Betrayal: The Centurions I

by Riches, Anthony

  To start at the beginning, the Batagwi (and we’ll get to the source of that name in a moment) – Batavians to the Romans – were one of the German tribes subjugated by Caesar in the wake of his rampage through the Gauls, and quickly became a firm ally of what was to become the empire. Having originated from the Chatti tribe, and migrated away from that part of Germany for whatever reason, they settled on a piece of pleasingly fertile land in the riverine delta in a location we currently know as Nijmegen. It seems likely that this land, surrounded by rivers on two sides and marshy ground to the west, would have effectively have been an island in those days before the reclamation of so much land by the Dutch, and it is termed as ‘the island’ in the contemporary accounts of the war. They called this new homeland Bat-agwjo, ‘the better land’ for the very reason of its fertility, the first element bat effectively the same as the bet in our modern day better, while the second part of the name, agwjo refers to meadows surrounded by water, in modern German aue and in Old-English īeg. Or in other words an island, and that’s how the Romans translated it. It is likely that the tribe called themselves Batagwi or something close to it, but to make life a little easier for the reader, however, and since the tribe are these days routinely described as Batavi, I have chosen to use that term, rather than anything more authentic but harder to get the tongue around.

  Providing Rome with a military contingent that sounds like it would have been the match of any legion – eight part-mounted five-hundred-man infantry cohorts and a cavalry wing – they were a powerful blend of German ferocity in battle with Roman equipment and, to some degree, Rome’s military ethos and tactics. In return for this disproportionate contribution to the imperial forces, they paid no taxes to Rome, an indication of just how valuable their contribution was deemed to be. Their role, to judge from the relatively scant sources, was in the long tradition of shock troops that has continued into the modern era in formations like the Parachute Regiment and the US Marines, hard men trained to high levels of physical competency and tactical aggression and, by consequence of both that conditioning and their collective underlying social backgrounds, lacking some of the instincts to self-preservation that can hamper soldiers from risking everything in pursuit of victory in the moment of decision that occurs on all battlefields. The best equivalent for us to consider with regard to the Batavi tribe’s contribution might well be the Gurkhas, Nepalese soldiers who have fought with great honour and bravery for the British empire and its post-colonial army, and whose bloody reputation has resulted in their mere presence in the order of battle proving fearsomely intimidating to Britain’s enemies on many occasions.

  Parented for decades by the Fourteenth Gemina Legion, it seems that the Batavi cohorts did a good deal of the initial dirty work on one battlefield after another, as at the battle of the Medway in AD 43. Their sneak attack at dawn across the seemingly unfordable river seems to have destroyed the British tribes’ chariot threat before the battle commenced, and allowed the Fourteenth, under the improbably young Hosidius Geta, and the Second Augustan under the future emperor Vespasian, to establish the bridgehead from which victory would eventually result. Incidentally, for those readers with an interest in the cursus honorum and its age restrictions, the historical record is a little confused with regard to Geta, and the legatus in question might have been an older brother, although age restrictions on command tended to be relaxed by a year for each child born to a family – so we can consider legion command at the age of twenty-four (it was usually no younger than thirty) as improbable but eminently possible, under the right circumstances. The most startling aspect of all this is that on more than one occasion the Batavi used an organic amphibious capability – and by organic I mean without the assistance of any third party such as a naval unit – to cross rivers and narrow coastal straits and turn an enemy flank by appearing where they were least expected. How did they do this, swimming while wearing their equipment which, weighing around twenty-five kilos, would obviously overwhelm even the strongest of swimmers in short order even before the encumbrances of having to carry a shield and spear are taken into account? It’s possible that the latter were carried by means of some kind of improvised flotation device, but we cannot discount the possibility that fully equipped infantrymen were carried across the water obstacle and straight into battle by means of the cohort’s horses being used to literally tow them across. This seems to have been what Dio Cassius is describing in The History of Rome:

  The barbarians thought the Romans would not be able to cross this [the River Medway] without a bridge, and as a result had pitched camp in a rather careless fashion on the opposite bank. Plautius, however, sent across some Celts who were practised in swimming with ease fully armed across even the fastest of rivers. These fell unexpectedly on the enemy …

  This was probably as innovative and disruptive to an unprepared enemy as massed parachute drops were (under the right circumstances) in the twentieth century, and the Batavi seem to have been viewed as Rome’s best and bravest shock troops, capable of doing the impossible and turning a battle to Rome’s advantage by their unexpected abilities. For a long time this guaranteed them the highest possible status as an allied people, ruled not by a governor but instead by a magistrate voted into office by the tribe’s most exalted citizens, the noblissimi popularium (the ruling class, literally ‘noble countrymen’). This tended to mean, one suspects, that they were pretty much guaranteed to take a Roman perspective on the behalf of a self-interested ruling class of families, themselves granted citizenship in perpetuity by the early emperors, in the pursuit of a Roman foreign policy that sought to ensure an alignment of the empire’s ambitions with those of the tribe’s rulers.

  This relationship went even further than the battlefield, for in 30 BCE Augustus recruited an imperial bodyguard from the Batavi and the other tribes that dwelt in the same area, Ubii, Frisii, Baetasii and so on. Where the Praetorians guarded the city and in particular its palaces, the corporis custodes protected the emperor himself, and were trusted for their impartial devotion to the task of ensuring his safety and deterring assassination attempts that might otherwise have been considered by the praetorians themselves (and for which they later gained an unenviable reputation). Disbanded briefly at the time of the Varus disaster in AD 9, they were swiftly reinstated when it became clear that the tribe had taken no part in Arminius’s act of outright war, and the Batavi played a full role in the suppression of the tribes to the north and east of the Rhine that was to follow. They remained at the side of a succession of emperors until late AD 68, when the new emperor Galba made what appears to have been the fatal mistake of dismissing them for their loyalty to Nero, thereby leaving himself open to assassination by an improbably small number of praetorians.

  It is important to understand just what this meant to the Batavi, and why they took the dismissal quite as badly as they undoubtedly did. The Bodyguard were, of course, a source of enormous kudos to the tribe and their local neighbours, and a significant source of income to boot, but the importance of their place in Rome went deeper than simple national pride – the influence of their position close to the throne on the tribe itself cannot be ignored. Exposed to Rome, the hub of empire and meeting point for dozens of nationalities and cultures, it was inevitable that the guardsmen would have had the blinkers of their previous existence removed to some degree, and that they would have been eager to share their new experiences and learning with friends and families. Anthony Birley argues in Germania Inferior (in an article entitled ‘The Names of the Batavians and the Tungrians’) that many guardsmen would have been likely to have been given new Latin or Greek names on their entry into service, as their own names might be unpronounceable for a Roman, and the perpetuation of these names into the Batavi mainstream as proud parents sought to rub a little of a brother or an uncle’s fame off on their new offspring must have been inevitable, which is the reason why some Batavi characters in Betrayal have apparently anachronistic Greek names that are in fact
entirely valid for their time and place. The guard effectively came to define the Batavi’s significant status within the empire, a source of enormous prestige at least within the tribe itself. This in turn justified the degree to which they had subjugated their culture to that of Rome, including the incorporation of their religion into the Roman framework, their god Magusanus, as was so often the case with local deities, being deftly spliced with the Roman version of Heracles/Hercules to create a new and mutually acceptable deity. The Bodyguard had come to define the Batavi to a large degree, and when they came home for good late in AD 68 it must have seemed as if the tribe had been cast aside by the previously doting parent regime, with immense impacts on both the Batavi’s own self-esteem and indeed their relationships with the other local tribes who were equally impacted by this inexplicably sudden and shocking change of fortunes.

  Of course the split with Rome was more complex than just the overnight loss of their prestige. It went far deeper than the sudden thunderbolt of late AD 68, and had been growing ever more obvious to those with eyes to see it over the previous years. The Batavi and their allies the Cananefates, the Marsacii and the Frisavones had to some degree, if the Roman commentators are to be believed, simply got too big for their own boots. In effect, it seems, they had made the age-old mistake of believing their own propaganda (or at least that of their Roman allies who called them the ‘best and bravest’, in itself possibly a play on the Germanic origins of the tribe’s name, Batavi, which might well have meant ‘the best’). They had taken, we are told, to strutting around telling anyone who would listen how important they were to Rome, had fallen out with their former parent legion the Fourteenth Gemina – possibly because the legion was lauded by Nero as his most effective after the Battle of Watling Street and the defeat of the Iceni, while the Batavi had presumably gone relatively unrecognised – and had thereby contributed to the increasing disenchantment with what was later portrayed as their overbearing behaviour. Rescued from internal exile of a sort by the onset of war between the German army of Vitellius and Otho’s loyalist legions – having previously been posted to garrison duty standing guard on the Lingones in eastern Gaul ostensibly to prevent a recurrence of the Vindex revolt – they had immediately (if we believe the primary sources who were of course propagandists with their own agenda) taken up where they had left off, telling all and sundry how they had mastered their former parent legion and how critical they were to the success of the war against Otho. It is doubtful if they were much loved by either legions or generals, but rather tolerated for their ability to turn a battle given the chance to do so.

  In late AD 68, and at about the same time as the returning men of the Bodyguard, Gaius Julius Civilis (‘Kivilaz’ in the book, this being entirely my own invention, with a little learned help, and in no way attested by any source) returned from captivity, trial and acquittal in Rome. Civilis’s Roman name identifies him as the son of one of the tribe’s original noble families – a prince and successful military commander, but he was a man with an unhappy recent past. Charged with treason for having allegedly participated in the Vindex revolt, a failed uprising that had ultimately led to Nero’s suicide, his brother had been summarily executed and Civilis himself sent to Rome to face the same charge. Freed by Galba – who had after all benefited hugely from Vindex’s apparent folly in rising up without an army worthy of the name – he went home and was promptly rearrested by the army of Germania Inferior under the emperor-to-be, Aulus Vitellius, on the same charge. Freed once more, by a canny emperor who realised the risk posed by potentially hostile tribes in his own backyard while his armies were for the most part far distant in Italy, Civilis seems likely to have discerned the inevitability of a third attempt to make the charge stick, once Vitellius had no further need to tread softly around the Batavi at the war’s end.

  And if the quasi-judicial murder of his brother and the threat hanging over his own head weren’t enough to motivate him to revolt against Rome, the opportunity to seize power in a political system that must have seemed to be sliding away from the noblissimi popularium’s control, as more and more men of common rank achieved citizen status through their military service, may also have been too strong a temptation to be passed up. Whatever the reason, Civilis roused his people to revolt and the bloody events that will play out in Onslaught and Retribution came to pass.

  There are some other smaller subjects to discuss while we’re looking at the historical backdrop to Betrayal.

  As you’ll have read (and if you’ve not read the book yet, be warned that this is a spoiler of sorts), it’s fairly clear that the man with the most to gain from a Batavi revolt was actually not Civilis, given that Rome was always going to stamp the rebellion flat eventually, but rather Titus Flavius Vespasianus, Vespasian as we know him. When the Batavi and their allies rose up and started killing Roman soldiers, the effect was to plant a dagger in Vitellius’s back at the worst possible time, dragging his attention away from Vespasian’s army as it advanced on Rome and preventing him from drawing any further reinforcements south from Germany to bolster his cause. It’s worth making the point that there’s no evidence that (another spoiler) Pliny the Elder was Vespasian’s emissary to the Batavi, but rather my invention based both on his previous military service in Germania Inferior and the fact that he was a friend of the emperor-to-be who rose to a position of significant responsibility after the latter’s victory. Perhaps I’m taking two and two and adding them up to make seventeen, but given Civilis’s time in Rome it’s far from impossible that Pliny and Vespasian’s son-in-law, Cerialis – a man we’re going to be seeing a lot more of – found an opportunity to make mutual cause, or at least to form the friendships that later translated to that alliance of convenience.

  Perhaps my favourite character in Betrayal is Gaius Aquillius Proculus (more spoilers here), blue-chinned dead-eyed warrior of Rome – at least in this fictional version of the revolt. What a gift for a historical novelist looking for a charismatic protagonist. All we know about him is that a phalerae – a medal, worn with several others on a chest harness – with his name and legion engraved onto its reverse, was discovered in the remains of the cavalry fort close to Batavodurum, and that, as Tacitus tells us, he was a centurion of the first rank – presumably a primus pilus – of the Eighth Augustan who led the initial resistance to Civilis’s uprising (another spoiler: which failed in the face of treachery from both Tungrian auxiliaries and the fleet). He then disappears from the historical record, but not from this story! Gaius Aquillius Proculus will return …

  And on to Claudius Labeo. To be frank, if Labeo hadn’t existed I would have invented him because – as we’re going to see in Onslaught – he’s a complex character who’s going to bring out the very worst in Julius Civilis. I can’t say much about him now, as his major part in the story is yet to begin, but I think it’s safe to say that he represents everything in his tribe’s ruling class that Civilis disdained and revolted to overthrow, and which must have been one of his major motivations in making his bid for independence from Rome.

  And lastly, that name Kivilaz. When I started out writing this trilogy I sought the assistance of a world renowned scholar of Rome and the Batavians, Jona Lendering, owner of the justly praised Livius website. If you’ve never used it then I heartily recommended a visit. In the course of working with him, a collaboration which has paid off massively for me due to his knowledge and generosity in sharing it, we speculated as to Julius Civilis’s real name, which is not contained within the surviving historical record. His first suggestion was Kivil, and that in itself was a brilliant extrapolation of the Romanised version that I then used it all the way through writing the manuscript of Betrayal with a very good feeling that we were close to the truth. Imagine my excitement, both for the book and for Jona himself, to receive the following a few days ago:

  “I have news that will make you happy: Kivil may be related to Dutch kiven, “to fight”, with a suffix that indicates the agent. If this is cor
rect, Kivil means “fighter”. Now here’s the beautiful part: that suffix was, in Anglo Saxon times, el, and in reconstructed ProtoGerman ilaz. We might therefore also reconstruct a name Kivilaz, which is even closer to “Civilis”.

  Which, as you can imagine, works for me and just feels like it fits. So Kivilaz it is. You won’t find it in any textbooks I’m aware of. Or at least not yet.

  So there it is, my partial understanding of the period and the help I’ve had in filling the inevitable gaps laid bare for your consideration. The assistance has been considerable, and as ever any errors are mine and mine alone. Your comments and criticisms are very welcome, whether via my website’s comments page or social media. I endeavour to answer all posts quickly, but writing and work sometimes get in the way, so please continue to show the usual patience and don’t be afraid to nudge me if I’m slow responding. And now I’m off to start writing Onslaught.

  Anthony Riches

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