Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-j7cmm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-07T11:38:02.814Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A NOTE ON THE BATTLE OF MONS GRAUPIUS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2015

Duncan B. Campbell
Duncan B. Campbell*
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
*
Duncan.Campbell@glasgow.ac.uk
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A recent book about Agricola's conquest of Scotland presents a Scottish historian's take on a subject that has been dominated by archaeologists: the whereabouts of Mons Graupius, the scene of Agricola's final battle. Unfortunately, in confidently locating it in Perthshire, author James Fraser builds his case on shaky foundations.

Information

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , May 2015 , pp. 407 - 410
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2015 

A recent book about Agricola's conquest of Scotland presents a Scottish historian's take on a subject that has been dominated by archaeologists: the whereabouts of Mons Graupius, the scene of Agricola's final battle.Footnote 1 Unfortunately, in confidently locating it in Perthshire, author James Fraser builds his case on shaky foundations.Footnote 2

In his central chapter, Fraser lays out his case for a battle in Strathearn, which is much further south than most scholars would prefer. He reassures doubting readers that ‘several antiquaries relying in the main upon the Agricola, for all their methodological flaws and foibles, had no difficulty in locating the battle south of the Tay’,Footnote 3 without realizing that it was precisely these flaws and foibles that led to their conclusion. Equally, in criticizing those who would champion a more northerly location, he is apparently unaware of the reason why ‘few antiquarian students of the battle had contemplated the possibility that it was fought north of the “Grampian” mountains’.Footnote 4 But it was only in 1785, with the discovery of the Roman temporary camp at Ythan Wells (Glenmailen), that the realization dawned on antiquarians that the Romans had ventured beyond Stonehaven.

Turning to details, Fraser informs his readers that the battle ‘is likely to have been fought early in the summer’,Footnote 5 thus flatly contradicting the evidence of the Agricola text. In fact, Tacitus indicates that it was late in the summer, for after the battle, ‘as the summer was now over, Agricola was not able to extend the war’.Footnote 6 However, Fraser's intention is to cast doubt on Tacitus' veracity and, by placing the battle early in the campaigning season, make a Perthshire location seem more likely.

He bases his case against a northern location upon the fact that ‘neither the narrative of Tacitus nor the current body of archaeological and topographical evidence can provide decisive evidence that Mons Graupius lay in the north or north-east of Scotland’.Footnote 7 In particular, he objects to Professor Kenneth St Joseph's identification of Bennachie with Mons Graupius,Footnote 8 not only by casting doubt on the evidence of the temporary camps,Footnote 9 but also by claiming that ‘Bennachie's distance from the Forth … is surely excessive from the standpoint of the narrative of the Agricola as outlined above’.Footnote 10

Having dismissed Tacitus' text and the evidence of archaeology, Fraser advocates a third approach, namely ‘to privilege the onomastic evidence of two key place-names contained in our sources’.Footnote 11 One of these is Victoria, ‘with its connotations of marking the site of a major victory’.Footnote 12 Fraser assures his readers that ‘it is beyond doubt that Victoria related to a location south of the Tay in Dumnonian territory, and most probable by far a location in Strathearn within sight of Duncrub’.Footnote 13 However, such faith in the accuracy of Ptolemy's Geography is misplaced. Scholars of other provinces are familiar with the problems of plotting Ptolemy's co-ordinates on modern maps,Footnote 14 without the special difficulties that beset the study of Ptolemaic Scotland,Footnote 15 so it is unsurprising that there is no consensus regarding the location of Victoria.Footnote 16 Nor is it self-evident that it must lie in the vicinity of Mons Graupius, so it is hard to see how Ptolemy's Geography can be used as evidence that the battle occurred in Perthshire; any attempt to do so surely requires detailed discussion.

The other place-name discussed by Fraser is, of course, Mons Graupius itself, and he suggests that ‘Scottish hills with names that might seem to contain variations of the word Graupius might be considered to be potential sites of the battle’.Footnote 17 This is not a new line of enquiry, but one that dates back to 1926 and a brief suggestion by the Celtic scholar Professor William Watson.

Unfortunately, Watson's argument rested entirely on a faulty copy of the Agricola, for he assumed that, ‘as the Caledonian leader's name was certainly Calgacus, not Galgacus as given in Tacitus, it may be conjectured that the true name of the hill is Mons Craupius’.Footnote 18 In fact, the misprint ‘Galgacus’ is not found in the manuscript copies of the Agricola; it first crops up in a handful of early printed versions, including the popular editions of Justus Lipsius that appeared between 1574 and 1607. The error found its way into the first English translation,Footnote 19 and from there it spread widely, appearing for example in Merivale's famous multi-volume History of the Romans.Footnote 20

Watson further conjectured that, if the original name of the hill had been a Celtic one, there might be a link with the Welsh crwb, meaning a hump or haunch.Footnote 21 He therefore concluded that ‘Mons Craupius is formally identical with Dorsum Crup, a place mentioned in the Pictish Chronicle (p. 10) and supposed by Skene to be now Duncrub near Perth’, although he conceded that this need not have been the only place with this name.Footnote 22

The theory resurfaced in 1970, when Richard Feachem, accepting Skene's identification of ‘Dorsum Crup’ with Duncrub, attempted to link it with the remains of a Roman temporary camp at Dunning, in order to establish a new location for the battle of Mons Graupius.Footnote 23 Feachem bolstered his case with a quote from the Celtic scholar Professor Kenneth Jackson, who noted that ‘Crub could be from Craupius (not Graupius) ... Hence Duncrub could be Mons Craupius, philologically’.Footnote 24 Jackson's careful wording reveals the fly in the ointment: namely, that Tacitus calls the hill Mons Graupius, not Craupius. He sought to address this problem by cautioning that ‘the Romans often confused Celtic c and g (e.g. Clanoventa variant Glanoventa, etc., etc.), for some reason, rather unclear’.Footnote 25

However, with the realization that Watson's theory was entirely misconceived, there is certainly no reason to join Fraser in assuming that ‘the word spelled as Graup- by Tacitus actually represents a mishearing or mis-rendering of *Craup-’,Footnote 26 particularly when no such word is known to have existed, but must be invented for the benefit of the argument (as the asterisk indicates). Consequently, the link between Mons Graupius and Duncrub is broken, Fraser's argument is shown to be invalid, and researchers can look elsewhere for a battle-site that better suits Tacitus' aphorism, that ‘it would not be inglorious to die at the very place where the world and nature end’.Footnote 27

References

1 Tac. Agr. 29.2: ad montem Graupium pervenit, quem iam hostis insederat. The battle is described in chapters 29–38.

2 Fraser, J.E., The Roman Conquest of Scotland; The Battle of Mons Graupius a.d. 84 (Stroud, 2005)Google Scholar, hereafter cited as ‘Fraser’. Though broadly favourable reviews seemed to endorse the author's thesis (Keppie, L., War in History 14 [2007], 113–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, R., Britannia 38 [2007], 392–3)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, the book has not gone uncriticized (Woolliscroft, D.J. and Hoffmann, B., Rome's First Frontier [Stroud, 2006]Google Scholar, 223: ‘the Fraser hypothesis is anyway difficult to take seriously, on purely tactical grounds’), although the publisher's hyperbole (‘James Fraser is the first historian to identify the most likely site of this legendary battle’) has ensured wide take-up by internet sources.

3 Fraser, 69. The ‘several antiquaries’ are not identified, but Alexander Gordon (c. 1692–1754) may be taken as typical of his age. He laboured under the mistaken belief that, ‘after this Battle was fought ... Agricola led back his Army into the Country of the Horestii, or Angus, for as it is certain ... that Agricola ... had been there before, so it is natural to think, he led his Army to the Place where his Fleet was, which most probably was in the River Tay’ (Itinerarium Septentrionale [London, 1726], 38)Google Scholar.

4 Fraser, 71.

5 Fraser, 70.

6 Tac. Agr. 38.2: exacta iam aestate spargi bellum nequibat.

7 Fraser, 73. Precisely the same objection could be levelled at his own favoured location in Perthshire.

8 St Joseph, J.K., ‘The camp at Durno, Aberdeenshire, and the site of Mons Graupius’, Britannia 9 (1978), 271–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Fraser, 72. However, regarding St Joseph's ‘110-acre series’ of temporary camps, he is mistaken in his belief that ‘investigations ... at the example from this series of campsites at Ythan Wells, underlain by a clavicular camp, revealed stratigraphy that supports the conclusion that the series were left behind by the Severan army in the third century’. On the contrary, all that the stratigraphy proves is that the smaller (‘30 acre’) camp predated the larger (‘110 acre’) camp, but not by how much: see Joseph, J.K. St, ‘Air reconnaissance in Britain, 1965–68’, JRS 59 (1969), 104–28Google Scholar, at 112–13. Both camps at Ythan Wells may (or may not) be Flavian, but evidence of Flavian occupation at Kintore (another ‘110 acre’ camp) would tend to carry both camps at Ythan Wells with it. Of course, Flavian need not mean ‘Agricolan’. For the dating of Kintore, see Jones, R.H., ‘Chasing the army: the problems of dating camps’, in Breeze, D.J., Thoms, L.M. and Hall, D.W. (edd.), First Contact: Rome and Northern Britain (Perth, 2009), 20–7Google Scholar, at 22.

10 Fraser, 72. The most important words here are ‘as outlined above’, as distance only becomes an issue if Tacitus' testimony of a battle in late summer is discounted in favour of an earlier date.

11 Fraser, 72.

12 Fraser, 73, developing a point originally made by Maxwell, G., A Battle Lost: Romans and Caledonians at Mons Graupius (Edinburgh, 1990), 116–18Google Scholar. Instead of crediting Maxwell, Fraser cites his source as ‘the Flavian survey’, which is his preferred method of citing the second-century Geography of Claudius Ptolemaeus (‘Ptolemy’); cf. Fraser, 33–7. It is generally assumed, from the level of detail in Ptolemy's description of northern Britain, that his source ‘was not earlier than the campaigns of Agricola in a.d. 80–84’ (Rivet, A.L.F. and Smith, C., The Place-Names of Roman Britain [London, 1979], 114)Google Scholar, while the omission of Hadrian's Wall seems to confirm a first-century date.

13 Fraser, 74.

14 For the problems of plotting Ptolemaic data, see (for Greece) Livieratos, E., Tsorlini, A., Boutoura, C. and Manoledakis, M., ‘Ptolemy's Geographia in digits’, e-Perimetron 3.1 (2008), 22–39Google Scholar; (for Spain) Tsorlini, A., ‘Higher order systematic effect in Ptolemy's Geographia coordinate description of Iberia’, e-Perimetron 4.2 (2009), 117–30Google Scholar; (for Italy) Tsorlini, A., ‘Spatial distribution of Ptolemy's Geographia coordinate differences in North Mediterranean eliminating systematic effects’, e-Perimetron 4.4 (2009), 247–66.Google Scholar

15 For the problems posed by the so-called ‘turning’ of Scotland, see Jones, B. and Keillar, I., ‘Marinus, Ptolemy, and the Turning of Scotland’, Britannia 27 (1996), 43–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, citing earlier literature.

16 Previous suggestions include Strageath (Richmond, I.A., ‘Ancient geographical sources for Britain north of Cheviot’, in id. [ed.], Roman and Native in North Britain [Edinburgh, 1958], 131–55Google Scholar, at 140), Inchtuthil (Rivet and Smith [n. 12], 499), Dalginross (Frere, S.S., ‘Naming Roman Britain’, Britannia 11 [1980], 419–23, at 421)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Fendoch (Strang, A., ‘Explaining Ptolemy's Roman Britain’, Britannia 28 [1997], 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 22), and even Stracathro (Maxwell [n. 12], 122).

17 Fraser, 72.

18 Watson, W.J., The History of the Place-Names of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1926), 55–6Google Scholar. He does not indicate which text of the Agricola he consulted.

19 Savile, H., The Ende of Nero and Beginning of Galba. Fower Bookes of the Histories of Cornelius Tacitus: The Life of Agricola (London, 1598)Google Scholar, 255. Curiously, the erroneous spelling appears in the translation of Church, A.J. and Brodribb, W.J., The Agricola and Germany of Tacitus (London, 1877)Google Scholar, 28, although the same authors' Latin text has the correct spelling (The Agricola of Tacitus [London 1869], 20)Google Scholar.

20 Merivale, C., A History of the Romans under the Empire, vol. 7 (London, 1862)Google Scholar, 86 (repeated in subsequent editions).

21 The derivation has now been disproved by Breeze, A., ‘Philology on Tacitus' Graupian Hill and Trucculan Harbour’, Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scot. 132 (2002), 305–11Google Scholar, at 305–6, pointing out that crwb is not an original Celtic word, but a loan word from Old French.

22 Watson (n. 18), 56, evidently referring to Skene, W.F. (ed.), Chronicles of the Picts, Chronicles of the Scots, and Other Early Memorials of Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1867)Google Scholar, cxliii (‘a battle ... at Duncrub’), with 10 (‘[bellum] ... super Dorsum Crup’). He is misrepresented by Hind, J.G.F., ‘Summers and winters in Tacitus' account of Agricola's campaigns in Britain’, Northern History 21 [1985], 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 13, who states that ‘an attractive candidate for Mons Craupius was found by W. Watson’, for he had made it perfectly clear, firstly, that the identification with Duncrub rested on Skene's authority alone, and secondly, that there could well be more than one ‘hill of the hump’ in Scotland.

23 Feachem, R., ‘Mons Craupius = Duncrub?’, Antiquity 44 (1970), 120–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is irrelevant to our purpose that Feachem misinterpreted the camp at Dunning as encompassing 16 hectares (40 acres) behind ‘Stracathro-type’ gate defences, while it was shortly afterwards revealed to encompass 46 hectares (115 acres) behind titulus-guarded gateways: see Joseph, J.K. St, ‘Air reconnaissance in Britain, 1969–72’, JRS 63 (1973), 214–46Google Scholar, at 218–19. It is similarly irrelevant that Fraser erroneously calls it a ‘clavicular camp’ (73, 76).

24 Quoted in Feachem (n. 23), 120. It is worth noting that Jackson restricted his comments to ‘Craupius’, and earlier stressed that ‘Graupius’ may not be a Celtic word at all (‘The Pictish language’, in Wainwright, F.T. [ed.], The Problem of the Picts [Edinburgh, 1955], 129–66Google Scholar, at 135).

25 Feachem (n. 23), 120. See also Jackson, K., ‘On some Romano-British place-names’, JRS 38 (1948), 54–8Google Scholar, at 55: ‘confusion of c- and g- is of course common in Roman spellings of Celtic names’ (citing Clevo for Glevo and Vindogladia for Vindocladia); ‘Romano-British names in the Antonine Itinerary’, Britannia 1 (1970), 68–82Google Scholar, at 70: ‘Galleva shows the not uncommon scribal confusion of c- and g-’; ‘the frequent confusion in late Latin manuscripts between c- and g- (see Calleva and Clevo)’. It is striking that his three examples relate to the Antonine Itinerary, and we may suggest that the reason (which Jackson thought ‘rather unclear’) is simply the scribal misreading of capital C for G (and vice versa).

26 Fraser, 74.

27 Tac. Agr. 33.6: nec inglorium fuerit in ipso terrarum ac naturae fine cecidisse. I have quoted from the translation of Birley, A.R., Tacitus: Agricola and Germany (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar, 24.