Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth: A Festival of Britain?

Abstract

Some time about the year A. D. 117, the Ninth Legion…marched north to deal with a rising among the Caledonian tribes, and was never heard of again.During the excavations at Silchester nearly eighteen hundred years later, there was dug up…a wingless Roman Eagle, a cast of which can be seen to this day in Reading Museum. Different people have had different ideas as to how it came to be there, but no one knows, just as no one knows what happened to the Ninth Legion after it marched into the northern mists.It is from these two mysteries, brought together, that I have made the story of ‘The Eagle of the Ninth’.