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defied modern notions of political unity. Nora Chadwick illuminated this point in her classic work,
The Celts
. “In any conflict between Celts and Romans, the superior powers of organization, sense of discipline and general orderliness of the Roman culture were bound to overcome the volatile and undisciplined Celts whose sense of loyalty, powerful though it may have been, was normally centered on an individual rather than on an institution or an ideal.” 2
    But although defeated, the stronger warriors among the Celtic tribes did not submit to Roman conquest. Some chose to die on the battlefield with sword in hand. The others moved on, expanding outward in several directions from the Roman areas, in some cases swooping south to attack Rome itself. 3 In fact, there is considerable evidence to indicate that the Teutonic tribes that later emerged in Germany were yet another division of the Celtic people. 4
    The invading Romans faced a similar assortment of Celtic tribes in Britain, which were doomed to meet similar results. In a series of campaigns that ran intermittently for more than a hundred years, the Romans conquered most of what is now termed England, and then Wales after that. Again, the stronger, the luckier, and ultimately the freer among the Celts avoided the yoke of conquest, refusing to go through that mandatory ritual of defeat, the bowing of heads as the vanquished were required to walk under a low bar in order to “bend the knee to Rome.” Many of them headed for the untamed areas of Cornwall, Wales, and especially Scotland, and from these redoubts continued to resist the Roman occupation. In the words of Winston Churchill, “In the wild North and West freedom found refuge among the mountains, but elsewhere the conquest and pacification were at length complete and Britannia became one of the forty-five provinces of the Roman Empire.” 5
    And resist they did. In A.D. 71, after brutally suppressing a rebellion in East Anglia, the Romans headed north in an attempt to conquer the southern areas of what is now Scotland. In Scotland the Romans met up not only with the tribes that had migrated away from their earlier invasions, but also with a fierce native people they later named the Picts, due to their tradition of painting important tattoo-like symbols on their bodies. Many campaigns followed, including, as Chadwick writes, an eastward march where the Romans “were met by a vast array of Caledonians, presumably the immediate ancestors of the historic Picts, with whom they fought a great pitched battle at an unidentified place called Mons Graupius.” 6 Factual accounts of such campaigns are difficult to verify, since the Celts of Scotland did not commit records to writing until the fifth century, 7 but some estimates, probably taken from Roman reports, indicate that thirty thousand Caledonians were killed in this battle. 8
    But it was not only the wild Celts of the north who took fearsome casualties. As Churchill writes, the positions the Romans “had won in Scotland had to be gradually abandoned. The legions fell back on the line of the Stangate, a road running eastward from Carlisle. The years which followed revealed the weakness of the British frontier. The accession of Hadrian was marked by a serious disaster. The Ninth Legion disappears from history combating an obscure uprising of the tribes in Northern Britain. The defenses were disorganized and the province was in danger.” 9
    In A.D. 122 the Romans decided to partition their conquered lands from the wilderness they had been unable to tame. Roman emperor Hadrian visited Britain, and in a trip to the north he decided to build a boundary stretching from sea to sea in order to defend Rome’s holdings from further attacks. And thus was built the wall that bears his name. A second wall called the Antonine Wall was built farther to the north twenty years later, but the Romans found themselves surrounded on both sides by the ferociously resisting