Hadrian's Wall

From an award-winning historian of ancient Rome, the definitive history of Hadrian’s Wall.

“Hadrian’s Wall is a short and sparkling introduction to the great wall of the Roman Empire, written by a master historian. Adrian Goldsworthy cuts through the myth without losing the magic.” ―Barry Strauss, author of The Trojan War

Stretching eighty miles from coast to coast across northern England, Hadrian’s Wall is the world’s largest known Roman artifact. Commonly viewed as a defiant barrier, the end of the empire, a place where civilization stopped and barbarism began, the Wall remained shrouded in mystery until today. Was it intended to keep out the Picts, who inhabited the North? Or was it merely a symbol of Roman power and wealth? What was life like for soldiers stationed along its expanse? And how was the extraordinary structure built—what technology, skills, and materials? Generations of historians have been fascinated by this wondrous fortification, which has generated a great deal of speculation and relatively few answers.

In Hadrian’s Wall, the acclaimed ancient historian Adrian Goldsworthy embarks on a historical and archaeological exploration, sifting fact from legend while simultaneously situating the wall in the wider scene of Roman Britain. He describes the construction of the wall in the early 100s AD, when Roman legions had reached the far north of the land they called Britannia. Goldsworthy reveals that while the sheer scale of the Wall may suggest that its main function was to keep the tribes of the north out, its actual purpose may have been to slow down northern raiders returning home with their plunder. And though we assume that legionnaires stationed at the wall were there to serve it, the surviving evidence indicates that it was there to serve them.

A fascinating investigation into the depths of Roman Britain, Hadrian’s Wall is a concise and authoritative history of one of the great architectural marvels of the ancient world.