IX

Near the turn of the first century, the Ninth Legion disappeared from frontier borderlands separating Romanized Britannia from the uncivilized lowlands of Caledonia. Between its first deployment there during Agricola's invasion in 84AD and the return of Emperor Hadrian in 122AD, all mention of the Ninth fades from memory. Although history speaks clearly of a massive uprising in the same region during 119AD, no authenticated record confirms the legion's military annihilation on a field of battle, and no evidence confirms its reassignment to any other region of the empire. Contemporary Rome, and all of history, seems to have simply forgotten the Ninth. Until now.Recent archeological discoveries clarify the legion's fate. As outlined in a unique letter penned two-thousand-years ago on a carefully preserved swatch of parchment, Legio IX's mysterious destiny is a tale of political intrigue, financial mismanagement, familial in-fighting, and social upheaval, all intermixed with the unyielding discipline required to keep a Roman legion safe in the field. For the first time since these events unfolded, the fully restored "Governor's Letter" identifies the men, women and children that collectively contrived the disaster. More informatively, the famed missive also clearly implicates its author as a central conspiratorial architect of the plot that resulted in the bloody revolt of 119AD and Legio IX's puzzling disappearance. Bold and thought-provoking, this account of the Ninth's intriguing doom rises from factual foundations constructed of moldering parchments, crumbling bones and toppled stones, all base materials of history's reconstruction.