Note 50 — Chapter I · ADVANCE OF THE ROMANS TO THE FIRTHS OF FORTH AND CLYDE.

Chalmers has narrated the Roman campaigns with a strange affectation of military language. He makes the Roman troops debouch, defile, and deploy through the hills and in the glens in the most wonderful manner, so as to have rendered the cutting off of the whole army at any point of their progress no very difficult task to the natives. He involves the troops in this march, when the army was divided into three, among the remains of small camps in the hilly region of the west of Fife in a manner to render the real account of the transaction very unintelligible. General Roy, with correcter military knowledge, but without attending to the narrative with sufficient minuteness, is not more fortunate. He supposes that Agricola’s position was at the camp at Ardoch, and that, when he divided his army into three, he remained there with the main division, and sent the ninth legion to Comrie, and the other division to Strageath, at both of which places there are the remains of Roman camps; but, independently of the expression ‘incessit,’ which implies a march forward, conceive an able general sending the weakest legion into the heart of the Grampians, at a distance of nine miles from the main body, through an almost impassable country. So far from preventing the army from being surrounded, it sent its weakest division into the midst of the enemy. In what sense, too, could Agricola be said to have followed on the enemy’s track, and how could he, between night and daybreak, have received news of the attack, and have traversed what must have been, without roads, a long day’s march? It is obvious, on a careful attention to Tacitus’s expressions, that the three divisions could have been at no great distance from each other, and the main division nearest the enemy. There is a plan of the camp at Lintrose in General Roy’s Military Antiquities, Plate XIV., which will show how singularly it corresponds with the narrative.