Page:VCH Derbyshire 1.djvu/275

 ROMANO-BRITISH DERBYSHIRE by) the First Cohort of Aquitani, under Julius Verus, legatui Augusti pro pnetore (= governor of Britain), and under the superintendence of Capitonius Fuscus, praefect of the cohort.'
 * / l !""

. l~, l. ; ; i.^ i. i 'r i  I-AQYII LIO IN S3; FIG. 14. RESTORATION OF INSCRIBED SLAB FOUND AT B ROUGH. The emperor is Pius, who reigned A.D. 138-161. The Cohors I. Aquitanorum presumably garrisoned Brough when the slab was erected. It is known, from a military 'diploma,' to have been in Britain in A.D. 124, and it has left an undated memorial of itself at Bakewell in the shape of an altar to Mars Braciaca (p. 252) ; it also is named on a dateless fragment from Hadrian's Wall. 1 The governor Julius Verus is also known. His name occurs in full on a slab found in the Tyne between Newcastle and Gateshead in 1903, and it is imperfectly preserved on an inscription at Birrens dated 158 A.D., as well as on a fragment from Netherby, assigned by good judges to the middle of the second century. He is also mentioned as governing Syria about A.D. 163 5, and Dr. Ritterling has acutely connected him with a man whose earlier career is set forth on a Dalmatian inscription. 2 His governorship of Britain appears to have coincided with trouble and disturbance. The Newcastle inscription which names him refers also to special reinforcements sent over from the Rhine. The inscrip- tions of Brough and Birrens, and probably also of Netherby, though in iform mere dedications to an emperor, are in reality evidences of serious /activity probably building or rebuilding in the forts concerned. We may perhaps connect this activity with certain measures taken during the reign of Pius against the Brigantes, the powerful hill tribe of what is now northern England. The precise date of the measures is not recorded. But the only other military operations known to have been carried out in Britain under Pius, the wall building of Lollius Urbicus between Forth and Clyde in 1434, He very far north of the Brigantian 1 Corp. Insc. Lot. vii. 176, 6203, 1195. s See Dessau, Prosopogivphia (incerti, no. 19). 207