180 On an Inscribed Roman Tile recently found in Leicester. 



this new legion, the second and the twentieth, for numerous 

 ascribed monuments still attest the work performed by each of 

 these three legions in the erection of the great wall which by his 

 orders was carried across the island from the Solway to the 

 Tyne. 



I must now speak of another peculiarity of the Roman 

 military system, namely, the custom of establishing the different 

 legions through the various parts of the empire in permanent 

 quarters, which the same legion continued to occupy until the 

 empire itself was broken up. We trace, in the narrative of 

 Tacitus, the second legion establishing its quarters in the 

 country of the Silures as early as the middle of the first cen- 

 tury, and the twentieth was no doubt stationed at Deva about 

 the same time; while inscriptions found at York leave little 

 doubt that that city, called by the Romans Eburacum, was the 

 station of the ninth legion, which had probably been placed 

 there as a check upon the incursions of the Caledonians. The 

 entire disappearance of the ninth legion after Agricola's last 

 campaign in the north, has been explained by the probable 

 supposition that Hadrian found it so greatly reduced in num- 

 bers that he incorporated it with the sixth legion, which he had 

 brought with him from Gaul ; and this, again, will explain why 

 the quarters of the sixth legion were subsequently established 

 at Eburacum. In the geography of Ptolemy, usually ascribed 

 to the year 120, and apparently compiled very soon after the 

 date of Hadrian's visit, these three legions only are enume- 

 rated as being then in Britain, the second legion at Isca (Gaer- 

 leon), the sixth at Eburacum (Yorh), and the twentieth at Deva 

 (Chester). Tiles, with the legionary stamps of the second and 

 twentieth legions, have been found in some places in Wales, and 

 probably mark stations at which detachments of those legions 

 were often posted, for reasons with which no historical records 

 have made us acquainted; but the three legions just enumerated 

 were never moved from their permanent head-quarters, until the 

 time when the imperial authority was withdrawn from the island, 

 and we have no account of the presence of any other legion in 

 Britain. When, in the reign of Antoninus Pius, twenty years 

 after Hadrian's expedition, the propreetor, Lollius Urbicus, 

 marched against the Caledonians, he took with him all the 

 legions in Britain, and the numerous inscribed slabs commemo- 

 rating the building of portions of the great line of defence known 

 as the wall of Antoninus, which have been found from time to 

 time, make us acquainted with the share each of these three 

 legions, and no others, performed in it. In the struggle for 

 empire which ended in the elevation of Severus to the purple, 

 in a.d. 197, the troops in Britain supported the claims of 

 Albums, and some portion at least of the legions went over to 



