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suggested in the report, abandonment of the round in the later sixth century in favour of an unenclosed
settlement of the tre type nearby.
Q.’s final chapter is a wide-ranging and interesting account of the interpretation of the site and its
wider significance in Roman Cornwall. She makes the case for Trethurgy and similar rounds as sites of
middle-ranking status and local traditional authority. The site had access to Romano-British artefacts but
she argues that the occupants adopted Roman goods without significantly altering their social structure.
This raises the issue of the relationship between Cornwall and the civitas Dumnoniorum, based in
Exeter, and Q. suggests that the distinctive nature of Roman Cornwall may imply that it might have been
administered separately from the more conventionally Romanised areas to the east.
This volume is an important account of a major site. It is well presented and interestingly discussed.
The limitations of the site — plough damage, localised stratigraphies, acidic soil, poor environmental
evidence etc. — should discourage specialists from taking the round ‘phases’ too literally, tempting as
the ten nice stage plans will be to the undergraduate and the unwary. Nevertheless the author and her
collaborators must be congratulated for making this distinctive site and its regional character so alive and
raising questions of much wider interest for Romano-British and early medieval specialists.

Cardiff University ALAN LANE

Ancient Germanic Warriors: Warrior Styles from Trajan’s Column to Icelandic Sagas. By M.P. Speidel.
Routledge, London, 2004. Pp. xiv + 313, figs 53. Price: £55.00. ISBN 0 415 31199 3.

The name of Michael P. Speidel will be familiar to most readers of Britannia from his numerous studies
of aspects of the organisation and operation of the Roman army. His latest work, under review here, is
a study of the different fighting tactics — ‘warrior styles’ as he terms them — employed by Germanic
warriors both against and in the service of Rome and of each warrior type’s appearance and fighting
equipment. Both Roman visual and historical sources are drawn upon to illustrate the type of warrior,
while later written sources, particularly Icelandic sagas, are used to trace the longevity of particular
forms of battle tactics. S.’s knowledge of Roman historical sources is particularly impressive.
The book consists of an introduction and twenty-two chapters, some of them only two or three pages
long, grouped under nine rather curious section headings: ‘Animal Warriors’, ‘Frightening Warriors’,
‘Strong Men’, ‘Shield Warriors’, ‘Churls’, ‘Horsemen’, ‘Foot against Horse’, ‘Outstanding Warriors’,
and ‘Warrior Styles through the Ages’. The main body of the text is just over 200 pages long; there
are just over 70 pages of notes, 28 pages of references, and a comprehensive index that runs from
‘Adrianople’ to ‘youth’, via ‘madness’.
In his introduction S. ominously states that ‘I nevertheless trust … that my findings reflect what truly
happened’, a claim that most academic archaeologists today would shy away from making, even if they
believed it to be true. There then follows an exposition on the frieze on Trajan’s Column, reading it as an
accurate military document. Indeed, throughout the book both visual and historical documentary sources
are taken more-or-less at face value. S. then goes on to discuss each of twenty warrior types in turn. Some
of the descriptions of categories of warrior type are frankly peculiar. For instance, on the ‘bear-warrior’
S. writes (45) that:

bears on the attack snort, bark hoarsely, and finally clack their teeth. Bear-warriors …
snorted (as did berserks). Very likely, therefore, they also barked and clacked their teeth.
The sagas and twelfth-century chess set from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides tell
of a weird custom of biting one’s shield. Such biting, done rapidly, makes a sound like that
of bears clacking their teeth before they attack. It is also much louder than clacking one’s
teeth and avoids the chattering that might seem to come from fear. Not loud enough for a
battlefield challenge, shield-biting could nevertheless put one into a trance.

However, I have chosen to dwell here on the category of Germanic warrior that S. calls ‘horse-stabbers’,
particularly as he illustrates this warrior in action with examples of the type of auxiliary cavalry
tombstone known as the ‘Reitertyp’, found in Britain and in the Rhineland in the first and second centuries
A.D. Usually the fallen or falling barbarian opponent on these tombstones is interpreted as being ridden
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down by the auxiliary cavalryman or trampled beneath his horse’s front hooves. S., however, reads the
gravestones of Romanius (Mainz) and Dolanus (Wiesbaden) as depicting a brave Germanic warrior
deliberately throwing himself onto the ground so as to stab the underside and belly of the cavalryman’s
horse.
Rather than simply celebrating the life and role of a soldier serving in the Roman army, his
interpretation turns this image into an altogether different motif, one that almost anthropologically
records a barbarian fighting technique and imbues the stabbing warrior with a high degree of daring
and courage against a mounted and seemingly more formidable Roman foe. I am afraid I find it hard to
accept this reading, particularly as the historical sources cited to back up the existence of this ‘warrior
style’ recount a number of separate occasions on which such tactics were used without necessarily thus
describing them as common or universal tactics on the battlefield employed by specific ethnic groups.
The auxiliary cavalry ‘Reitertyp’ tombstones from Britain, most famously those of Longinus (Col-
chester) and Rufus Sita (Gloucester), appear to show no such incidences of horse stabbing. While S.
quite rightly points out that all the cavalrymen on such tombstones are themselves non-Romans, from
Thrace, Noricum, and Dalmatia for example, he does not consider the question of how their ethnic
identity relates to the fighting styles of the Roman army in which they serve. While in his bibliography he
cites Marjorie Mackintosh’s 1986 study of what she calls ‘the horseman and fallen enemy motif’, under
which she includes the ‘Reitertyp’ tombstones, he does not cite her later fuller study of 1995 (The Divine
Rider in the Art of the Western Roman Empire, BAR Int. Ser. 607).
Unfortunately, there is no concluding summary chapter that pulls together the information assiduously
presented in the preceding sections. Instead, there is a two-page conclusion which anticlimactically
simply suggests that ‘much is still to be learned about ancient Germanic warriors’. There is no mention
here of strategies of self-representation in Roman art and literature, of the creation and manipulation of
identities in visual and textual sources, of the differing responses of the Roman viewers to particular
works of art such as Trajan’s Column, of the interpretation of gesture in Roman art, and so on. So
in reality the book remains simply a long list of facts, seemingly teleported forward into the twenty-
first century from the 1950s when uncontextualised Roman military studies such as this were most
fashionable.
The book is well illustrated, with over 50 figures, mainly good quality and well-reproduced black and
white photographs. The quality of some of the few line drawings is poor (especially figs 4.1 and 20.2).
There are few typographical errors noticeable in the text, though unusual phrasing does crop up here and
there, including the use of anachronisms such as ‘strike force’ or ‘churl’. The definite article is missing
in many places, suggesting that closer copy editing might more fully have justified a price of £55 for the
book.
Students of tactics in ancient warfare will find much of interest in this curiously old-fashioned and
idiosyncratic book. However, it may not have much appeal to other, non-specialist readers.

Birmingham IAIN FERRIS

A Companion to Roman Britain. Edited by M. Todd. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2004. Pp. xx + 508,
figs 96. Price: £85.00. ISBN 0 631 21823 8.

This volume in the Blackwell series of Companions to British History consists of twenty-four chapters
written by twenty-three authors that together are intended to ‘synthesize the current state of scholarship
… and provide a statement on where the field is heading’. Each of the contributors was tasked with
describing a particular aspect of Roman Britain and the editor has arranged their articles into loose
groups of chapters that each deal with the same broad theme. Thus, the late prehistoric Background
(chapters by Cunliffe, Haselgrove, and Niblett) is followed by Conquest (Todd, Manning, and Maxwell),
Consolidation (Davies, Crow, and Hanson), Romans in Britain (Jones, Aldhouse-Green, and Henig), and
Roman Britons (Roberts and Cox, Allason-Jones, Croom, and Wild). The Countryside and Economy
chapters (Fulford, Hingley, King, and Grant) appear before Later Roman Britain and the End (Southern,
Esmonde Cleary, and Wood), while Todd also provides the postscript to the volume in a short survey of
Roman Britain as a historical subject. The authors are leading researchers and their individual statements
all contain a wealth of information and interpretation which will make the Companion a useful resource.