AELIUS'S DRAGON AT BANNA/BIRDOSWALD: A REAPPRAISAL OF MY EARLIER WORK ON THE ILAM PAN

On the coins of Decius Trajanus (and Aurelianus), Dacia is personified as a woman bearing a wolf-headed draco standard:

In response to this iconography, Professor Roger Tomlin (via private correspondence), wrote:

"It is your best evidence of Dacia being identified with the draco."

We can compare the Dacian draco on these coins with the wolf-headed draco found on Trajan's Column, where the standard is also Dacian in nature:

Tomlin's comment got me to thinking.  I had already heard back from Prof. Kimberly Cassibry of Wellesley, who had responded to my question "Do you know of any examples in souvenirs where an owner's or maker's name is intruded into text that otherwise details only the subject(s) of the text?"  [Cassibry has researched and published extensively on Roman period souvenirs, including the three British examples that list forts starting at the western end of Hadrian's Wall.]

"That's a perceptive question. No other examples come to mind based on my current research."

All of which brings me back to my original point on the significance of the AELI DRACONIS of the Ilam Pan, which replaces the Banna fort name on the other two extant souvenir pans.

My readers may remember pieces such as the following:

https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2019/07/aelius-draco-dacian-and-bannabirdoswald.html

https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2022/06/birdoswaldbanna-fort-of-draco-of-aelius.html

Basically, I felt I had to default to the notion that Aelius Draco was a person, the owner of the pan, and that he may have been a Dacian, and may have been associated with Birdoswald and its Dacian garrison with its draco standard.

But the question in the back of my mind was this: what are the chances of the name Aelius Draco just happening to be found in place of Banna/Birdoswald where an Aelian cohort of draco-venerating Dacians were in garrison?

Well, my answer is pretty obvious: the chances of that being the case are astronomical.

So, what I think the Ilam Pan is saying is this:

X forts [starting with Mais/Bowness On Solway and progressing to Camboglanna/Castlesteads] along the line of the Wall of the Aelian Dragon

Roger Tomlin shared this with me:

"For a Latin-speaker, AELI would be a genitive ('of Aelius', or 'of the Aelian ...'), and that if he wanted to abbreviate Aeliae, he would resort to AEL, not AELI."

And that means that we can, indeed, allow for "the Aelian dragon" as a reference to the Banna garrison and, by extension, the fort itself. 

If I am right, this helps support my contention that Uther Pendragon, father of Arthur, has his origin at the sub-Roman royal hall discovered at Birdoswald.  The next fort to the east from Birdoswald was manned in the late period by Dalmatians, including people from Salona, where Artorii related to or descended from L. Artorius Castus are attested.