In 1820, a larger-than-life bronze boot was pulled from a Scottish bog. For centuries, experts assumed it was looted from a Roman settlement, perhaps as an odd spoil of war. But a new analysis challenges that theory, suggesting that Rome’s own soldiers deliberately dismantled the statue.
In a recent statement, National Museums Scotland announced that its team had reconstructed the full statue that once included the boot known as the Milsington Leg. During a closer analysis of the boot and other statue fragments from the Roman frontier, the researchers realized the leg appeared to have been carefully removed, not “brutally hacked off,” the museum explained. Taking into account known records of Rome’s conquest of Scotland, the team now believes the statue depicted Antoninus Pius on horseback, and the leg was removed by the Romans as they retreated from southern Scotland in the CE 160s or 180s.
“This really turns on its head our understanding of Rome’s second attempt at conquering Scotland,” Fraser Hunter, the museum’s principal curator of prehistoric and Roman archaeology, said in the statement. “But it begs the question … where is the rest of the statue?”
Antoninus Pius was the successor to Hadrian, who commissioned the famous eponymous wall symbolic of the Roman Empire’s conquest of what is now the United Kingdom.
