Donald O’Reilly

Lost Legion Rediscovered: The Mystery of the Theban Legion

(Pen & Sword, 2011), 208 pp. £19.99

Before we delve into this book, we need to understand the very unique subject matter that the book deals with. According to the Bishop Eucherius of Lyon, during a flooding in 383 A.D. a bank of the Rhone river collapsed, revealing a mass grave of Roman soldiers who originally had been recruited in the area of Thebes, in Egypt. Eucherius said that these soldiers had been massacred a century before, due to their Christian belief. This incident has not been recorded by anyone else from the period. Donald O’Reilly, the author of the reviewed book, has set out for himself to find out whether this legion existed, and tell its story. This book was published almost a decade ago, and the fact that this book is reviewed a significant amount of time after its publication, will be taken into consideration. The benefits of a late review are that we can see whether the book and its conclusion stand the test of time.

This book presents itself as a thrilling piece of detective work, and a thorough historical examination of an obscure and forgotten subject. Such an idea by itself is a welcome one, and I believe more multidisciplinary works of this fashion should be conducted. Yet, the ability of the book to achieve its goal needs to be scrutinised. My analysis of the book will be conducted in two parts. The first part will be a factual examination of the information presented. This is especially essential as the great majority of the book is actually a history of Rome, from the 1st century B.C. until the 4th century A.D., as well as a history of Judaism at this period and of Early Christianity. The second part of the examination will be a methodological one, to see whether the author’s detective work really provides evidence for what he claims to have found.

Although the book is at times very engaging, consisting of interesting debates on Roman history, it is littered with factual mistakes. I will bring a few extracts from the book to clarify my point:

“In 43 BC, a Roman army in the region had suffered the worst disaster a Roman army would suffer in the East. Crassus, a civilian millionaire, a supporter of Mark Antony and Octavian in their rival hopes of becoming the first emperor, had won approval to lead an army invading Persia.”(pp. 34-35)

In this paragraph, there are a few errors. The first is that the battle of Carrhae took place not in 43 B.C. but in 53 B.C. Secondly, it was not Rome’s greatest defeat in the East, as the defeat of Emperor Valerian at the battle of Edessa in 260 A.D. by King Shapur the First of Persia was much greater. Thirdly, Crassus was not merely a civilian or a millionaire. He was the richest man in Rome at the time and, like any other aristocrat, he had a military background due to the cursus honorum. It is true that he was not as successful a military leader as the two other members of the triumvirate, Pompeius and Julius Caesar, but he was the military leader who crushed Spartacus’s rebellion 20 years earlier. Fourthly, Crassus could not have been the supporter of Mark Antony or of Octavian, as he perished in captivity after the battle of Carrhae. At the time, Mark Antony was a junior cavalry officer in Caesar’s army in Gaul, while Octavian was a small child. Lastly, Crassus’s campaign was not against Persia, but against the Parthians, during a time where there was no Persian Empire. The passage above is part of chapter five. This chapter is especially problematic, as it starts with the events occurring in 276 A.D. at Carrhae, then jumps back to the battle in 53 B.C., then leaps back to the events of 276 A.D. The main problem is that it is written in a manner which does not help the reader to follow these time jumps.

Another problematic passage is the next:

“The legionnaires would have seen the Circus Maximus, Rome’s largest stadium, which could hold 385,000 ecstatic fans, built with the slave labour of Jews after the first revolt and inaugurated in the year 72.”(p. 93)

There are a few mistakes here. The first, that the Circus Maximus is a very ancient Roman landmark, whose origins are hundreds of years before the given date. Secondly, this building could not host 385,000 people, but only 150,000 to 180,000 people, which is significantly more logical, as the whole population of the city of Rome was half a million to a million people. Furthermore, the second part of the passage suggests that the author confused between the Circus Maximus and the Flavian Amphitheatre, more commonly known as the Colosseum, which could hold between 50,000 to 80,000 people. I suggest this as it is commonly believed that Jews were used as slave labour for the construction of the Colosseum. Although we do not have any definitive proof on this matter, it is only a logical suggestion as the construction started after the Jewish Great Revolt, and the treasures of the Jewish Temple were used to pay for the construction of the Flavian Amphitheatre. Yet, the year 72 A.D. is not the year that the Colosseum was inaugurated, but the year that construction commenced.

Another extract that may also indicate not only factual mistakes, but methodological and ideological ones, is the next:

“In Bar Kochba’s revolt, a legion of Greco-Copts, the III Deotariana, had been annihilated.” (p. 3)

The legion that was stationed in Egypt and later disappeared from the records around the Second Jewish Revolt, was not the III Deotariana, but the XXII Deotariana. Furthermore, there is no basis in saying that the legion consisted of Greco-Copts, especially when O’Reilly uses the term Copts very liberally and with a deliberately strong Christian connection. Throughout the book, the author is too keen on finding and seeing Christians, even where they were not, or even when there is no clear evidence for such claims.

It seems that the author is too invested in the subject for him to offer some critique of the sources. It is especially true when he deals with what is supposedly the main subject of the book: the Theban legion. With regards to this unit, the author does not emphasise enough that the earliest record of this story is 100 years after the event. Other stories on the event can be found only in Christian sources written many centuries later, some of them even in the 16th century. This was the reason why scholars believed that the story was no more than a myth or legend. Yet, O’Reilly considers all of these stories as fact when creating his own narrative on the history of the Theban legion. He also tries to connect the stories of Christian martyrs of the period, taken from the Acta Martyrum (Acts of the Martyrs), neglecting to mention that many of the Acts were written many centuries later and are considered unreliable. Moreover, the author does not only make mistakes in the content throughout the book, but also in the footnotes. Some of the footnotes are untraceable, as they were written in a problematic way, but worse yet, the source in the footnote often does not correspond to what is said in O’Reilly’s book.

To conclude, we may say that there were Theban units in the Roman army, and there were Christian martyrs, including Christian soldiers – facts which are well-known. The current book does not sufficiently prove that the Theban legion existed, and that the story told by Bishop Eucherius of Lyon is reliable. It is partially due to the fact that the book is neither well-organised, nor focused on the subject matter, and more problematically – filled with errors. Yet, the greatest problem is that the author presents his own theories and unreliable information as facts. This book is proof that an impartial re-examination of the subject is necessary, but unfortunately it does not provide one.

Haggai Olshanetsky
Bar Ilan University