. It would have completely bemused the local population because they did not build out of dress stone and to see this huge 15, 20 feet high structure running along the top of the crags, clinging firmly to the crags

without a break except for occasional mile-separated gateways. Would have been really quite unnerving, I think. And how did they... Can you come back to you, Greg, now, How did they set about doing this then? Well, we don't know a lot of detail, but what it looks like happened is Hadrian visits Britain. He's on a tour of the provinces, moving very rapidly from one to another. And when he's there, he makes a decision.

The decision is build a war. He's out to Britain within a year, probably, and never sees it, probably never sees it begun, certainly never sees it completely because it's still being built at the end of his reign. And he says, build a war. And then they set about doing it. Now, Romans don't have many ways of doing it, so they have to get the army in. And there's three legions based in Britain. There's two kind of Roman soldiers,

legionaries who are the regular trained ones, and then auxiliaries who come from the rest of the empire, the less regular ones. And the legions, each of them, send detachments up to build different stretches. We know because we've got little inscriptions at particular milestones or various forts along saying, this detachment of this legion or this detachment of the British fleet built this one. Probably not all the soldiers went up there.

And then over less than a decade, probably, they got to work building the basis. And then, of course, it gets elaborated later because they change the plan to when they're building it like, well, like almost any large public project today, really. But, Lindsay, can I come back to you for a moment? Do we have any evidence that there was a total scheme of it before they started building? Does any written evidence come down to us that they decided to make it this massive, that we have early fragments of drawings or whatever? No, sadly, there's no documentation. All we can do is look at the archaeology and realise that the original plan was to have a curtain wall

with a mile castle every Roman mile, which is basically a defended gateway, and two towers in between each pair of mile castles. There was a ditch to the north of the wall. And that was all that was going to be. The forts were still down on the stane gate. They didn't need forts, they thought, on the wall itself. But as Greg said, a continual change of plan,

and they decide to move the forts up onto the wall, which meant actually knocking down some of the mile castles and turrets. And then later on, around about the same time as they're finishing off the fort, they create this major barrier to the south of the wall, which today we call the Valem, which is a very large ditch with upcast on both sides. So it becomes very much a frontier in depth. And they started it by laying lines of stones just to show that the track that was if it had to follow.

It must have done something like that. It's very difficult to imagine how else. They have very good surveying, Roman, so there isn't a difficulty there. And they knew this territory well, because they'd been north of the wall and on campaign for a long time, north of the line of the wall beforehand.

But yes, they must have started by laying it out and then assigning sections to each unit, and then each unit commander would take responsibility and there'd be engineers supporting them. And they weren't all doing it exactly the same way, because you can sometimes see little differences which sort of betray a different local engineer's solution to a problem.

than his counterpart 20 miles to the west or east. Sorry, David, you have to come in. Well, one of the most exciting developments on Hagen's Wall recently is by John Poulter, who's an amateur surveyor, and he looked at how the wall was surveyed. What do you mean about recently? Because I'm worried about historian saying recently. His two books on the subject were published three years ago.

That's recent. Okay, that's recent. And John realized that, in fact, they started surveying the wall from each end towards middle and they divided into great long stretches to survey within each stretch and then manoeuvre the wall within each survey length. And this is absolutely new to us. I mean, in spite of all this research on Hayden's Wall for so many years, nobody had asked this basic question before and I happened after a conference to say to John, we must be able to work this one out. And he went off and did it. So what are his results that are significant for

scholarship about the wall? Well, there are two basic elements. The first is we can see how the Rome was laid out the wall, how they surveyed it. That's significant in itself. But John realised as he was looking at the position of the wall in the landscape that although it runs along the crags in the central sector, and you simply have to take that out of the discussion because the position makes itself.

East and west of that, the wall can choose where it goes within the landscape. And where it lay was on the south side of the ridge along which it ran. So the soldiers in the towers and my castles, which Lindsay's described, appear to be looking back towards the forts which were still there on the stain gate behind the wall. And then John asked himself the question, well, if these forts weren't there, where would the wall be? And his answer was it will be a little further north on the front edge of the escarpment, and it would be sinuous. And that is actually, as it happens, an absolutely spot-on description of where the Antonin Wall is in Scotland.

So we can see the difference between the placing of the two walls in their own landscapes. And running on from that, the question obviously is why is the wall in that position? Well, it's to do with maintaining these communications. Why isn't it on the foremost edge of the escarpment? Possibly because actual defence wasn't so important to the soldiers as maintaining their own lines of communication, as Lindsay has described. Can I just come back to you a moment? One of the spectacular things about it is that it is built in stone,

as I understand the only great stretch of Roman Wall in their empire that was built in stone. And that's great for us because a lot of it remains. I'm considering that there's still masses of archaeology to be done. There's an enormous amount to be seen now, this great stone thing. We dig down, we find ten feet down. It's an enormous amount of stone and building in stone. So that was just because it was handy, was it? I think it was.

I think when they built a frontier stretch in Germany, what they had was mud and trees. And so they built a rampart with turf and mud walls and trees. And if you build it up in Northumbria, you do it in stone. But it's all local quarries. I mean, they're not going very far. We know exactly where the quarries are there, though, they're taking the stone from.

So it really is sort of put this unit here, find some stone, build a wall. And where the western stretch, where the geology's different, they did it differently. So it's very pragmatic. They changed it as it went along, don't they? They change. Can you just give us an outline of that?

David. The great change was that part of the way through the building program, they decided to build forts actually on the wall line. I mean, one of the most remarkable things about Hayden's wall and why study is important is that apart from the Antonine War in Scotland, it's the only frontier where all the elements are linked. So, as Lindsay described...

The frontier in the whole Roman Empire. Yeah. I mean, in Germany, the towers are separate from the fence and the earthen bank, and then the narrow stone wall which they built. So these are separate elements, and the forts are separate. And in North Africa, it's different again. It's the same principle as in Germany. The elements are separate in the landscape.

Whereas on Haydus Wall and the Antoniname Wall, the elements are all joined. So the towers are actually on the frontier linked to the wall. The gates through the wall have these little defended structures. And then the forts are placed on the wall. So they're brought up from the Stain Gate, the old road. Not brought up literally, but anyway, they're put in the wall. Yes. Why did they do that?

Well, they're actually not put in the wall. They put astride the wall. And this is unique. There's no other Roman frontier where the forts are actually. even touching the frontier, these are a stride. And there has to be reason. Yes, to a certain, I mean, they're not, I'm wrong to say part of the wall, but they're as near as they're spitting distance, aren't they?

I mean, literally, you go to Hustadt, you take two steps, you're at the wall. The reason I think is because if we look at these forts, we have three major gates north of the wall now and one behind, and each gate has two entrances. So we move from the single Marcastle with one entrance to six entrances north of the wall and two behind, and to make the point even stronger, they added two gates in these forts behind the wall. So they moved to from one gate through the wall to up to ten gates. And this has to indicate that the army was concerned about mobility in the landscape.

If you think about the forts on the Stain Gate and you wanted your 500 soldiers, to get north of the wall, they had to file through a gateway which is about 10 feet wide. So the wall's getting in the way of the army, moving it round. If you put your force north of the wall and there's trouble and you want to get back quicker, the wall's going to get equally in the way. Lindsay, Alison Jones, can you tell us how long it took to build and what the completed wall would have looked like? We get massive, wonderful views now, but still, could you tell us how long it took?

and what it would have looked like? By 133, they were still completing one of the forts on the wall at Carabuff. So it had taken a good 10 years to get to that stage. But that was largely, because as Greg said, they kept changing their mind about where they wanted things. Just in time, I think it was completed pretty well just in time for them to give it up and go north to the Antonine War. We come to that in a minute.

So it took out by 10 years, and what did it look like? Again, just give us a sweep of it. It would have been about 15 feet high But from the north If there was a war walk with a parapet Then from the north you would have seen probably about 20 feet A solid wall Which would have been swooping up and down the crags

And across the countryside And it would have been a major monument In fact it is the largest monument In Britain still today It is a major engineering feat And to the people coming down from the north It would have been a major statement by the moment, don't mess with us.

This is what we do. Greg, Greg, well, who manned the wall? I mean, where did the soldiers come from? Well, this was the second group of soldiers, the auxiliaries, so the professionals, the legionaries, built it and went south. And then they brought in troops from all over the empire. So we have detachments of Syrians. We have people from Belgium, people from the Netherlands.

So Tongri, Bataviaans, Hami, we have people from the former Yugoslavia. So subjects of the empire who are not citizens are then drafted up there. Their public language is Latin. That's what they write their documents in and send letters. But privately, probably quite a lot of them speak other languages. And very occasion, you'll find a tombstone, which has got a bit of palmyrian script in, which is a language spoken in what's now northern, on the sort of Syrian Iraqi border. So a very, very heterogeneous group of people all brought up there. David Breeze, how effective was the wall? Lindsay's

mentioned that it must have been effective as a statement. But how he's effective was it, or how was it called on to be effective as a military deterrent? Well, it would be good if we had more literary references to the use of the wall. We don't have many, but we do know soon after 180

AD the wall was a wall. We're not even told by the Roman writers which wall, but a wall was crossed. They're very explicit. The northern tribes, the Caledonians, cross the wall which divided them from the Roman forts and did a lot

of damage and killed the Roman general and his troops. So this is presumably Hayden's Wall, and nearly 200 years later in 367, there was a major invasion of Britain, and we assumed that Hayden's Wall is crossed again. But these are just two isolated references in the history of the war which lasted 300 years. How effective was it? Well, what we can certainly say is that no Picks and Scots and Caledonians or any other, as the Romans would have seen, the barbarian people, lived. and took up residence in the lee of the wall.

So in that way, it was successful and effective. And they weren't very much interested in it later on, but when the Romans went back or when they abandoned and Britain. But we'll come back to that in a moment. Can we just talk for a moment first, Lindsay, Alison Jones, about the settlements. We have the wall. In front of the wall, we have the ditch. We have the Valem after that.

We have the road behind that. It's an immense complex, not just one wall. But there are also the settlements. When the Romans arrived in the area, they would have found a very tribal society made up of people who lived in self-sufficient agricultural communities, mostly circular huts in groups of two or three, not usually more than that.

What you have, when the Romans come, is a completely different form of settlement. You have behind each fort, a vicars and extramural settlement, which is very much like a Roman town, except it doesn't have the major buildings of a Roman town. And this is where the people who are associated with the soldiers and the fort would be living. This is where retired soldiers might move when they leave the fort.

This is where mothers, sisters, wives, this is where the prostitutes and the barmaids are. This is quite a large settlement. And recent research, ground penetrating radar and such like, has shown that these settlements are much, much bigger than we realised and that the non-competent element of the Roman presence in the north of England is much bigger than we'd realized. What does much bigger mean? Well, I think you could almost say there were four or five times as many people

living in the settlements attached to the forts than there were in the forts themselves given that we have evidence that very often the forts didn't have their four contingent of men or the time. The forts would have 700 people or something like that. It's 500, 500 normally. But Vindelanda underwriting tablets and such like suggests that soldiers were very often on duty elsewhere

and the fort can be almost empty but the settlement behind, which very much relied on, the economic factors of the fort and the social aspects of the fort for their existence. I mean, this happens in other frontists too, but we could think of what's happening as the huge stimulus, the local economy. Almost all the coinage that gets into Britain comes in through the wall because that's where most of the soldiers are. So most of the soldiers are there, coins come in, they're then spent in the local economy, these populations need to be fed, more agricultural

services produced. So if you look at what's the most dynamic bit of Roman Britain, It's probably this area where money's coming in from outside and then getting distributed into local communities. So the frontier is a huge sort of economic accelerator, if you like. When you say money coming in from outside, you mean coming from Rome to pay the wages? Yeah, I mean coin coming from Rome to minted in Gaul or coming from Rome and being used to pay soldiers' wages. And then from soldiers trickling out to the people they're buying services and things from,

and then eventually getting way down the south to more remote bits of the country. One insider, a big insight, David Breeze has spoken of one, another great insider was in 1973, the discovery of the writing tablets at Vindalanda on Hedrons War, which has made an enormous difference to the studies there. Could you tell us all a little about that, please, Lindsay? Well, the Vindalanda writing tablets have been one of the most exciting finds that we've had from the region. Vindalanda isn't on Hedron's War, it's on the Stain Gate to the south, and the writing tablets are written around about 100. AD so they're written a generation

before the wall is built. But they do give us the most incredible insight into the bureaucracy that was involved in running a military establishment. There are chitties that soldiers have to fill in to have leave. There are shopping lists for big religious festivals and such like.

There are letters, letters from commanding officers to fellow commanding officers between their wives. One of them refers to a birthday party. And it gives us an insight in to the social life of the wall, which we wouldn't have otherwise. But also, I think it gives us a very interesting insight into supply, because quite a number of these writing tablets refer to

wooden artefacts such as cart axles and such like that they're having to bring in from some distance. Several of these writers are wheeling and dealing, sometimes officially, sometimes not quite so officially. You do get the impression a certain amount of black marketeering going on as well. It gives us amazing insight in a way that the archaeology you can't otherwise do. We have documents which are very similar from Egypt and the Eastern Frontier. And we've always been cautious about using these in relationship to the northern frontier. The East was far more civilised for much longer. Could these be an accurate representation of the less civilised parts of the empire? What Vindalanda writing tablets do for us is make a

They demonstrate that the broad similarity allows us to use this eastern material to illustrate life on the northern frontier. So it helps us fill in the gaps which are not there in the Vindelanda writing tablets and give a much more rounded picture of the Roman army on its frontiers. It's a wonderful series of accidents, isn't it, discovering them in first place, and then discovering that they were dry, and then the way that they're uncovered, and there's still, there are many, many more to follow, so goodness knows what will be found out. And it's helping us, once they've found, they've now been discovered in Carlisle, for example.

I mean, people now know what to look for, which they didn't before. These thin slivers of wood. And not only at Carlisle, we know that there were writing tablets in the Corbridge Horde, which was found in 1962. But also in the Corbridge Horde, there were bits of papyrus, none of which has survived. It now looks like Dandruff, because nobody recognised exactly what it was. And one wonders what.

insights we would have had from those had they survived? In 138 AD, Hadrian died and Antoninus Pius became emperor and almost immediately he abandoned the Hadrian's wall, marched north and set up the Antenine War. Why did you do that? Well, unfortunately, we're not told by anybody in antiquity. So we have to produce our best guess. And for many years, it was assumed that there was warfare in the north and so the front he was moved forward to be closer to the enemy. But some years ago a new idea developed which was that it actually related to the nature of the succession. It's a slight character of the Roman Empire to say it's a military dictatorship, but you had to have the army on your side to run the empire.

And coming back to Greg's description of Hadrian, one of his problems was the succession. He forced his brother-in-law in his 90s to commit suicide and he chose somebody else to succeed him and possibly wasn't a very good judge of men because the person he chose to succeed him promptly died so he went for another person which was the man we know as Antoninus Pius and he was chosen very late in the day just a few months before Hadrian died as his successor.

Now everybody in Rome knew this, everybody knew that Antoninus Pius was not the first choice everybody knew that he was a very worthy man, but he had no military experience. What is the first thing he does? He goes and gets some military experience. Not personally, of course. He sent his general to do the job for him. But one of his contemporary courtiers describes the scene

that it was rather like the ors in the ship controlling the course of the war from his palace in Rome. And this is what Antoninus Pius did. And it's interesting, if you're sitting there in Rome, you want a military adventure to show you are a worthy emperor. There's no point in going south into the Sahara. You can't face up to Parthia. Europe so vast. So Britain's quite a small place where you can have your military adventure. And he won. I mean, he's general won for him. And the only time ever in his very long reign of 23 years, he took the title conqueror,

imperator. And that's got to be meaningful. And then on the Antennaum, War, the new war, they created these wonderful items of sculpture which are unique in the Roman world, showing how the gods shone on the Roman army and the emperor to give him victory. Can you tell us, briskly Greg Wolf, how the Antonine Wall differs from Hadrian's wall? It's shorter, but that's just a feature of the Clyde for this must be not so wide. It's built much more of turf. You haven't got the resource. that you've got the wind sill, so you haven't got huge, massive stone structures. So it's a much smaller.

Now, you can see this is a kind of efficiency gain, if you like. You can say, well, shorter wall, quicker to construct, cheaper to do. Or you can say, well, it's to do with slightly different resources in the area. I mean, it's a very short-lived experiment as well. Because they're dashing back. And for me, this symbolises the arbitrariness of imperial power. One emperor can say, right, we're going to build a wall here. The next one says up there, then the next one.

or later I can say bring it down again. And this seems to be very characteristic to the way of doing the things. I say to this man come and he comes, this man go and he goes. And emperors can just do this. But it seems to be, from what I've read, that it was rather misguided because he built it in a place where he still had quite a few of the enemy, as it were, in what, let's call it, Dumphrishina, behind him as well as in front of them.

Yes, I think that's right. I mean, I think that I don't think we should imagine that these are very well-planned, researched, carefully organised and projects. They don't think they do a lot of systematic information gathering first and then design something in a very rational way. I don't think that's the way this sort of thing works. I think it's... It's more like David says.

He wants a conquest. He wants to be called an imperator. I think so. Whether it's that scenario or a different one, I mean, it's the arbitrary use of power to move people up. And then later another arbitrary use of power to move them down again. There's a question really, too, of how the Romans might be bothered by an enemy behind them. I mean, this was the most powerful army that Europe saw for eight centuries.

Could defeat anything put in the field against it. It would deal absolutely ruthlessly with opposition, killing people, why women, children, as well, as we see from Caesar, where a million people are supposed to have died in Caesar's Gallic War. So I think if people were going to cause trouble for the Romans, they would have to be rather silly in many ways. because retribution would be swift and fearful. Well, in this strange history, Lindsay, in the 160s,

they abandoned the Antonine Wall and went back to Hadrian's Wall, then in a certain measure of disrepair, but not by no means irreparable. So they built that up again. Why did they do that? I think they just overstretched themselves. There was another burst of common sense that Antonius Pius had not shown,

and I think they just felt, no, this isn't working. Hadrian's Wall is much more substantial and they did have tribes behind them like the Navanti who would have been irritating they weren't following the Roman idea of what life should be like and they would have been an irritation and they probably would have felt much more comfortable

with the whole Hadrian's wall communication system its strength its solidity basically this was a U-turn After Britain seems to be part of the Roman It ceased to be a Roman province in about 410, 412. And money, but not all of the troops, went back to Rome. What was the fate of Hadrian's wall for the next few hundred years?

Well, it's still there, of course, when it's too solid to disappear. But almost immediately people seem to have forgotten what it was there for. Maybe there were some troops who stayed on for a while and acted, sort of converted themselves. Well, you have been as a bird Oswald, for instance, don't it? Yes. And there's, there are lots of ideas floating about. And one possibility is that local detachments sort of convert themselves into gangs of robber barons hanging out in the forts. But we don't really know.

And already by the time that you've got early medieval monks, Gildas, then bead writing, it's pretty clear. They're very confused about the whole thing. And I mean, this actually then rolls on and on until by the time in the Elizabethan age, people are writing about the walls. They're worrying about whether it's about the Scotland. Scotland and England and suggesting new walls be built. And it becomes something that's mythologised. And the Arts Humanities Research Council has just got this really big project going, which is gathering different stories that accumulate around the wars over the centuries.

And you can see how they always attract attention, but not necessarily very much knowledge. David Ries, was it ever thought of again as being useful as a fortification? Well, as Grace says, yes. and when you had another powerful state set up in the southern part of this island, particularly under Henry VIII Elizabeth, there were these thoughts about re-fortifying the wall and using it. But it was fleeting. Haynes Wall day had gone, as it were, never to be recovered,

apart from in newspapers today where it still uses a synonym as the border between England and Scotland. But it's interesting though, I mean, so much is there that although it was plundered and uses a quarry by local churches and abys and farms and there's still so much of it there.

A surprisingly large amount of it is still there. This may largely be due to a man called John Clayton who in the 19th century bought up sections of the wall. He was so alarmed at this speed, at which the wall was being plundered that he bought up sections of the wall and forts such as house steds.

He had been born at Chester's and therefore had a fort in his garden, so to speak, which made him interested. But I think it's through his efforts that a lot of the wall has survived. Finally, do you think it was, it was, in the end, a great approaching a vanity project

for Hadron? I do. I mean, we probably would all agree on this, but I think the front here is really, sensible, having soldiers, the communication system, all that makes sense, and it works. But actually having a linear boundary and something that looks so spectacular and yet within a decade, you're walking through an abandoned spectacular project where the doors ripped off the hinges to get to another wall further up. So yes, I do think it's a vanity project in that sense, but the legacy of it is enormous and it changed the landscape of England.

There is, as Grace says, other ways we're looking at it. If Hayd was said, well, I want you to build a wall. What he understood by a wall was a war around a Greek city. And in many ways, that's what they built. They sort of cut the end off and stretch it out across the countryside. And that's what we have. And we're back to Hadrian being a megalomaniac builder. Yes, but he's building what he understood a wall should be. Yes, I think it is a vanity project in many ways,

but it's a political statement. It's a political statement that here are the Romans, and this is where Romanitas finishes. Anywhere north of there has got to be barbaric. It didn't last long because it was a thing of its time. It was a statement of its time. A lovely contradiction that it didn't last long and it's still massive there now. It is extraordinary, isn't it.

And another thing is that wave after wave, especially in the last hundred or so years, new discoveries are being made. It's yielding more and more about the Roman Empire, more. And as we know, as you said, David, that we can now connect it with the rest of the Roman Empire. So it was the same there as in Egypt so we can really get cracking on that. And then the Great Vindalanda. and there's an awful lot to be discovered, yes, isn't it?

It's probably worthwhile remembering that there's a maximum of only 5% of Haynes Hall has been examined archaeologically. It gives us an idea of the task ahead. And certainly one of the problems is that every time we excavate a site, we answer some questions but get twice as many new ones we hadn't thought of at all. Well, thank you very much to Lindsay, Alison Jones, Greg Wolfe and David Breeze. That's it for this series of In Our Time. We'll be back on September the 13th and 6th.

Thank you very much for listening and happy hiking. If you've enjoyed this BBC podcast, why not try others such as The Forum, the discussion programme about global ideas. To find out more, visit BBCworldservice.com slash forum.