Wolves of Rome

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  Arminius wanted to tell his mother about the horrors he had experienced in the war he fought with the Romans in Illyricum and Pannonia, and that you can survive horrors, but he didn’t do that. He drew close to his father and took his bony hand in his own. ‘I’m here. It’s me, Armin. Wulf has not disappeared. He’s married and he’ll have had children by now. You’ll see them.’

  Sigmer turned towards him but did not meet his eye. He was staring into an empty place, and yet he seemed to see and somehow understand. But it must have been other places that he was seeing, other times. At a certain moment, Arminius realized he was beckoning for him to come nearer and he did. He leaned his ear close to his father’s parched mouth and he thought he heard a sound, and then another. A phrase, a jumble of phrases. His father seemed to be speaking in a language that he had never heard, but that was somehow comprehensible. And yet he couldn’t make sense of the flow of words; too many of them escaped him.

  He felt one thing clearly: a deep sense of horror and fear.

  Then he knew.

  ‘Great Thor, Father! Did you go to consult the Germanic oracle? What have you done, Father? Why? Why?’

  More words spilled out of Sigmer’s mouth in that strange language that was alien and familiar at the same time . . . Arminius tried hard to listen, to let himself understand.

  All at once he realized what his father knew, what the oracle had revealed to him: it was what Arminius had been keeping hidden in his heart. It was the slow, painful labour that had given birth to the certainty that his wild roots remained. The truth was so terrible he could not share it with any human being, not even his brother. It was a secret. But the secret had been revealed to Sigmer.

  Destiny had rung Sigmer’s last hour at the very same moment that Arminius had come to a final decision. And here, on his death bed, Sigmer was imploring his son to give up what he was intending to do.

  Arminius could not believe what he was hearing. He had always known that it was his father who had accompanied General Drusus to the oracle’s cave where the Roman would hear his death sentence: ‘You will die first.’

  And now, through the voice of his father in agony, the oracle was telling him, ‘You will die after.’

  He felt an icy blade run through his heart. There was no turning back.

  ‘It’s too late now, Father,’ he said. ‘I’ve decided. I will liberate our peoples from the Roman yoke, for always. I’ve earned Rome’s trust. I’ve always obeyed blindly, even if I loathed what I was doing. I became one of them. But perhaps now I can convince Wulf to come over to our side. Together we will found a Germanic empire, stretching from the Rhine to the eastern plains. Even the Celts will unite with us when they see that we can win.’

  Sigmer gazed at his son intensely, his eyes full of incredulity and despair. They stopped looking then, all at once, and took on the stunned fixity of death.

  THE FUNERAL OF Sigmer, the lord of the Cherusci, lasted three days. The priests invoked Wotan at great length, chanting, beseeching him to welcome the great warrior rising towards his gilded palace. The bards sang of his deeds while the Cherusci warriors, carrying their finest weapons, rode three times around his pyre, shouting his name and letting out their war cry. The fire was lit at the four corners of the mound. Just then Flavus appeared on his horse in the middle of the clearing, wearing a simple grey tunic, his sword slung over his shoulder in a silver baldric. Arminius rode over to his brother and together they unsheathed their swords to salute their father, as one. That gesture warmed the hearts of many of those present but in reality the two brothers had never been further apart.

  After the ceremony, Sigmer’s ashes were buried at the foot of a huge, centuries-old oak tree and the women surrounded Siglinde to pour tears on the burial mound of the greatest of the Cherusci.

  Arminius and Flavus rode in silence to the hill that overlooked the darkening lake and Arminius was tempted to tell his brother what he had said to their dying father, but he could not find the words. He asked a question instead: ‘Did your wife give birth?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Flavus. ‘A boy.’

  ‘Have you given him a name?’

  ‘Yes, Italicus. Do you like it?’

  ‘It’s a nice name,’ replied Arminius. Then he asked, ‘Who does he look like?’

  ‘He’s blond, so me. His mother, you know, has brown hair.’ Flavus fell silent for a spell, listening to the sound of their horses’ hoofs clopping on the beaten path. When he began speaking again, he said, ‘You know, yesterday there was a rumour going around at camp, just before I left. It seems that the emperor has chosen the man who’s going to be the next governor of Germania. Until now Saturninus has covered both the governing duties and the military command, but they say that now Tiberius might need him in Pannonia and Illyricum, so he’ll have to be replaced.’

  ‘Who do they say the new governor will be?’

  ‘The name I was hearing is Publius Quinctilius Varus. You know him well, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘I do,’ confirmed Arminius.

  At that moment, Arminius saw his future play out clearly before his eyes. The Germanic oracle, consulted by his father, had spoken. It had indicated a destination for him, and his people, from which there was no turning back.

  He was like a dog who suddenly remembers it is a wolf.

  He understood that he could not speak to his brother in any way about his plan, and that their roads would soon separate forever. He thought that one day they might be fighting each other on the field of battle and the idea broke his heart.

  22

  IN THE MONTHS THAT followed, Arminius often withdrew to the woods deep inside the Germanic forest to think and to try to understand the path that had led him to abandon all the convictions that had been instilled in him during his long years in the Roman world.

  When he became a citizen and an Eques, he felt sure that Rome would be his world. He’d tried in every way to forget his roots, those days when he and Flavus would run until they were out of breath, or would hunt game until it was too dark to see, or would simply stretch out in the luminous afternoons of spring and watch the falcons fly over the treetops.

  For a time, a very long time, he had been fascinated and won over by the majesty of the Empire. By the power of her armies, but also by the music and poetry. The comedies and tragedies performed in her theatres, and the imposing monuments. He had dreamed of making that civilization his own, of making Rome a part of him and making himself a part of Rome.

  Then slowly, secretly, his ancestral origins had come back to life, had trickled into his limbs, flowed through his blood again. His nature was that of the bear, the wolf, and the high-soaring falcon. Almost without realizing it, he had understood that Roman discipline – obedience to the norms of society at the cost of losing one’s own freedom – was a sacrifice too great to ask of himself.

  There hadn’t been a real turning point, a single event that had broken him, that had liberated the wild beast within him. It had been imperceptible, so slow that it had never come to the fore. His ancestral people were wild, their customs and habits rough. Bloodthirsty, you could say, but innocently so, in the way that one animal that mangled and tore another to pieces was innocent. The peoples who the Romans called barbarians were simply more ancient and closer to the origins of creation, to the scattering of life from the hands of the gods.

  He had come to conceive of an enormous plan, almost without realizing it: the defeat of the Roman Empire and the liberation of the Germanic peoples.

  He knew all the secrets of the Roman armies, their strengths and their weaknesses. They called them their ‘Achilles’ heels’ although he didn’t really know what that meant nor who Achilles was exactly. He had won their complete trust: the trust of Centurion Taurus, of Velleius, of Corvus and Vetilius. The trust of Tiberius Caesar and perhaps even that of Augustus. At first he had been sincere, but then he became duplicitous. How or why that had happened, he wasn’t sure.

  There was o
nly one key person missing from this list, but he might turn out to be the most dangerous of them all. The son of General Drusus and his beautiful Antonia. They too were carved into the Altar of Peace and that son of theirs was just a little boy, wearing a toga and a pendant around his neck. An amulet – who knew what it contained. Arminius had never fought alongside him. They’d exchanged glances on occasion but not more than that. Not enough to understand . . .

  Germanicus.

  And then there was one more person who surely would never believe him, who would never trust him. The one he missed most, with his golden head of hair. Mocking, cynical, loyal to his masters like a Molosser with a collar of spikes. His brother, the person he loved most. Flavus. Which of the two of them might lose his life?

  Arminius had sought out Thusnelda, time and time again. Only once did he succeed in speaking to her, but just from a certain distance. She had not let him get close. Maybe she was afraid of him, or afraid of herself, of giving in to him. What would it be like for them to finally look into each other’s eyes, to talk? What was her voice like? Her scent? Her hands? He was sure he knew – his dreams had told him everything.

  He also pondered long and hard over why his father had gone back to consult the Germanic oracle. As a young man, he had brought General Drusus to her and he had watched the Roman fight against the giantess, the very symbol of Germania. Why had his father wanted to consult the oracle again? And why did he have to die? What was the language his father had spoken in, so like his own and so different? What nightmares had sunk their claws into him? Maybe Arminius would never know. Maybe it was the same secret at the core of the relationship between Sigmer and Drusus.

  In his heart he feared an encounter with Germanicus. Would the two sons replicate the destiny of their fathers?

  He also feared meeting up with Taurus again. He would have liked to forget him. While he was not at all disturbed by the thought of seeing Publius Quinctilius Varus again; he was just waiting for the right moment.

  In the meantime, Tiberius’s Germanic campaign had left an uneasy calm between the Rhine and the Elbe, more like torpor than voluntary inactivity. And yet, the natives had learned much from his passage; it had taught them how a Roman army moves on the field, under the orders of a skilful commander. When they attacked and on what kind of terrain, and what kinds of situations they tried to avoid.

  Arminius soon began to travel through tribal territory, with the pretext of scouting and of meeting with the most important Germanic chiefs in order to gauge their reactions and discover their intentions. He began with his own ancestral people: the Cherusci, who had accepted him as their head after the death of his father Sigmer. Flavus played no part in Arminius’s plan. Knowing Flavus, it wasn’t even conceivable to think of convincing him, even though he had promised his father he would try.

  Some of the Germanic chieftains were opposed to Arminius’s ideas: ‘But weren’t you at the service of the Romans? Aren’t you still? How many Germanic warriors did you kill in battle, fighting under their orders? How can we listen to you? You want to drag us into war to satisfy your own ambitions, not because you love us and want us free!’

  Arminius answered point by point. When he had the floor, his eyes gleamed and his voice thundered. He’d often listened to the great orators in the Roman forum haranguing the crowd from the rostra. He’d memorized their movements and gestures, their tone of voice, and mastered the way they paused to create expectation. He’d even trained in public speaking in the school on the Aventine. But it was all much more difficult here; he found himself having to give explanations where there were none to be had.

  He spoke from his gut: ‘I’m no different from you. How many times have you killed warriors from other Germanic tribes and how many of your fathers fought with the Romans? Mine did, for one. How many of your warriors fight at their sides as auxiliaries? Many of them are even part of the Praetorian Guard that protect the emperor. And I was no different. But do you know why we do this? Because we don’t know that we are stronger than they are! We continue to combat each other and to accept everything that the Romans impose upon us. But we can defeat them. We can unite and put together an army of one hundred thousand warriors! I know everything about the Roman army, and I know how to defeat them. Taken one by one, they’re small men, weaker than any of us, less courageous, and less tough.

  ‘The time has come to liberate Germania. I don’t want to see their fasces or their axes any more! I don’t want to see their togas! I’ve learned that my spirit cannot be bartered with anything and there is nothing in the world that is worth losing our freedom for.’

  Thus he spoke, and little by little he convinced many of the chieftains to follow him and trust in him. He met with them in secret in the wood where they would never be seen. He made sure to know who he was talking to, and even surer to find out more about the ones who did not light up with enthusiasm at his words, but listened in silence.

  Soon the new governor, Publius Quinctilius Varus, arrived and very shortly thereafter Arminius was summoned to Rome’s headquarters on the Rhine.

  He wore his toga.

  Varus received him with joy as if he were an old comrade in arms. ‘I can barely believe my eyes!’ he said. ‘It seems like yesterday that we were riding with Vetilius and Corvus through the desert of Carrhae.’

  Arminius returned his greeting with warmth. ‘Please allow me to congratulate you for the position the emperor has entrusted you with. I hope you will be able to exercise your authority in the most fruitful of ways. Consider me at your complete disposition.’

  Varus had had dinner prepared and, with dinner, a surprise: Vetilius and Corvus appeared suddenly and embraced Arminius like an old friend.

  ‘You look wonderful in that toga!’ exclaimed Corvus. ‘Whoever would have thought . . .’

  ‘Remember that night in Antioch?’ added Vetilius.

  ‘Who could forget it,’ replied Arminius, laughing. ‘I learned more things that night than in all the years I’d lived until then!’

  They continued with light talk, chuckling over the obscenities that the two legionary officers recounted non-stop, drinking the wine that was continuously replenished. It was the kind of evening that you could have expected Taurus to show up for, although he never did, nor was he ever brought up in conversation. Arminius breathed a sigh of relief; he would have been uncomfortable the whole evening had Taurus been there.

  When they’d finished eating, Varus took Arminius’s arm and walked outside with him. ‘I’m glad to have found you here, my boy. I have a very important plan in mind for this land, and men like you will be indispensable. There have been too many wars here; I want peace. I want the people to understand what the law is and what enormous advantages can come for them with respecting the law. Not even the law of Rome, just the law, the natural order that protects the weak against the bullies, that ensures that what’s right prevails over what is unlawful.’

  Arminius thought of the two thousand Judaeans that Varus had crucified when he was governor of Syria.

  ‘You understand our way of life and you know your people as well. With you by my side I can bring – after so many years of war – a period of peace in which arts and trade can thrive, along with craftsmanship, education . . . in which your people will understand that respect of the law is an advantage for everyone . . . Will you help me?’

  ‘I’ll certainly help you,’ replied Arminius. ‘Everyone will benefit.’

  IT WOULD BE nearly a year before Varus assumed full authority, and Arminius spent the time perfecting his plan in every detail. The Cherusci were the first to fall in line with his vision, first of all because with Sigmer gone, Arminius was his only heir, seeing that Flavus had made his choice of irrevocable loyalty to the Empire, and secondly, because his words had won them over. Their conduct towards Rome continued to be impeccable, so that the governor would never have any reason to suspect them of untoward intentions. Arminius then turned to the Bructeri, who lived betwee
n Lipias and the Ems, and then to the Chatti, warriors accustomed to keeping disciplined battle lines and capable of forming strong infantry units. He was shown Thor’s Oak, a thousand-year-old sacred tree with an immense trunk, populated by nocturnal birds of prey who by day found shelter in the deep shadows of the numerous trunk hollows and gaping scars. Arminius felt confused and quite moved by the sight. None of the naked statues in Rome could compare to the purity and power of that immense moss-covered tree.

  Arminius turned to the Marsi as well, even though they were the smallest tribe in that part of Germania. Their allegiance would ensure continuity of territory, and moreover they were fantastically resistant to pain, hunger and the cold. Altogether, the Germanic peoples covered a vast area, many parts of which were impervious to anyone who did not have a profound knowledge of the territory.

  When he reported back to Varus it was to speak of his patient mediation and extraordinary results in consolidating Rome’s alliances. He was always at Varus’s side as an intermediary when the governor had dealings with the tribesmen. He seemed a model Roman citizen and Eques to all intents and purposes. This served to increasingly convince Varus that the consequence of Tiberius’s campaigns had been the tribes’ willing capitulation to Rome, driven by their desire for peace.

  The governor spent the next summer and autumn travelling from one community to another and administering justice personally wherever he went, as if he were a praetor in the Roman forum instead of the governor of a rebellious, hostile and never before tamed territory.

  Germanic tribal justice was simple. Whenever there was a conflict between two warriors or notables, it was settled by a fight. The loser was wrong, the winner was right. The weaker party could choose to surrender and recognize the rights of his adversary. Bravery and boldness were at the heart of this non-written law, and problems were solved directly by the two parties involved. Varus instead implemented Roman law, ignoring Germanic customs. He applied the law inflexibly, humiliating those subject to judgement. Few of the tribesmen spoke of rebellion because the memory of Tiberius was still very fresh, but as time passed, greater numbers of warriors were attracted to Arminius’s plan and the desire for revenge became stronger than their fear.