Who were the Romans in Scotland?
When we talk about “the Romans” in Scotland, it is easy to imagine an army of men from Rome marching north.
The reality was much more interesting.
The people who came to Roman Scotland included legionaries, auxiliary soldiers, cavalrymen, centurions, commanders, administrators, traders, craftspeople and families.
They came from across Britain and the Roman Empire.
Some were born surprisingly close to Scotland. Others had travelled hundreds or even thousands of miles.
And not everyone living around a Roman fort was Roman.
Local people continued to live alongside this new military world — trading, working, cooperating and sometimes fighting against it.
Archaeology gives us thousands of anonymous lives.
Occasionally, however, an inscription gives us something extraordinary:
a name.
Here are some of the people we can actually meet.
🪦 Nectovelius
A Brigantian in a Thracian cohort
Where: Mumrills, Antonine Wall
When: second century AD
Occupation: Soldier
Unit: Second Cohort of Thracians
Nectovelius is one of the most evocative individuals known from Roman Scotland.
His tombstone tells us that he was Nectovelius, son of Vindex. He died aged just 29, after nine years of military service.
Most importantly, the inscription describes him as a Brigantian.
Yet he served in the Second Cohort of Thracians.
That tells us something fundamental about the Roman army.
Nectovelius wasn’t a Thracian.
Auxiliary units were originally recruited from particular peoples or regions, but over time replacements could be recruited elsewhere.
A unit’s name therefore doesn’t necessarily tell us where its individual soldiers were born.
Nectovelius was a man from northern Britain serving in a unit whose origins lay far away in Thrace, before dying on Rome’s frontier in Scotland.
See the original inscription — RIB 2142
🏛️ Marcus Cocceius Firmus
The centurion who left his name all over Auchendavy
Where: Auchendavy, Antonine Wall
When: Antonine period
Occupation: Centurion
Unit: Legio II Augusta
Few individuals have left a stronger personal imprint on Roman Scotland than Marcus Cocceius Firmus.
He was a centurion of Legio II Augusta and is best known from an extraordinary group of altars discovered at Auchendavy.
His dedications invoke a remarkable collection of gods and divine powers, including Diana, Apollo, Jupiter, Victory, Mars, Minerva, Hercules, Epona, the Campestres and the Genius of the Land of Britain.
His inscriptions give us an unusually personal glimpse into the religious world of a Roman officer stationed on the empire’s northern frontier.
They also demonstrate why inscriptions are so valuable: without these stones, Marcus Cocceius Firmus would be almost completely lost to history.
Explore Marcus Cocceius Firmus
⚔️ Lucius Minthonius Tertullus
An officer at Cramond
Where: Cramond
Occupation: Military commander
Unit: Fifth Cohort of Gauls
At Cramond, inscriptions introduce us to another Roman officer:
Lucius Minthonius Tertullus.
He commanded the Fifth Cohort of Gauls.
His story is valuable because Cramond occupied a strategically important position on the Firth of Forth and became particularly significant again during the campaigns of Septimius Severus.
Tertullus’s unusual family name also provides an opportunity to investigate the possible geographical origins and connections of an officer who eventually found himself serving in Scotland.
Explore Lucius Minthonius Tertullus
🪦 Flavius Lucianus
A legionary who died in Scotland
Where: Shirva, near Auchendavy
Occupation: Soldier
Unit: Legio II Augusta
A tombstone from Shirva gives us another name:
Flavius Lucianus.
He was a soldier of Legio II Augusta. That may sound like a small piece of information, but it changes how we think about a legion. A legion can appear in history as an anonymous block of several thousand soldiers.
A tombstone reminds us that it consisted of individual men with individual lives and military careers. Some of those lives ended in Scotland.
👩 Flavia Baetica
A woman with a tantalising name
Where: Birrens
Known from: Inscription
Military inscriptions mean that men dominate the written record. But they weren’t the only people living within Roman military communities.
One particularly intriguing woman is Flavia Baetica, known from an inscription associated with Birrens. Her name raises a fascinating possibility.Baetica was also the Roman province covering much of southern Spain. Does her name indicate a connection with Spain? It is tempting — but names must be handled carefully. A name alone cannot prove someone’s birthplace.
Nevertheless, Flavia provides a rare opportunity to investigate the life and possible origins of a woman associated with a Roman military community in Scotland.
Read Flavia Baetica — A Spanish Wife
👩 Vibia Pacata
An African woman at Westerwood
Where: Westerwood, Antonine Wall
Known from: Inscription
Another female name surviving from Roman Scotland is Vibia Pacata. She appears in the inscriptional evidence from Westerwood and was the wife of a centurion of Legio VI Victrix. Her presence raises questions that conventional military histories often overlook.
Read Vibia Pacata – a North African Wife
👩 Women in Roman Scotland
Flavia Baetica and Vibia Pacata were not unusual simply because they were women in Roman Scotland. What makes them unusual is that we actually know their names. Women were part of everyday life in and around the forts: living in nearby settlements, travelling with military communities, raising families, working, trading and worshipping their gods. Archaeology is gradually giving us a clearer picture of these women and their lives, but inscriptions offer something rarer still — the chance to know an individual by name.
More people you can meet
The surviving inscriptions introduce us to many more individuals.
🐎 Valerius Nigrinus
At Mumrills we meet Valerius Nigrinus, a duplicarius — a double-pay cavalry sub-officer — serving with the First Cavalry Regiment of Tungrians.
He dedicated an altar to Hercules Magusanus, a god particularly associated with communities around the Lower Rhine.
His inscription therefore combines a person, military unit and religious belief on a single stone.
🏛️ Gaius Arrius Domitianus
At Newstead/Trimontium, Gaius Arrius Domitianus is unusually well represented.
Rather than surviving in a single chance inscription, he appears four times in the inscriptional evidence from the site.
That makes him one of the individuals we can investigate particularly closely at one of Roman Scotland’s most important military centres.
→ Explore Gaius Arrius Domitianus
🧒 Salamanes
A particularly poignant inscription records a boy called Salamanes, who died aged only 15. The name has Near Eastern parallels, opening the intriguing possibility that this family had connections stretching as far as Syria or the eastern Mediterranean. But the inscription doesn’t tell us where Salamanes himself was born, so that possibility needs to remain just that — a possibility.
Read A Syrian in Perthshire? — Salamanes
⚔️ Quintus Pisentius Justus
At Castlehill on the Antonine Wall we encounter Quintus Pisentius Justus, prefect of the Fourth Cohort of Gauls. He is another example of how an inscription can transform a fort from an archaeological plan into a place containing identifiable people.
Explore Quintus Pisentius Justus
🌲 Lucius Tanicius Verus
Lucius Tanicius Verus survives because of a religious dedication. He was a prefect who dedicated an altar to Silvanus, fulfilling his vow to the god. The inscription therefore gives us both an individual and a glimpse of his religious life.
🌍 An army from across an Empire
These individual stories reveal something much bigger.
Rome’s forces in Scotland included units whose names had origins across Europe and beyond.
Among them were:
Tungrians — associated originally with the Lower Rhine region
Batavians — from the Rhine delta
Thracians — originating in the Balkans
Gauls — from areas of continental western Europe
Hamians — associated with Hama in Syria
Alongside them were the great citizen legions:
Legio II Augusta
Legio VI Victrix
Legio IX Hispana
Legio XX Valeria Victrix
The Antonine Wall alone provides inscriptional evidence for a remarkable range of units.
The name of a military unit is not a passport.
A soldier serving in the Second Cohort of Thracians didn’t necessarily come from Thrace. Units moved. Soldiers were replaced. People married. Children were born in new provinces.
The Roman army itself became a mechanism for moving people and cultures across enormous distances.
Explore the soldiers and units of the Antonine Wall
🦅 Legionaries
Legionaries were Roman citizens.
The legions provided the Roman army with heavy infantry as well as engineers, surveyors, builders and other specialists.
Legionaries were crucial both to the invasion of Scotland and to enormous construction projects.
On the Antonine Wall, inscriptions record three legions involved in construction:
Legio II Augusta
Legio VI Victrix
Legio XX Valeria Victrix
But there is an important distinction. The soldiers who built a fort weren’t necessarily the soldiers who lived in it. Legionaries could be detached to undertake specialist construction work and then move elsewhere.
A legionary building inscription therefore does not automatically identify the permanent garrison of a fort.
Explore the Antonine Wall and its legions
🛡️ Auxiliary soldiers
Much of the day-to-day military presence in Scotland depended upon auxiliary troops.
These included infantry cohorts, cavalry and specialist units recruited originally from peoples incorporated into the Empire.
Auxiliaries performed some of the most important fighting in Roman Scotland.
Tacitus tells us that at Mons Graupius, Agricola committed auxiliary infantry to the main battle while initially keeping his legionaries in reserve.
These soldiers weren’t peripheral to the Roman army.
They were central to it.
🐎 Specialists
Not everyone in the Roman military system was simply an infantryman.
Scotland’s evidence includes:
cavalrymen • archers • engineers • craftsmen • administrators • scouts • intelligence personnel
and soldiers selected for special duties.
One particularly intriguing group were the beneficiarii. These were soldiers released from ordinary unit duties to work for senior officials. Their responsibilities could involve administration, communications, security and policing strategic routes. A recently recognised spear-shaped mount from Inveresk resembles the distinctive insignia associated with such officials.
At Cramond, a silver ring-pommel sword pendant provides another Scottish connection with this specialist military world. These objects remind us that maintaining Roman control required far more than soldiers with swords.
It required an administrative network capable of controlling people, supplies, roads and information.
🏘️ The people outside the fort
Roman Scotland wasn’t populated solely by soldiers.
Settlements developed outside many forts. Archaeologists commonly call these vici.
They could contain:
traders • craftspeople • partners and families • veterans • labourers • enslaved people • visitors
Places such as Inveresk, Cramond and Newstead therefore need to be understood as communities rather than simply military installations.
The surviving inscriptions inevitably favour people with the status or resources to commission them.
Many other inhabitants remain anonymous.
For their stories we have to rely on archaeology.
🏴 And what about the people already here?
There is another danger in talking about the “people of Roman Scotland”:
Not everyone was Roman.
Scotland contained established communities long before Roman armies arrived.
Roman writers give us numerous names for northern peoples, including:
Caledonii • Vacomagi • Taexali • Venicones • Damnonii • Maeatae
But these are mostly names recorded by outsiders.
We don’t know whether everyone placed within these groups would have described themselves in the same way.
Nor should Roman Scotland be imagined simply as:
Romans ⚔️ Caledonians
Relationships could involve:
warfare • diplomacy • trade • military recruitment • exchange • accommodation • resistance
Different communities probably responded to Rome in very different ways.
👑 The famous people
A few individuals dominate the story because Roman historians chose to write about them.
Agricola
The Roman governor whose campaigns took his army deep into Scotland.
His son-in-law Tacitus made him the central character of the Agricola.
Calgacus
The Caledonian leader to whom Tacitus gives his famous speech before the Battle of Mons Graupius. Almost everything we know about him comes from Tacitus — and the famous speech should not be treated as a verbatim record of what Calgacus actually said.
Antoninus Pius
The emperor under whom the Antonine Wall was constructed, despite never visiting Britain himself.
Septimius Severus
The emperor who personally travelled to Britain and launched Rome’s last enormous attempt to conquer northern Scotland in AD 208–211.
For the surviving Roman accounts of Agricola, Calgacus and Severus:
→ Explore Ancient Writers on Roman Scotland
🔍 How do we know someone’s story?
There is an important difference between evidence and reconstruction.
Consider Nectovelius.
His tombstone tells us that he was:
son of Vindex • aged 29 • nine years in service • Brigantian • soldier in the Second Cohort of Thracians.
Those are unusually firm pieces of evidence.
But if we ask: Where exactly was he born? Why did he join the army? Was he married? How did he die? The inscription doesn’t tell us.
We can investigate possibilities, but we must distinguish those possibilities from what the evidence actually says. That principle applies to every person on this site.
🔎 Find a Roman person yourself
One of the best ways to investigate people in Roman Scotland is through Roman Inscriptions of Britain Online.
Search Roman Inscriptions of Britain
Try searching for:
Nectovelius
Marcus Cocceius Firmus
Valerius Nigrinus
or simply enter the name of a Roman site in Scotland.
Then look at the original inscription and ask:
What does the evidence actually tell us about this person?
That is often where historical research begins.
From people to their gods
The people of Roman Scotland didn’t travel alone.
They brought languages, customs, beliefs and gods with them.
At Auchendavy, Marcus Cocceius Firmus invoked an extraordinary collection of deities.
At Mumrills, the Tungrian cavalryman Valerius Nigrinus dedicated an altar to Hercules Magusanus, a god with strong associations with the Lower Rhine.
At Inveresk we encounter evidence for Mithras and other religious traditions.
Elsewhere, the inscriptions of Roman Scotland introduce us to:
Jupiter • Mars • Minerva • Victory • Epona • Silvanus • Diana • Apollo
An altar can therefore tell us much more than the name of a god.
It can reveal who dedicated it, their military unit, their rank and sometimes something about the cultural world from which they came.
That makes the natural next question:
Who were the gods of Roman Scotland — and who worshipped them?
→ Next: Explore Roman Altars
