10 Incredible Things Mankind Has Managed To Lose

3. An Entire Roman Legion

Michelangelo Merisi Da Caravaggio Nativity With St Francis And St Lawrence WGA04193
[GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

You'd think an entire legion of Roman soldiers would be a difficult thing to lose, and you'd be right, but that didn't stop Ancient Rome from performing exactly that feat in about 120 AD.

A that time Britain was a rain-lashed hellhole of woad-covered maniacs at the dangly nether end of the known world. Into this grim, savage isle marched the Legio IX Hispana, which promptly vanished from Roman records forever. Considering it had anything up to 5000 men, something pretty gnarly must have happened to it.

Historians love speculating about what happened to the legion, especially given that the Romans were a bunch of nerdy bureaucrats who loved writing down tedious details. Yet they never recorded what happened to the legion, creating the sort of juicy mystery that can keep historians selling books forever.

Theories include being massacred out by mental northerners, marching into Scotland, being wiped out in the Second Jewish Revolt, or stuff like aliens and time travel. It could be any of those.

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Ben Counter is a fantasy and science fiction writer, gaming enthusiast, wrestling fan and miniature painting guru. He was raised on Warhammer, Star Wars and 1980s cartoons that, in retrospect, were't that good. Whoever you are, he is nerdier than you.