Rome's Lost Legion: What happened to the Ninth?



Let’s dive into the incredibly fascinating story about the disappearance of the ninth legion!

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43 thoughts on “Rome's Lost Legion: What happened to the Ninth?”

  1. They probably got decimated by a local illness and the Britons kept opportunistically picking them off… Add a famine or something wouldn't have been great either

    Or… It was an embarrassing defeat in which Hadrian had to barter for peace, and built a wall not to keep people out physically but as a demarcation of territory. Such a loss wouldn't have been written down. Hadrian may have Ukrained himself

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  2. They got lost in bad weather and accidentally found themselves wandering the streets of Glasgow, the night after an Old Firm game.

    EDIT: I'm never going to see the word "Nijmegen" again, without hearing Simon calling it "Ninja Men".

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  3. One of the more fascinating mysteries of the Roman Empire along with the Varian Disaster. To this day no one is 100% sure where they went. Probably decimated by multiple wars and eventually disbanded and the rest dispersed into other legions.

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  4. Simon, I think it's quite possible the the legion was just absorbed into other legions and the name was just abadoned. But an the other hand it's also possible that rome was just ashamed about the defeat, so they just destroyed every report of the battle a short time after. Eventhough that is quite unlikely. Legions vanishing into thin air, never to be seen again isn't something, that hasn't happend before in the roman empire. In fact, just look at the famous Batlte in the Teutoburg forest (also called Varian Disaster or Varus Battle) in germany in 9 AD. We do absolutely with 100% certainty know that this battle did take place. And that 3 roman legions were totally destroyed. Since both rome and the germanic tribes kept reports about the battle.

    But to this day we still don't know where exactly the battle took place. We don't even know wether the battle really took place in the teutoburg forest, somewhere near Cologne, Hanover, Osnabrück, near Frankfurt or near the harz mountain region in Saxony-Anhalt. That's a difference of several hundred kilometres in a total different area in germany !.
    To this day, the battlefield and the remains have not been found. Just a handfull of artefact from some roman legions has been found
    But nothing that can undoubtedly traced back to the missing legions.
    A few coins from the time, some spears, sandals and a helmet but thats basically it. For three full legions that's almost nothing. Just as if they dissapeared into thin air.
    16000-20000 people just gone and only a handfull of fragments that might belong to them remain.
    But we definitely know, that the battle did really take place in 9 AD. The 17th, 18th and 19th legion were all destroyed by the germanic tribes. But that's all we know.
    Just a handful belongings, a few coins, and thats basically it.

    So i thinks it's quite reasonable to think, if rome keept reports about such a massive defeat of 3 legions, they would've probably kept a report about the defeat of 'just' one legion as well, if a battle ever took place.

    On the other hand if they just destroyed the records out of shame it's quite reasonable to asume that the remains of the lost legion are still somewhere buried in the ground waiting to be found.

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  5. I know Simon explicitly said that he doesn't care, but pretending he does:

    The reason that the 9th disappearing is more interesting than the 22nd is because the 22nd isn't as decorated, there's a reasonable explanation (they were the legion that was destroyed and weren't called out) and they didn't "disappear" like the 9th did. The 9th was a decorated unit that went from a station to unlisted in a relatively short period, and while the reason is probably tedious, it is also frustratingly elusive for historians of a bureaucratically well documented civilization that (as Simon has said himself) is both incredibly incredibly similar to and radically different from our own.

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  6. Ilse kept saying "legate" when she meant "legionnaire". A legate was roughly equivalent to a general, the official in command of the entire legion.

    I say "official" rather than "officer" because there wasn't a clear distinction between civilian and military leadership in those days. And these could be rotating assignments, so it's not especially significant that some former legates of the IX had traceable later careers.

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  7. 28:25 — You can't carbon date ceramic, Simon. Just organic material. Pottery is usually dated by stylistic and stratigraphic evidence. When a potter style has identifiable changes over time this is very useful in establishing a sequence, and if there are organic remains reliably associated with a pottery style that can help date the entire sequence. But a roof tile bearing a standard stamp isn't distinctive enough to be used this way even if you could pinpoint it to a decade on style alone. And you probably can't.

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  8. 4:10 – Chapter 1 – Who was the 9th legion ?
    10:50 – Chapter 2 – What did a regular legion look like ?
    13:45 – Chapter 3 – So what happened to the 9th legion?
    15:20 – Chapter 3.1 – 1st theory ; defeated in a battle in england during the reign of emperor hadrian
    27:05 – Chapter 3.2 – 2nd theory ; transferred out Britain to the continent
    32:45 – Chapter 3.3 – 3rd theory ; they just kinda left
    37:40 – Conclusion

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  9. methinks the whistleboy doth protest too much… new conspiracy theory, the ninth legion is buried on factboy's ancestral lands, and he's just pretending that he's never heard of them… "rome… *pshaw* nobody cares about THEM anymore"

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  10. Great video. you've remind me of what someone once said❤ Making money is an Action, keeping money is behavior, Growing money is Knowledge. I once attended seminar and ever since then i been waxing strong financially, and i most tell you the truth.👍💎.

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  11. To be fair, it's not like the 9th was composed of the same soldiers the entire time. We're talking almost a century between the Gallic Wars and the invasion of Britain. So a loss of skill is to be expected. Especially when it looks like they kept getting their leaders killed due to mutinies.

    Can't carbon date pottery or stone. No carbon-14. It only works on organic material, and only to about 50,000 years ago.

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  12. A little TOO honest there: "Never heard of this, but I'm your host so lets go!" LOL! Pretty funny though, dw I'm also a skeptic of conspiracy theories however I don't know that I would confess the fact as a youtuber!

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  13. The thing about 16:30 is that the Romans were very good at keeping records even about their losses. The Egyptians didn't write about their losses, but the Romans were anal about documenting shit.

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