‘Cheruscan territory’: this was Armin’s own tribe, thought to have occupied today’s Minden-Hannover-Brunswick area, between Weser and Elbe. According to Roman accounts, they had been defeated at least twice during the previous twenty years. However, as the currents of conflict swirled more savagely about them, we may imagine the usual fragmentation into resistant and collaborationist factions; a process which was no respecter of families. Under circumstances of which we know little, Armin (following his father, Sigimer, the tribe’s leader) had thrown in his lot with the invaders, become a Roman officer and received a knighthood from the emperor. This was clearly a sweetener, for the cultivation of German friends was a priority at that time. Now, covered in glory and with the highest possible commendations, Armin returned to his tribe as Varus’ deputy and liaison officer. He was still only twenty-five years of age. Velleius resumes the narrative:
Onto this stage now strode a young German nobleman of firm purpose and astute mind; a high-flier, far above the usual run of barbarian intelligence: Armin, a prince of the Cheruscan tribe, whose face and eyes seemed to shine with the light of some inner zeal. He had served with the Roman army for some years, earning Roman citizenship and a knighthood to boot. Here was the type of man who would be quick to spot in Varus the perfect dupe, for none is more credulous than the incautious; and a sense of security is the surest recipe for calamity.96
It now becomes clear that Armin’s devotion to the Roman cause was only skin deep; and beneath that skin there festered earlier hatreds. Bending before Drusus’ and Tiberius’ onslaughts had been one thing; dancing attendance on this military ignoramus was another. As a teenager he had thought Rome invincible; yet later, in the Balkans, he had seen brave people make a bid for freedom and almost win. What is more, when it came to rebellion, Germania had a telling advantage over Illyricum. There the mountains could be surrounded and in time reduced. Here desperate men could, in the last resort, retreat indefinitely north or east, beyond even Rome’s long reach.
None the less it needed nerve to take on a superpower. This must not be a rash rebellion which ignites from a riot, but one which was meticulously planned and stealthily fostered; in the event by one man’s will. Despite Varus’ ineptitude, the odds were daunting. How could the young Armin unite warring tribes when even his own family was divided? He had married a girl named Thusnelda against her father’s will. His father-in-law, Segestes, hated him and was to warn Varus repeatedly that he could not be trusted. This was dismissed as jealousy; for how could Armin, whom the emperor himself had knighted, behave in so un-Roman a manner?
To consider the problem from another direction: empires are seldom as powerful as they seem. They are based on bluff, on making their subjects think them stronger than they are. Had Armin sensed this secret? Might an obscure German princeling puncture the imperial bubble, as Japan would one day prick the British balloon at Singapore?
Velleius continues:
At first Armin confided in a few of his compatriots only, but as time passed the circle widened. He argued that Rome could be beaten. More to the point he gave substance to his words by organizing a plan of action and fixing a date for its execution. Segestes, Armin’s father-in-law, warned Varus of what was afoot and urged him to have the plotters clapped in irons. But by now the Fates were taking a hand, controlling all Varus did and lulling his suspicions; as they often do to those whose fortunes they are about to topple.97
A plot was hatched along the following lines. As summer ended and the army began to fall back toward the Lippe, an ‘uprising’ would be invented to divert the column away from the established route with its lifeline of fortified camps and depots, with its bridges ready-built and trees ready-felled. When the Romans had been lured some distance into unfamiliar and unfavourable terrain, the German auxiliary brigade would abscond. Finally, at an advantageous moment, the deserters (shadowing at a distance) plus all other dissidents and malcontents who could be mustered, would close in on the Roman column and destroy it.
Dio:
The plot’s ringleaders were Armin and [his father] Sigimer, constant companions with whom Varus often feasted. As a result he became more and more confident and completely off his guard. Then came news of an uprising designed to inveigle him through ostensibly friendly territory toward the supposed trouble spot. At first Armin and Sigimer went with him, but subsequently excused themselves on the grounds that they were going to mobilize more assistance. When each district had butchered the soldiers in its vicinity they all closed in on Varus, by now in almost inextricable forest. Then, at the very moment of showing themselves as enemies, the conspirators struck a terrible blow.98
Dio now depicts the final phase of this débâcle: the three or four-day running fight known to posterity as the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Not only did Varus follow the course which treachery had devised but the Roman response was hindered by a catastrophic change in the weather, favouring an enemy to whom slithering mud and rough ground were familiar conditions.
The slopes were uneven and creased with gorges. Felling trees, clearing a trail and improvising bridges, the Roman column advanced. It included large numbers of carts and pack animals, as if this were a peacetime journey. There were, besides, numerous women and children, with a big retinue of servants behind them, all tending to make the column longer and more scattered. A hurricane began, bringing drenching rain. The tops of trees snapped off and fell among the marchers. The ground was slippery and treacherous.
Now the savages began to close in, appearing through the dense forest suddenly and from all sides at once. At first it was hit-and-run, with spears hurled from a distance; but when they could see that many were being wounded and there was no serious counter-attack, they began to press closer. By now the column was in chaos, with soldiers, wagons and civilians all jumbled up: impossible to organize into defensive formations and being whittled away piecemeal.
A halt was called and – insofar as a suitable place could be found on a forested hillside – camp was established for the night. Here they reorganized, burning most of the carts and abandoning inessential equipment.
On the second day things went better. Despite losses, they broke through to open country. But on the third morning the column plunged once more into forest and began to take the heaviest casualties yet. There was no room to deploy the cavalry among the trees, or use infantry and cavalry in unison.
On the fourth day the hurricane struck again and the rain returned in torrents. It was difficult even to stand. Wet bowstrings, slippery spears and sodden shields deprived them of effective use of their weapons; while the Germans, more lightly armed, fared better. As word spread that the Romans were weakening, the enemy’s ranks began to be swelled by fence-sitters and plunder-seekers; his strength growing as the Roman bled away.99
The crisis was now at hand. Neither Dio nor Velleius makes clear its tactical character or reveals the place and circumstances, though à propos of the battle’s finale Tacitus uses the words in medio campo; ‘in midfield’, as it was formerly translated. A more recent reading100 proposes a specialized meaning for campus, as the space in the centre of a camp, normally used as a gathering place or parade ground. This could suggest that Varus’ men spent the last night crouched within the shallow mounds of a temporary fortification and that an inner redoubt101 was improvised in the muster-area to which the perimeter’s defenders could retire to join the senior officers, fighting back to back in a final stand. Dio describes the end:
By now Varus and all his senior officers were wounded. Fearing they were about to be taken alive or that slaughter was imminent, they steeled themselves to face the terrible alternative. When the soldiers heard that their commanders had taken their own lives, resistance collapsed, some killing themselves, others throwing away their arms and inviting anyone to kill them who wanted. Every man and animal was cut down without returning a blow.102
Some were in fact taken prisoner. Velleius summarizes:
And so a Roman
army, in bravery, discipline, dash and battle-worthiness the best we had bar none, was entrapped through its general’s fecklessness, its enemy’s trickery and its own wretched luck. Hemmed in by bog, bush and ambush it was exterminated almost to a man by the very enemy it was used to slaughtering like swine.
Varus found more pluck to die than he did to fight. Following the example of his father and grandfather,103 he ran himself through with his own sword. V. Numonius, the cavalry commander, deserted the field, leaving the infantry unprotected, and tried in vain to break through to the Rhine. The body of Varus, partially burned, was further mangled by the enemy; his head cut off and dispatched to Maraboduus, who sent it on to Augustus. Despite the ignominy it was honoured by burial in the family tomb.104
Here Velleius, one of Augustus’ staunchest propagandists, is making Varus the scapegoat for the emperor’s miscalculation. As for Armin’s cruder but shrewder propaganda sense: the head, sent to Maraboduus, King of German Bohemia, was a way of saying, ‘See! It can be done! Rome can be defeated! Join our resistance movement!’ Maraboduus, fearing resumption of the Bohemian plan, preferred to keep his options open. Nevertheless, in forwarding the consignment to Augustus he was doing Germany a service; for with the decomposing head of Quintilius Varus the message from the Teutoburg Forest reached its ultimate recipient.
This defeat would henceforth be known as clades Variani, the Varian Disaster. It wiped out twenty years’ effort east of the Rhine. At a stroke it cost a province, its governor, his staff and perhaps 30,000 men, women and children; including three crack legions and their eagles. All garrisons within Germania were massacred. In all forts so far excavated on the Lippe, evidence of intensive activity, with coins, abundant to AD 9, ends in the sardonic silence of a layer of ashes. However, one of these, Aliso,105 held out for a short time. Haggard and wild-eyed, a few of Varus’ survivors stumbled in. Armin was not far behind. Soon the last fort in Germany was surrounded by an exultant mob ‘brandishing the impaled heads of slain Romans on spears before the rampart’.106 At night, when perhaps the Germans were drunk, the garrison made a break for freedom and fought its way back to the Rhine with the grievous tidings.
The sombre dispatches burst on the emperor like a bomb; his over-reaction resembling that of three years earlier, to the Illyrican revolt,107 when he foresaw the imminent invasion of Italy; confirming him as a man of alarmist and emotional temperament, hardly in line with the serene public image:
On hearing of the disaster Augustus rent his clothes and mourned deeply, not just for the dead soldiers but also as an expression of fear for the endangered German108 and Gallic provinces, and because he expected the enemy would march on Rome. No citizens of military age worth mentioning were left. Moreover there were many Gauls and Germans in Rome, both in his bodyguard and on other business. These he sent away: the bodyguard to certain islands, the civilians out of the city.109
A panic recruiting drive now followed, in Italy and the capital itself. This was by lot, with draft-dodgers punished by confiscation of property and even death. Freed slaves were enrolled and veterans recalled. The new units were sent to stand between Italy and Germany. Nevertheless the three lost legions would not be replaced. Their numbers, henceforward considered unlucky, were omitted in perpetuity from the army list.
Suetonius allows us a more personal glimpse of the emperor’s distress:
When the news arrived Augustus had night watches posted throughout the city in case of disturbance and prolonged the terms of all provincial governors.110 He was said to be so stricken he refused to cut his hair or shave for months and would often bang his head against doors, shouting: ‘Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!’ Each year he observed the anniversary of the disaster as one of grief and mourning.111
Augustus was now seventy-two and had ruled for thirty-six years. Though he displayed private and public grief, the débâcle would not, as far as we know, be mentioned in official documents or pronouncements, least of all in his own Accomplishments.112 Like the Balkan setback, this was a responsibility which could not be offloaded. Having stripped the senate of military powers and kept all decisions and appointments to himself, he could hardly complain of having been ill-advised. As Tacitus would put it, ‘Augustus so arranged it that the emperor must bear the blame or praise for Rome’s distant wars alone.’113 He had sent a civilian into a savage land; a governor with neither tactics nor tact, a commander who had never commanded and a judge incapable of judging men. Nepotism and distrust of career generals had cost Augustus dear.
Armin did not march on Italy. It is probable that his coalition fell apart the moment Rome’s presence was removed. Far from uniting a nation, he could not even resolve his private feuds; and it was owing to them, twelve years later, that he was murdered. In view of Roman prejudice, Tacitus’ tribute is remarkable:
Without doubt the liberator of Germany. A man who took on the Roman nation, not in her infancy but at the summit of her sovereignty. In war without defeat, he lived thirty-seven years, twelve in power. Even now114 his fame is sung in barbarian ballads. He fell by the treachery of his own kinsmen.115
Armin’s power did not spread far. Nor does his name survive in German folklore. It would remain for 17th-century learning to restore it to memory and for 19th-century nationalism to equate it with unity. Armin became Kaiser Wilhelm’s answer to Napoleon III’s glorification of Vercingetorix and the Victorian cult of the misspelt ‘Boadicea’.116 So earnestly did such rivalries seek Roman precedent that Clemenceau would argue Gaul’s boundaries in support of French claims at Versailles.
It would be time to leave this remarkable young man who, at twenty-five years of age, defied and defeated Augustus; except that a group of events, six years later, offers a final glimpse. The postscript is by courtesy of Tacitus who, in his latest work, the Annals, deals with Rome’s vengeance. In the last year of Augustus’ life a war of revenge was unleashed on Germany. In command was Drusus’ son, Germanicus; Tiberius’ nephew and father of Caligula, next emperor but one. Here was a young man with his father’s feverish zeal, buoyed up and urged on by popular expectation that he would restore Rome’s tarnished honour. ‘He was’, as Tacitus reminds us, ‘great-nephew of Augustus and the grandson of Antony; and in his imagination there resided the whole great picture of triumph and tragedy.’117
Nothing in this resumption of the German War could be closer to Germanicus’ heart than revival of the amphibious strategy by which his father had first led the eagles into northern Germany. This would also be the perfect pincer to nip the Cheruscans, prime target of revenge, though it seemed likely that Armin himself would by now have fled eastwards or into Scandinavia. In Tacitus’ view the objective was ‘rather to expiate the shame of Quintilius Varus than extend the empire’,118 but the inferences of Germanicus’ dispatches and conduct are that he saw the restitution of a lapsed province as his sacred duty.
Like his father, he would spend three summers in Germany. It is the second of these, AD 15, which is of special interest: for not only did he rediscover the site of the Teutoburg battle, but also there are vivid descriptions both of the sea passage and the bog war, which compensate in some measure for the sources’ silence on similar aspects of his father’s and uncle’s campaigns.
So, with Germanicus, the North German War returns to its starting place; what are now the Netherlands; and particularly to that part of them which the Romans called the Batavian Island, the largest piece of relatively dry land, between the Old Rhine and the Waal. The rest of the huge delta was water or reedy fen, though with ridges left by former river courses and the natural levees of existing ones, along which ran prehistoric paths and tracks. Native settlement was mainly on mounds (in Dutch, Terpen) elevated and enlarged by centuries of tipping. Here were small plots, a few animals, plus a living to be made from fishing and fowling; for this vast wetland must have been a bird haven whose like northern Europe has long forgotten. The Romans copied the local method of mound-making, or founded their bui
ldings on wooden stakes, hammered into the mud. Place names with the syllable wijk,119 Latin vicus120 (village), show how numerous Roman settlements were eventually to become.
Now, throughout the winter, scores of small shipyards sprang up along the muddy shores of the Batavian Island. With timber floated down from the German forest, thousands of soldiers instructed by hundreds of sailors laboured to cobble together the shallow-draught troopships and supply vessels for the coming campaign. We have statistics for the year following, when eight legions, their auxiliaries, horses and supplies embarked in a thousand newly built ships. The scale suggests how terrible Rome’s revenge would be. Why, one may ask, were new ships built before each season? The answer must be that Germanicus had no option but to use green timber, which warps rapidly, rendering ships useless within a few months. Tacitus’ celebrated narrative of the seaborne operation concerns the return journey only. His account of the overland arm of the expedition, which deals with both the outward and inward journey, is no less sensational. Here a vanguard detachment, partway up the Lippe Valley, encountered a group of Bructer,121 perhaps thirty miles south of the Teutoburg region. They engaged and the Germans fled. To the Romans’ surprise and intense excitement, a search of the captured impedimenta revealed the eagle of Legio XIX, lost with Varus. Led by survivors of the disaster, who were acting as guides, they pressed on:
Now they were approaching the Teutoburg saltus where the remains of Varus and his legions were said still to be lying unburied. On they marched across the gloomy plain, chilling both to look at and to think about. Varus’ first camp was wide in extent, with its tent plots marked out for men and officers, suited to the size of three legions. Then a half-ruined dyke and shallow ditch showed where the last remnant had taken cover. In the parade ground area were bleaching bones, scattered where men had fallen individually, or in heaps where they had made a stand. Splintered spears and horses’ legs lay around. Human skulls were nailed to tree trunks. In nearby groves were savage altars at which they had sacrificed the young lieutenants and warrant officers. Some among the relieving force, who had survived the battle or given their captors the slip, recounted where the commanders had fallen, where the eagles were seized, where Varus was first wounded and where he died by his own tragic hand. They told of the platform from which Armin had harangued his fellow victors, of the arrogance with which he had insulted the standards and the eagles; and of the gibbets and torture pits for the prisoners.
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