[106: A worse narrative than that of Tacitus concerning this war, _Ann._ xiv. 31-39, is hardly to be found even in this most unmilitary of all authors. We are not told where the troops were stationed, and where the battles were fought; but we get, instead, signs and wonders enough and empty words only too many. The important facts, which are mentioned in the life of Agricola, 31, are wanting in the main narrative, especially the storming of the camp. That Paullinus coming from Mona should think not of saving the Romans in the south-east, but of uniting his troops, is intelligible; but not why, if he wished to sacrifice Londinium, he should march thither on that account. If he really went thither, he can only have appeared there with a personal escort, without the corps which he had with him in Mona--which indeed has no meaning. The bulk of the Roman troops, as well those brought back from Mona as those still in existence elsewhere, can, after the extirpation of the 9th legion, only have been stationed on the line Deva--Viroconium--Isca; Paullinus fought the battle with the two legions stationed in the first two of these camps, the 14th and the (incomplete) 20th. That Paullinus fought because he was obliged to fight, is stated by Dio, lxii. 1-12, and although his narrative cannot be otherwise used to correct that of Tacitus, this much seems required by the very state of the case.] [107: Tacitus, _Hist._ i. 2, sums up the result in the words _perdomita Britannia et statim missa_.] [108: The imperial finance-official under Pius, Appian (_proem._ 5), remarks that the Romans had occupied the best part (τὸ κράτιστον) of the British islands οὐδὲν τῆς ἄλλης δεόμενοι, οὐ γὰρ εὔφορος αὐτοῖς ἐστὶν οὐδ' ἣν ἔχουσιν. This was the answer of the governmental staff to Agricola and such as shared his opinion.] [109: The opinion that the northern wall took the place of the southern is as widely spread as it is untenable; the cohort-camps on Hadrian's wall, as shown to us by the inscriptions of the second century, still subsisted in the main unchanged at the end of the third (for to this epoch belongs the relative section of the _Notitia_). The two structures subsisted side by side, after the more recent was added; the mass of monuments at the wall of Severus also shows evidently that it continued to be occupied up to the end of the Roman rule in Britain.