After the Batavian Revolt, written sources transit from meta-history, written from afar by the elites for the elites, to the ego history reflected by epigraphic sources (some of them narrating episodes truly spectacular, such as the soldier Soranus crossing the Danube in full gear in front of emperor Hadrian). Obviously, epigraphs, however revealing, are not enough, although the material culture holds the key to our understanding of the Batavians’ integration, acculturation, and becoming during the late second and third centuries.
Dispersal
After Julius Civilis’s revolt, the Batavian troops were reformed, the nine pre-revolt cohorts being reorganized and dispatched as follows. Cohorts I and II returned to Britannia immediately after the revolt and are documented for the first time outside of the island in Pannonia, through a diploma from AD 98 (CIL XVI 42). From there, the first cohort was transferred to Dacia and the second to Noricum (CIL XVI 174). The Vindolanda tablets show that cohorts III and IX were still in Britannia around 90 AD. The third cohort is attested in Raetia in a diploma from AD 107 (CIL XVI 55), and after AD 135 it was transferred to Pannonia Inferior and replaced in Raetia by the ninth cohort. So, around AD 130 the four Batavian cohorts were in different provinces, with Dacia being the only province in which two Batavian units were stationed (one cohort and the ala).
Notoriously, Van Rossum speaks of a ‘denationalization’ of the Batavian units by their transfer, especially, stationed on the Lower Rhine frontier at the time of the uprising, deserted to the rebels. Tacitus considered that the alleged Batavian support of Vespasian and their fighting specifically against Vitellian troops was just a pretext and a propaganda scam employed at the beginning of the revolt, but there might actually be some truth in this assertion. A few decades after the revolt, however, the was still stationed on the Lower Rhine, as a diploma from Elst, from AD 98, attests. Thus, the unit, though it deserted to Civilis, was not immediately relocated. In fact, we note that there do not seem to be any real repercussions from the revolt. Moreover, there was no interruption in the increasing density of settlement in the Lower Rhine area.
