HOW THE FRAGMENTARY 'ARM[...]S' OF THE L. ARTORIUS CASTUS STONE BECAME A LOGIC PROBLEM

When I first started working on possible candidates for the fragmentary ARM[...]S of the L. Artorius Castus stone, my first task was to see what words representing ethnic groups, territories/countries or individuals would fit in the gap.  Prior to the proposed reading of  'ARMATOS' by Dr. Linda  A. Malcor, Antonio Trinchese and Alessandro Faggiani, the academic community had found itself divided on only two possibilities for ARM-: 'ARMENIOS' or some form of 'ARMORICOS.' I backed the ARMENIOS idea for quite some time, until Trinchese pointed out that the formulaic use 'proc centenario' for LAC's pay grade was not found on stones prior to the Severan period.  I delved into that matter, and found an individual who had 'proc c.' in c. 190, i.e. during the reign of Commodus.

Because I had to change my thinking about the date of the stone, I was forced to let go of ARMENIOS for ARM-.  Doing so meant I was pretty much stuck with ARMORICOS.

With the help of Faggiani and others (including Roger Tomlin), I could not properly fit any conceivable form of ARMORICOS onto the stone.  It could only be made to fit with a rare o inside of C ligature, something of a style not otherwise demonstrated on the stone, and quite possibly being of later origin and geographical distribution.

From there I devolved to personal names or even outright inventions.  No personal names of the kind one would have expected to be mentioned in the time period under question (given a person of note, who was powerful enough to have the Sixth legion and large detachments of the other two British legions being brought to bear against him) could be found in our extant historical sources.  Imaginative creations such as *Are-/Ar-M[a]eatae were doomed from the outset, and rather quickly dispensed with.

And so, finally, I was forced to look at ARMATOS.  And that is where the deductive reasoning came in.

1) Had the Roman governor Statius Priscus taken some British detachments with him to Armenia in the early 160s, those troops would indisputably have been under his command.  There would have no need to appoint LAC as dux over the said troops.

2) As we know Priscus, one-ime legate of the Sixth, led British troops in the Deserters' War in the early 180s, and LAC's supposed command of British troops in Armorica has been associated with the same event, LAC would not have been called dux.  Priscus was a senator and had been a governor and a legate.  As praepositus of the British vexillations against Maternus, we cannot justify LAC's assuming of the title dux in this context.  

3) Had LAC merely been dux in the sense of his transporting troops to Armorica, he would not have included ADVERSUS in his inscription.  As dux of vexillations [see point 4 below] of three British legions against ARM-, he was telling us in no uncertain terms that he was the commander of this force in war.  He was not taking them across the Channel as dux and then handing them to Priscus.

4) The omission of any mention of vexillations on the LAC stone cannot be considered an implied presence.  I have not found a single additional inscription from this period or before that fails to include vexillations, even if written only in various abbreviated forms.  This fact, taken in combination with points 1-3 above, forces us to accept the high probability that LAC led his own entire Sixth legion, supplemented by generous detachments from the other two British legions, in a conflict in northern Britain.  

5) Given 1-4 above, the ARM- in question, taken to be ARMATOS, 'armed men', needs to be a shorthand form for the several tribes said to have broken through the Wall c. 180.  As there was insufficient room on the stone to list all these tribes - and given the very real possibility that LAC may not even have known who all of them were - and needing to keep his inscription reasonably compressed, he had available to himself really only a couple of terms.  I've already shown how it would be redundant to declare that he had been "dux of three British legions against Britons", as his fighting in Britain would have made it obvious who his opponents were.  Assuming, of course, he did not specify that the enemy was composed of mutinous soldiers.  Tomlin said "he might refer to HOSTES in Britain", but this is equally as vague as ARMATOS.  Tomlin once joked about ARMATOS, saying that "Who else would he be fighting - inermes [unarmed men]?"  But the same could be said of HOSTES.  "Who else would he be fighting - a non-enemy?" Malcor and colleagues have proposed that ARMATOS refers to a mix of Britons and rebellious Roman soldiers, but in truth we are not told of a mutinous state of the British army until Ulpius Marcellus had won the British war c. 184.  It is safe to say, then, that ARMATOS would be a concise way of referring to the several tribes who killed a general and troops in c. 180.  

6) The nice thing about this reconstruction of events is that it allows LAC to have assumed the title of dux in an emergency around 180.  At some point thereafter Priscus was appointed to replace the legate of the Sixth (the general who was killed) and LAC reverted to camp prefect of the same legion.  At the completion of the war, the army tried to raise Priscus to the purple, but he refused.  He was immediately transferred to the Macedonian legion.  But he was not there for long, for the Deserters' War was heating up.  He was appointed commander of British vexillations sent to help deal with Maternus, and among those serving under him in this capacity was LAC.  As has been suggested by scholars before me, the 1500 spearmen sent to Rome to kill Perennis quite likely came from the British contingent that was already on the Continent and perhaps not too distant from Rome.  While there are those who balk at the notion that these 'spearmen' were Sarmatian cavalry, the terminology in Dio Cassius used to describe them, as well as LAC's and Priscus's undoubted use of them in the British war, permits us to suggest without bending the rules of credibility that they were, indeed, Sarmatians. 

There is no evidence whatsoever, on LAC's stone or elsewhere, that he was de facto governor between the offices of Pertinax and Clodius Albinus.  Furthermore, the supposed gap between these two British governors is probably imaginary.  It has been demonstrated (see  https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-strategos-and-lucius-artorius.html) that the governorship of Ulpius Marcellus, who preceded Pertinax, lasted several years.  Birley himself has said that "Albinus would have been in Britain for over five years by the time of Commodus’ death: not impossible..."  Dio Cassius says that Albinus was governor in Britain when Pertinax as murdered.

7) My readers will know by now that I long resisted any supposed connection of the 5th-6th century British Arthur with Sarmatians.  And this was true even though I had, some years ago, discovered what I believed to be a link between Arthur and the Roman fort of Ribchester, site of the settlement of Sarmatian veterans.  Eventually, the more I worked on the problem of the sub-Roman Arthur, the more I came to realize that I couldn't continue to resist the obvious conclusion:  the famous Arthur of romance did, in fact, seem to have hailed from Ribchester.  And that meant, simply put, that the Artorius name had been preserved in the folk memory of the Dark Age descendents of the Sarmatian veterans at Ribchester.  The name was passed down through the generations and given to a royal son precisely because L. Artorius Castus had made himself especially famous among the Sarmatian troops who had served with him in the British War, in the Deserters' War, and in the execution of Perennis.  

My mind works in very rational, logical way.  But it is also a deliberate (a better word than 'slow') and methodical mind.  As things stand right now, my conscience is satisfied that I have reached the best possible solution to the 'LAC Problem.'  There are no resources, to my knowledge (or at my disposal, at any rate!), that have been left unaccessed. And there are no alternatives/options left for me to consider. As I am not one to speculate based on a dearth of information, and try very hard to resist the temptation of ego-driven or taught bias or pre-conceived belief, I can say with full confidence that according to my limited abilities, there is nothing left for me to add to the LAC or Arthur debates.