Sometimes a book doesn’t change your life in the sense that reading it makes you suddenly decide to learn to whistle Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or to abandon your lifelong prejudice against gaboon vipers, or to leave your job to panhandle in San Francisco to find out about life in the street. No, sometimes reading a book simply changes your perspective—as if before, you saw everything in a rather depressing shade of blue, but after you read the book your way of looking at things was clearer, perhaps even faintly tinged with rose.
That’s why I want to discuss Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth, in my view one of the finest novels ever written. Please open the elaborate bronze fibula pinning the curtains shut and follow me through the curtains into the atrium.
As the novel opens Centurion Marcus Flavius Aquila is marching at the head of a column of soldiers. He is Cohort Commander of “six hundred yellow-haired giants from the northern tribes of Gaul,” attached to the Second Legion as an Auxiliary Cohort.
Sutcliff describes Marcus Flavius Aquila as “Roman to his arrogant finger-tips; wiry and dark as they [the Gaulish tribesmen] were rawboned and fair.” She further notes that “between his level black brows showed a small raised scar that marked him for one who had passed the Raven Degree of Mithras.”
Young (18 years old) and ambitious, a member of the equestrian rank of Roman society, Marcus has bold plans for his future. Although “Legion commanders were almost always men of Senator’s rank… the two Egyptian Legions were exceptions to the rule. They were commanded by professional soldiers; and an Egyptian Legion had been Marcus’s shining goal for as long as he could remember.”
He realizes of course that one day he will be too old to “follow the Eagles,” but when that day arrives he plans to return to Italy and perhaps buy back the family farm, sold when his father died.
Marcus is glad to be serving as Cohort Commander in cold, misty Britannia, because fifteen years ago his father, the aquilifer of the Ninth Hispana Legion, marched away with that legion into the mists of Caledonia and vanished. No one ever saw or heard what became of it; it was a mystery. The aquilifer was the soldier who carried the eagle, symbol of the power of Rome, on a long wooden staff; legionaries were expected to defend the eagle, which symbolized the legion’s honor, with their lives. To allow it to be captured was a profound disgrace. If there were anything to be learned about his father’s disappearance, Marcus thinks, it would be learned here in Britannia.
All goes reasonably well when Marcus and his cohort arrive at their post, Isca Dumnoniorum; he assumes command, works out a decent enough relationship between himself and the other centurions, administers Roman justice to the rather sulky Celtic tribespeople in the neighborhood. He even goes hunting with one of the more prominent tribesmen, Cradoc. Later Marcus borrows Cradoc's chariot to race the tribesman’s horses, descendants of the Royal Stables of the Iceni, Boudicca’s tribe. Marcus believes he gets on well with Cradoc and the other native people but is shortly disabused of this notion; there is an uprising, and in defending the fort against the tribes, Marcus suffers a grievous wound to his leg.
When he recovers, after weeks of lying ill in the fort sickroom, Marcus is interviewed by the man who has replaced him as fort commander, Centurion Maximus. He realizes his army career is over.
He took it very quietly; but it meant the loss of almost everything he cared about. Life with the Eagles was the only kind of life he had ever thought of, the only kind of life he had any training for, and now it was over. He would never be Prefect of an Egyptian Legion; he would never be able to buy back the farm in the Etruscan hills, or gather to himself another like it. The Legion was lost to him and with the Legion it seemed that his own land was lost to him too; and the future, with a lame leg and no money and no prospects, seemed at first sight rather bleak and terrifying.
When he is fit to travel, Marcus decides to go to the only relative he has in Britannia, his Uncle Aquila, older brother to Marcus’ late father, who lives in the town of Calleva. Over the course of two years several things happen: Marcus buys a slave, a Brigantian named Esca, with his mustering-out pay to save Esca from a miserable life; he rescues a wolf cub and brings him up; and he makes friends with the girl next door, an Iceni girl named Cottia. Cottia, called “Camilla,” by her Romanized aunt and uncle, is kept in very strict bounds but manages to escape into the garden to talk to Marcus and play with Cub when she can avoid her nurse. Marcus learns that his leg, which still gives him trouble, was never set properly by the drunken fort surgeon at Isca Dumnoniorum; therefore, it has to be rebroken, set properly, and allowed to heal. This takes a year.
A visit from one of his Uncle Aquila’s dearest friends, a legion commander, brings the news that a Roman eagle has been spied in the possession of the wild tribesmen of the North; Marcus seeks and obtains permission to go in search of it. Before they depart, he sets Esca free, for the quest is too dangerous to force an unwilling partner to brave the wilds of Caledonia with him. Esca, now a freedman, decides of his own free will to accompany Marcus, so the two disguise themselves and set out.
It would be a real disservice to those who have not yet read The Eagle of the Ninth to give a blow-by-blow description of what transpired during the quest. Sutcliff’s writing is such a pleasure to read that it would be a crime to deprive anyone of the desire to do so.
A year later, back in Calleva with Uncle Aquila, Marcus and Esca wonder what to do with the rest of their lives. Esca suddenly realizes that as a freedman he still has little status in Roman society, because the mere fact of having once been a slave differentiates him from those who have always been free.
Marcus, troubled, decides to face the situation at once.
On a sudden impulse Marcus reached out his free hand and caught his friend’s shoulder, not at all gently. “Listen to me,” he said. “Are you going to live all the rest of your life as though you had taken a whipping and could not forget it? Because if you are, I am sorry for you. You don’t like being a freed-man, do you? Well, I don’t like being lame. That makes two of us, and the only thing we can do about it, you and I, is to learn to carry the scars lightly.
This is definitely food for thought. Who among us has not experienced misfortune, even overwhelming misfortune, in our lives? Some of us have had our life-plans completely derailed; others have received the blows of Fate through accident, illness, or financial disaster, or have experienced the sudden, unexpected loss of loved ones.
How do we cope with the cruel vagaries of Fate? Do we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and sally forth to resume the game? Or do we sink under the blows, as if there is no way to deal with them, and become increasingly embittered? It’s an interesting question to contemplate.
So the topic of the morning is this: can we put aside our misfortunes and carry on? Or do we believe that misfortune will overshadow the rest of our days?
The floor is yours.