[What] is impressive about Frontier Wolf is not the story itself, nor the gradual winning through of Alexios from disgrace to honour. It is Rosemary Sutcliff's extraordinary capacity for recreating a visual and emotional picture, many-textured, of the life of a Roman garrison on the Antonine Wall as the Empire crumbled. She has the writer's equivalent of a musician's "absolute pitch"; her certainty enables her to use language that fore-echoes the future (the Votadini speak with a recognizable Celtic lilt), and to engender situations and characters that carry with them an authenticity and complexity that defy the conventional textbook image of Roman times.
Elaine Moss, "Outposts of the Empire," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1980; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), No. 4051, November 21, 1980, p. 1323.
