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Eboracum (York)
The Roman city of Eboracum was an important military center during the Third and Fourth Centuries A. D. Two Roman emperors died there, Septimius Severus and Constantius Chlorus. Both were strong military leaders and lived to be old men in their sixties when the average person seldom lived past the age of forty-five. They had both been on recent military campaigns against the Pictish tribesmen from the north of Britain who had been raiding Roman settlements south of Hadrian’s Wall. (These Picts are the ancestors of the Scots of modern times.) In both cases, the Picts were defeated in open warfare but were not conquered and continued to harass the settled areas of Roman Britain. The emperors died a little over a century apart, Septimius Severus dying in A. D. 211 and Constantius Chlorus in 306.
If there is a lesson to be learned in this, it is probably that one should not pick a fight with a Scotsman, or he might die in a lonely Roman garrison town on the edges of civilixation, far from the comforts of one’s palace!
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