Note 109 — Chapter V
William P. (William Purdie) Dickson translation
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.
The building of Severus can only be referred to the northern structure. In the first place, the structure of Hadrian was of such a nature that any sort of restoration of it could not possibly be conceived as a new building, as is said of the wall of Severus; while the structure of Pius was a mere earthen rampart (murus cespiticius, Vita, c. 5), and such an assumption in its case creates less difficulty. Secondly, the length of Severus’s wall 32 miles (Victor, Epit. 20; the impossible number 132 is an error of our MSS. of Eutropius, viii. 19—where Paulus has preserved the correct number; which error has been then taken over by Hieronymus, Abr. 2221; Orosius, vii. 17, 7; and Cassiodorus on the year 207), does not suit Hadrian’s wall of 80 miles; but the structure of Pius, which, according to the data of inscriptions, was about 40 miles long, may well be meant, as the terminal points of the structure of Severus on the two seas may very well have been different and situated closer. Lastly, if, according to Dio, lxxvi. 12, the Caledonians dwell to the north and the Maeates to the south of the wall which divides the island into two parts, the dwelling–places of the latter are indeed not otherwise known (comp. lxxv. 5), but cannot possibly, even according to the description which Dio gives of their district, be placed to the south of Hadrian’s wall, and those of the Caledonians have extended up to the latter. Thus what is here meant is the line from Glasgow to Edinburgh.