Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge
Page 14
Following the main army’s arrival the battlefield was tidied and a memorial service held: ‘And so, six years after the disaster, a Roman army buried three legions’ bones, while Germanicus laid the first sod upon the funeral mound.’122
Little is known of the season’s retribution which followed. One can only guess at the extent of atrocity committed in the name of Mars Ultor (‘Mars, who has the last word’). At the end of it, in September or early October, Germanicus began the usual retirement toward the Rhine. His army now regrouped into two columns, one returning by land the other making for a pick-up point on one of the rivers, where the fleet waited.
The landward army, under the veteran commander V. Severus Caecina, was crossing stretches of log causeway, improved during previous campaigns but now badly deteriorated. The route was seemingly along the line where the wooded hills and the plain met; a place of danger and difficulty owing to the excessive run-off from the adjacent high ground and the concealment which its trees afforded. ‘All around was vile, heaving bog and clinging mud, veined with small streams.’ The legionaries struggled to repair the causeways. At this worst of moments the worst happened. Not only did a large force of Germans appear through the trees above, but their leader – it could clearly be seen – was none other than Armin himself: not skulking beyond the Oder or a refugee across the Skagerrak, but here in person, uncomfortably close to the scene of the Varian Disaster and under circumstances which looked painfully similar. As his main force rushed downhill to attack, others diverted streams, flooding the area where the Romans were already stuck. Not just the place and season, but also Armin’s instinct for the psychological moment, were frighteningly familiar. The only improvement, from a Roman viewpoint, was that Caecina was no lawyer but an able and experienced soldier.
The subsiding ground made it too soft to stand still and too slippery to move. They were in heavy armour and could not balance themselves to throw their javelins effectively. To the Cheruscans, however, such conditions were normal. The legions were close to breaking point when nightfall saved them. But this would be a night of little ease.
In Tacitus’ description of the nocturnal ordeal, strongly reminiscent of the night before Agincourt,123 the predicament of the two armies is suggested by contrasting sounds. However, in the apparition of Varus, Tacitus plays an even more horrific card.
As the Germans revelled, the valleys and forests echoed with their savage shoutings and jubilant chants; while in the Roman lines men huddled round fitful fires, speaking in snatches, lying down behind their improvised dykes or wandering among the tents in a sleepless daze. That night, too, the general had a most horrible dream in which he beheld Quintilius Varus, drenched in blood, rising from the morass and beckoning him.
In the morning Armin resumed the onslaught, shouting: ‘Here is Varus and his legions, trapped by fate in the same way!’ Luckily the enemy’s greed worked in our favour, for many stopped killing and started looting.
The Romans were now able to regain firm ground and dig in before the onset of the second dusk:
Without spades or turf-cutters an earthwork was somehow thrown up. The units were without tents, the wounded without dressings. As the mudcaked, bloodstained rations were passed round the men groused at the funereal dark and the end which the next day would bring to thousands.
But fortunes were about to turn. The ground was drying fast and when, next morning, Armin stormed the camp on one side, the Romans rushed out from the others and fell upon the German flanks and rear, shouting:
‘Where are your woods and swamps now? This is good ground and the odds are even!’ The enemy, who had looked for a quick kill, proved as panicky in defeat as he had been rash in success. Armin slipped away unhurt. The massacre went on as long as daylight lasted.124
Tacitus next described the no less hazardous progress of the seaborne column, led by one Vitellius. Here two legions were marching along the coast toward their embarkation when a great northerly began both to back up the tidewater from the sea and impede the escape of freshwater from the land, increasing the flood level by the minute.
Now the entire landscape began to liquefy: wave, shore and plain merging into one so that the fluid and the firm, the shallow and the sea, became indistinguishable. Men were dragged under. Drowned packhorses, their loads and human corpses began bobbing back through the ranks. Units became muddled up, men one moment chest, the next chin deep. Here was death without glory.125
Disaster was averted by the timely arrival of the fleet. In the season following, however, a storm caught the same operation a stage later, soon after embarkation. This time it was a southerly, driving the leaky and overladen vessels onto the East Frisian Islands.
Germanicus guided them down the Ems and out into the North Sea, that last and landless deep. At first its calm was troubled only by the whispering sails and creaking oars of a thousand ships. But soon black clouds massed in the sky, unloading hail. The wind, rising from every quarter, stirred the sea, blurred the view and plagued the steering. Then all heaven broke loose. The south wind, drawing its strength from Germany’s drenched land, deep rivers and unending clouds, caught and scattered the vessels to the open sea or onto islands made savage by sunken shoals. Horses, pack animals, baggage, even weapons were thrown overboard to lighten the leaking ships as the sea overrode their gunwales. Some went down. Others were thrown ashore on remote islands where (apart from a few who ate the horse carcasses washed up with them) they starved to death.126
It was during this third campaigning season of AD 16 that Tacitus offers a last, sardonic snapshot of Armin. On one occasion Roman and Cheruscan forces were separated by the Weser, with neither having the superior strength to cross. Armin’s brother Flavus, still a serving Roman officer, was brought forward to parley across the water. The two brothers faced each other from opposite banks. Flavus had lost an eye fighting under Tiberius in the Balkans. Noting his scarred face, Armin asked how he had come by the wound. Flavus explained. And what had he received in compensation? ‘A pay-rise and some decorations,’ said Flavus. ‘The wages of slavery are low,’ was Armin’s sneering retort. The conversation then degenerated into abuse and threats; and the two brothers had to be restrained from floundering across the river at each other’s throats.
Germanicus could never quite trap Armin, but he did succeed in catching his wife Thusnelda and their infant son. They were taken to Rome and paraded in Germanicus’ Triumph, while her father, Segestes, watched the show from the VIP seats. So Rome sundered tribe and tribe, brother and brother, father and daughter; and through these sad vignettes127 one glimpses the other side of the coin of conquest.
The German War was twenty-eight years old, outlasting by two years the emperor who began it. With Augustus’ death in AD 14 Rome’s imperial ambitions reached a watershed; for his testament, read to the Senate after the funeral, signalled a memorable downturn. This was Augustus’ ‘advice’: a posthumous thunderclap described, in Tacitus’ famous phrase, as consilium coercendi intra terminos imperii128 (advice that the empire should be kept within its existing boundaries) and amplified by Dio as, ‘the opinion that we should be content with what we now possessed. Under no circumstances should we seek to expand the empire. It would be difficult to defend and we might lose what we already had.’129 This pronouncement may be variously interpreted. Prima facie it was simply an assertion that the empire had achieved its natural limits. More broadly it was a veiled admission that the German War was lost. Most broadly of all it proposed a changed relationship with the outside world; a renunciation of the military adventurism which had made Rome great; a turnabout so total that even Augustus had not dared make it in his lifetime. Only the distress and disappointment of the Varian Disaster, playing on a tired and ageing mind, can explain it. Of course, it need not be binding on future emperors. Each would insist on his own foreign policy. Nevertheless, one of Rome’s most influential imperialists had recanted; and the effect on future thinking would be considerable.
Accordingly, when Germanicus wrote to Rome requesting a fourth summer, in which German resistance would be crushed for ever, Tiberius replied, ‘There have been successes enough already.’130 With this weary comment the German venture and the dream of endless empire ended. A line was drawn under the Varian Disaster, soon to be translated into the physical line of Rhine and Danube, which would divide Roman from barbarian for more than four centuries. Not all emperors would respect it. Indeed the next two Episodes concern major excursions beyond it. Nevertheless, non-aggression now becomes the imperial norm.
Soon Tiberius would retire again, this time finally: to Capri and pastimes which would earn that charming island the nickname Caprineum131 (goatery). Small wonder, writing of this reign, that Tacitus would lament: ‘My theme is narrow and inglorious: an emperor unconcerned with enlarging the empire…’132 It is in this change, from a foreign policy of breadth and glamour to one of narrowness and inglory, that the significance of the Teutoburg catastrophe lies. In purely military terms Rome had survived far worse. Despite Augustus’ alarm it had not been a Second Punic War, with Hannibal at the gate and every Roman woman in mourning. None the less, the Teutoburg was more than a battle. Time would show it as the moment when the caesars first recognized unlimited goals as a fantasy and limitless miles as the reality. Of course this meant the simultaneous birth of a contrary idea: that the empire would have formal frontiers; for if expansion were to halt there must be halt lines.
All in all it is hardly surprising that when retired generals write about history’s decisive battles, the clash in the Teutoburg Forest is almost always given an airing. Without this defeat, argues Major-General Fuller, Germany would have been a Roman province. It follows therefore that:
Had Germany been for four centuries thoroughly Romanised, one culture, not two would have dominated the western world. There would have been no Franco-German problem, no Charlemagne, no Louis XIV, no Napoleon, no Kaiser Wilhelm II and no Hitler.133
Even more fundamentally: had an emperor’s niece married a soldier rather than a lawyer; had the German tribes been progressively defeated and recruited to the Roman side, the empire would have disarmed what were in the long term to be its worst enemies and might therefore still exist. The imaginary consequences run on and on.
Returning to more realistic speculations: of the many theories regarding the Teutoburg battle site, that proposed by the eminent 19th-century Romanist, Theodor Mommsen, always seemed the likeliest. He reasoned that to pay for services and bribe chieftains, Varus’ column must have carried substantial sums in gold and silver coin; and that this would be the most detectable and dateable element of the looted baggage. He therefore plotted all Augustan coin-finds in north-western Germany to determine whether a significant number appeared to radiate from a central spot. On these grounds Mommsen pointed to the Wiehengebirge as the probable location, at the northern extremity of the upland area designated the Teutoburg Forest by 17th-century antiquarians.
On flat ground, a little to the north of these Wiehen Hills, was an area between the villages of Bramsche and Venne, known since the 17th century to be rich in Roman coins. Most of the finds had been accumulated by the local landowning family, the von Bars of Barenaue Castle, whose collection consisted of one aureus (gold), 179 denarii (silver) and two asses (copper). Mommsen examined it and was struck by the fact that all the coins were dateable to between 194 BC and the first decade of our era. This seemed to verify proximity to the battlefield. However, since the two villages are in the adjacent plain and Dio’s descriptions favoured densely forested upland, Mommsen stuck to his choice of the Wiehen Hills, only three or four miles to the south.134
Mommsen’s theory soon came under attack. It was argued that he had been wrong to base his findings on gold and silver coins, which could be evidence of a diplomatic mission or a merchant’s purse. The quantity of copper coins was insignificant. These were the soldier’s everyday spending money; and a battlefield, with thousands of Roman casualties, should be expected to yield them in large numbers. Further, the von Bar collection had been gathered sporadically, without record of provenance; and was therefore challengeable. Part had been sold to a dealer in 1884 and dispersed without trace; the remainder reportedly looted by Allied soldiers, occupying the property in 1945. Even more damaging was the complete absence of military accoutrement. It will, of course, be obvious that, while gold and silver have always found favour with the accidental finder, small, scattered, scarcely visible objects of baser metal have often awaited the coming of the metal detector.
In 1991 press reports, promising some resolution to the long search, were followed by publication of a more substantive account by a group of North German scholars, behind whose guarded opinions exciting conclusions seem to lie.135 It concerned the first phase of an investigation into the same part of Lower Saxony, some ten miles north-north-east of Osnabrück, which began in 1987. Earlier that year Major J. A. S. Clunn, a British officer in the Osnabrück garrison, had begun to conduct solo searches in the vicinity of the Barenaue estate, uncovering a hoard of 160 Roman coins. Though this was not proof of military presence, his second discovery (in the spring of 1988) of three pieces of lead slingshot, provoked further attention and provided the starting point for a large-scale effort. A systematic survey yielded 162 silver coins, plus three glass beads of a type associated with Roman children’s games. The dating of the last coin, though disputed, is probably AD 4. All this was intriguing but still inconclusive. During the next two years, however, the evidence sharpened dramatically. Over a hundred copper coins were discovered, many minted at Lyons between 8 and 3 BC. Two silver coins could be dated with certainty to AD 9, the year of the Varian Disaster. Most thrilling of all, some copper pennies were counterstamped with the letters VAR. Provincial countermarking with the monogram of a governor is well attested for this period and almost always associated with monies issued as bonuses or soldiers’ pay. VAR points unerringly to the German governship of P. Quintilius Varus, AD 7–9.
A convincing series of military finds now accompanied the coinage. Especially noteworthy were two bronze hauberk clasps of serpentine design, one scratched and the other punched on the back with the inscriptions: ‘the Century of Terentius Romanus’ (or ‘Romanus, of the Century of Terentius’) and ‘M. Aius of the 1st Cohort, Century of Fabricius’. Besides this there was a silver-dipped, iron face mask, of considerable individuality and realism, part of a ceremonial helmet. In addition a rein-guide was identified, thought to be from a yoke joining draught animals. Other finds included a spear tip, a Roman pickaxe head, rings, buckles, pins and many small metal components from uniforms or equipment. But it is the first four items, plus the beads, which must be stressed; for the clasps are of legionary, the sling shots of auxiliary, the face mask of cavalry and the rein-guide of wagon-train origins, while the beads suggest families and civilians; all verifying Dio’s picture of a large, combined, cumbrous army or its remnant, perhaps still partially burdened with baggage and dependents.
The objects were found scattered over an area of three-and-three-quarter miles from east to west by 1,000 yards from north to south, randomly and in what had been the topsoil, as if lost or trampled into the surface vegetation. Because so many clues were won from relatively few archaeological incisions, and despite the likelihood that the battlefield was picked clean by the victors, the presence
of thousands of people may be inferred. Abundant coins of the later Republic, peaking during Augustus’ reign and ending abruptly at AD 9, debar the earlier campaigns of Drusus and Tiberius, and cast strong doubt on the revenge expeditions of Germanicus (AD 14–16) as sources of the lost articles.
Geography adds comparable weight. Kalkriese Hill, northern outlier of the Wiehen Range, on the extreme edge of the Teutoburg Forest, descends some 350 feet to the North German Plain, where it meets a marsh still called Grosses Moor (big fen). Between this last slope and first bog a sandy strip affords dry passage for east-west traffic, doubtless the location of a prehistoric pathway and carrying today’s B218 between Engter and Venne. It is by now beyond question that this was the Roman line of march. In the Middle Ages soil from drainage ditches, cut into the morass, was laid down on much of the sandy strip to promote cultivation, further concealing but also preserving the battlefield’s secrets.
Here, then, was a natural ambush corridor between densely forested hill and quaking fen. At its narrowest, adjacent to Niewed Manor, the dry passage is 120 yards wide; with only the modern road, a fringe of trees and the width of a small field separating slope from quagmire. Below the imported topsoil is yellow sand and in it archaeological investigation has revealed the substantial remains of a sandy, sod-capped ridge, perhaps four feet high; running parallel to the foot of the hill for several hundred yards, believed to have been thrown up by the Germans, both for their own protection and to retard the Romans by reducing the bottleneck to a mere sixty yards. Numerous coins and fragments of military equipment have been found on and around this improvised dyke, suggesting a desperate struggle across it. Though not yet certain what stage of the attritional process this represented, it was already difficult to deny the Niewed Field as the focal point of a brilliantly executed ambush. However, in 1994, another vital piece was added to the puzzle. Near the adjacent foot of the Kalkrieser Berg, Professor W. Schlüter discovered a mass grave, with bones placed in a pit and turves laid over them, resembling convincingly the Tacitean description of Germanicus’ visit to the battlefield; so pointing to this vicinity either as the battle’s climax, as one of its peaks, or as the place where, in Major Clunn’s view,136 the remnant of an already depleted Roman force was finally annihilated.