Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth combines the presentation of the historic era of the Roman occupation of Britain with an acute sense of place. A feeling of belonging to a certain landscape becomes a vital part of the plot structure. She portrays remarkably the conflict between the Celtic tribal customs and the Roman way of imposing its own civilization wherever it went. The two elements are finally welded into an inseparable unity by one force of nature—the country itself…. Place works its will, not only on the buildings of the Romans but on the characters of the Romans as well. The hero of the story, Marcus, is at the end of the novel free to go where he wishes, back to the loved land of his childhood. But he elects to stay; Britain has become his home. This conclusion is no mere noble decision but the inevitable result of the strong sense of place inherent in this novel from the beginning. By the time the novel is finished, the reader even feels homesick, homesick not only for a certain essence of country and climate but for another time.
While the action in the plot is dignified and utterly credible, it moves to a climactic chase which crests onward to the conclusion. There is never any question about the appropriateness of this time and place as background; the characters are drawn out of the past; they behave in a way consistent with their times and still are utterly comprehensible. Much about the past is illuminated by this novel, particularly the relationship between Celt and Roman, the dynamics of two civilizations clashing. Used in a masterly, symbolic way to emphasize the underlying theme is the incident of the wolf cub and his allegiance, as a free animal, to his master. The author points out, through the wolf cub and also the Celtic freedman, that loyalty, allegiance, and friendship have value only when freely rendered. This idea is presented not as a moral but as dramatic development within the plot. If the plot is to have meaning it must be in the deepening of our understanding of man's relationship to man. That this presentation of the past does so with sharpness and acuity is not only a tribute to the writer's scholarship, her careful proportioning of a good story with believable characters, but is also a measure of her philosophical depth. She brings a degree of greatness to the feeling of love that a man from another place, a man of a conquering people, can have for a country not his birthplace, a people not his own. (pp. 142-43)
