The Eagle of the Ninth

NOTE: The third and fourth photos on this page are from a movie of this book.


The Eagle of the Ninth was a wonderful surprise--full of amazing plot, crystal-clear insights, interesting characters, and great writing. I had never heard of this book, but it was on my children's reading list, so I ordered it in from interlibrary loan and started reading. It was receipt of this book and two others in this series that made me happy enough to write my blog entry "Good Books: An American Freedom," available on this blog page.

Sutcliff sets this story in ancient Britain, during the time of Roman occupation, the second century A.D. The plot takes a young Roman soldier through his first command and then on to a quest to retrieve the eagle of his father's legion, called The Lost Ninth. The eagle is the golden standard held at the front of every legion--the eagle is protected as long as a soldier lives.

Our hero, Aquila, wants to return the eagle to bring honor to his father's legion, but also to find out if anyone knows what happened to the legion, what happened to his father. Along the way, Aquila grows greatly in understanding and courage. He finds that courage is easy with a whole legion around you...it's harder when it's just you and a companion pursued like animals by the men of a British village. He comes to know British people in the south and north (the south was conquered, the north free); a British girl being forced to live in the Roman way; his uncle, a retired Roman legionaire; and a wolf that is given to Aquila as a tiny puppy after its mom is killed by hunters.



The pup does more than more than any other part of the book in establishing the reader's trust in Aquila. Yes, a person may most certainly be evaluated by how he treats his dog. The pup also reinforces a main theme of the book--that love and trust must be a choice and cannot be enforced by ownership papers or leashes. Aquila gives the pup a clear opportunity to be free and still the puppy returns, with love, to stay with him.

The journey to the north to find the eagle also gives Aquila time to solve another critical life issue--what is he going to do with his life? An injury drove him from the only life he ever knew or wanted, a military career with the legion. The eagle quest is his hero journey, by which he comes to know himself truly as an adult. He gains talismans and loses treasures, but his greatest achievement is knowing his own future course.



Aquila's friend Esca deepens the theme of freedom. Esca, an unwilling gladiator, is saved and then purchased by Aquila as a slave. Their deepening friendship encounters many difficulties. The two men are from radically different cultures, social classes, and belief systems--all of which orbit around the central question: Can a free man and the slave he owns be friends? What can you ask a slave to do that you could not ask from a friend--and vice versa? Finding the answers to these questions is an important part of Aquila's growth, and also Esca's. Does being a slave determine your whole life?

But the best thing of all about this book is the writing. If it had been my book, and not the library's, I would have marked all over it to note the location of beautiful passages of prose. "He was desperately homesick for his own land; for now that they seemed lost to him, his own hills grew achingly dear, every detail of sight and scent and sound jewel-vivid on his memory." "Jewel-vivid." I am jealous of that phrase.

In discussing the phenomenon of being conquered, Esca says, "We know that your justice is more sure than ours, and when we rise against you, we see our hosts break against the discipline of your troops, as the sea breaks against a rock. And we do not understand, because all of these things are of the ordered pattern, and only the free curves of the shield-boss are real to us. We do not understand. And when the time comes that we begin to understand your world, too often we lose the understanding of our own." Beautifully put.

Esca, telling the story of the disappearance of the 9th legion, says, "But the mist was creeping down from the high moors, and the Legion marched into it, straight into it, and it licked them up and flowed together behind them, and they were gone as though they had marched from one world into--another."

Aquila's sacrifice of an emblem he has carried since childhood--a bird carved of olive wood--returns to the jewel imagery: "The golden sparks that he struck dropped onto the tinder-dry scraps of birch bark, and hung there an instant like jewels; then, as he blew on them, nursing them to life, they flared up into crackling flame; a flower of flame with the olive-wood bird sitting at its heart like a bird on her nest." Sutcliff's writing is like the sparks that catch and flare. Her command of detail give the book a sterling authenticity.