Eager for Glory

by Philip Lindsay Powell

  Claudius was less successful in love than his father.188 His first marriage had been an embarrassment but by her he had two children, one daughter named Claudia and a son, named after Nero Claudius Drusus.189 Young Drusus was betrothed to the daughter of Seianus but died in Pompeii “he being choked with a pear, which in his play he tossed into the air, and caught in his mouth”.190 In his second marriage to Valeria Messalina he found a woman he truly loved. With her he fathered Ti. Claudius Germanicus to whom he gave his honorary name Britannicus and upon whom he doted, commending him to the soldiers and “holding him in his arms before their ranks”.191 Alas, Messalina did not love her husband with equal passion. When a plot hatched by her and her lover G. Silius to overthrow Claudius was discovered, they were summarily executed. By direct association with his mother, Britannicus became something of a liability to his father. Through his third marriage to Iulia Agrippina (the great-granddaughter of Augustus, Stemma Drusorum no. 20) Claudius adopted her son, an older boy, named L. Domitius Ahenobarbus.192 Assuming the new name Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus in honour of his illustrious father, he was made joint heir with Britannicus, just as Augustus had done with Caius and Lucius. They quickly became rivals and the focus of factions within the palace. When Claudius died in 54 CE, it was Nero as the older surviving relative who succeeded him at the age of 16.193 The following year Britannicus died, probably by poison, just one day before his fourteenth birthday and the occasion of his assuming the toga pura. His sister Octavia died seven years later. Nero’s fourteen-year reign ended in ignimony in which the emperor was declared a public enemy.194 He took his own life on 9 June 68 CE. He was the last ruler to bear the proud name of Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus.

  After Nero’s suicide four contenders feuded for the throne in the year 69 CE.195 It was T. Flavius Vespasianus, the former legate who had subdued Hod Hill and Maiden Castle as part of Claudius’ expeditionary force to Britannia, who survived to establish a new dynasty. He sought to break with the excesses and wickedness of Nero, but to maintain continuity with the best of Augustus’ lineage, among whom he considered Claudius one. His son had been an intimate friend to Titus, Vespasianus’ own son. Titus claimed that he had been there with Britannicus at the moment he swallowed the poison, even claiming he had tasted the dose himself and fallen ill on account of it.196 When Titus succeeded his father in 79 CE, he remembered his childhood friend fondly. He erected a gilt-bronze statue of him and another equestrian statue of ivory, which was still carried in procession at the Circus Maximus at the time Suetonius was writing Lives of the Caesars.197 Titus even minted a special ‘restoration issue’ sestertius celebrating his memory as one of the good Claudii Nerones.198

  The life and exploits of Drusus the Elder were frequently mentioned in the narrative histories of Rome: in the first century by Pliny the Elder, Valerius Maximus and Velleius Paterculus; in the second by Florus, Suetonius and Tacitus; in the third by Cassius Dio; in the fourth by Eutropius, and in the sixth by Cassiodorus. Most of these historians drew heavily on the great history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, by Livy who was a contemporary of Drusus. In Books 138 through 142 Drusus’ wars were recounted but tragically they survive only as tantalizing single-sentence summaries. With each retelling of Rome’s sweeping history the accounts of the commander’s life, however, became progressively selective and diluted until they were little more than trite anecdotes.

  In the lands with a direct connection to Drusus, however, his memory flourished. The annual festival honouring Drusus at Mogontiacum became an important fixture in the calender of the military base, whose civilian settlement outside grew substantially on the back of it (map 12). A theatre was built some 340 metres (1,115.5 feet) down the hill from the cenotaph, which seems to have been an intrinsic part of the burgeoning Drusus cult.199 It was rediscovered in 1884 and has been excavated over the years since. Today it abuts the southern railway station, which has been appropriately renamed Bahnhof Mainz Römisches Theater. Visitors can marvel at the foundations of the theatre’s 116 metre (380.7 feet) wide seating area (cavea) and 42 metre (137.8 feet) wide stage, which was the largest of any Roman theatre built north of the Alps – bigger even than the better known theatres in Arausio (Orange) and Arelate (Arles) in Gallia Narbonensis.200 A fragment of a brick bearing the stamp of legio XXII found at the site suggests the building was still in use well into the fourth century under Constantine (308–310 CE) or Julian (355–360 CE) – and after Christianity had gained acceptance.201

  Figure 8: ‘Der Aichelstein’ by Matthäus Merian der Ältere in

  With the fall of the Roman Empire in the west the memory of Drusus the Elder faded. His triumphal arch in Rome crumbled and its brick and marble were robbed until all trace of it vanished completely. Memory of an arch dedicated to Drusus survived, however, and another structure – part of the Aqua Antoniana aqueduct – was wrongly attributed to the stepson of Augustus. The name, nevertheless, stuck. Across the Rhine a new Holy Roman Empire now held sway. Drusus’ tumulus monument in Mainz, stripped of its finished stone or marble exterior, became a defensive watchtower in mediaeval times close to the Benedictine Abbey of St Alban. The ruins of the cenotaph and the nearby theatre were used by the burghers of fifteenth century Mainz in dealing with their overbearing archbishop to remind him of the antiquity of their privileges and municipal liberties stretching back to the founder of their city, Nero Claudius Drusus.202 In 1520, and again in the edition of 1525, Johann Huttich included the Drususstein/Eichelstein in his Collectanea Antiquitatum of ancient Roman remains in the region.203 The Swiss engraver Matthäus Merian der Ältere (1593–1650) was captivated by the noble but teetering ruin and featured ‘Der Aichelstein’ (fig. 8) as one of the 40 copper plates and 3 maps in his Topographia Archiepiscopatuum Moguntinensis, Trevirensis et Coloniensis of 1646. In 1655 Prince-elector Johann Philipp von Schönbrunn surrounded the city of Mainz with defences and the French-style quadrangular Zitadelle was constructed which encompassed the tower but left it untouched. In his scholarly Der Eichelstein: das ist Neronis Claudi Drusi monumentum of 1697 Christian Gotthülff Blumberg (1664–1735) quaintly, but quite wrongly, imagined the ruined monument in its heyday as a pyramid.204 Inspired by the antiquarian Pater Joseph Fuchs and praised by the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Friedrich Franz Lehne (1771–1836) presented a more convincing reconstruction of the appearance of the tumulus (as a tower with a square base, cylindrical middle section and domed top that is still accepted today) in his groundbreaking Comparaison du plan de l’ancien Mogontiacum avec la situation actuelle de la ville de Mayence of 1809 (fig. 9).205 The ruined monument (plate 40) still stands in the Zitadelle as part of the Jakobsberg ensemble of historic buildings and in its quiet grassy, tree lined grounds visitors can enjoy a moment of solitude and introspection.

  Figure 9: Johann Friedrich Franz Lehne’s Comparaison du plan de l’ancien Mogontiacum avec la situation actuelle de la ville de Mayence of 1809, published 1836-1839, was an early attempt to ‘scientifically’ document the location of Roman ruins. The ‘Monumentum Drusi’ is show in the lower right hand corner beside the fortress wall.

  In the east, shaken by an earthquake, the Drusion tower at Caesarea Maritima fell into the sea to be washed away by the unyielding tides. The whims of Fortune determined that the books of Augustus and Pliny the Elder, which most fully detailed his life, turned to dust or were consumed by flames. From 1453, the other general histories that survived – preserved in collections in Constantinople or by monks under its sway – became more widely available to inspire a new age of learning, spurred on by the invention of the printing press. Thus in the sixteenth century Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) drew on Maximus to recount in one of his literary essays the story of Tiberius’ epic journey to be with his brother as he lay dying.206 Yet while in the succeeding four centuries interest in the Roman Empire only increased, Drusus’ contribution was largely overlooked by the wider story of conquest and loss. He is not mentioned, for instance, in the epi
c and influential Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, which first appeared in 1776, because his survey started with the Antonine emperors. Young men of means seeking enlightenment and education endured grand tours of Europe while collectors, enticed by the recently discovered ruins of Pompeii, went out in search of art to grace their own classically inspired stately homes. Many of these travellers brought back statue busts, among which were those of Drusus that had once adorned public buildings and about whom their purchasers knew little.

  Meanwhile the fortresses founded by Drusus and their civilian settlements had morphed into prosperous industrial, trading and religious centres on the Rhine. The dedicated monks of the Church of Rome had for centuries preserved the memory of the classical past. To one of Cologne’s alleyways running by the gate of the cloister of the mendicant order of Minoriten or Fratres minores (‘Lesser Brothers’ or ‘Black Franciscans’), which was built around the year 1242, the mediaeval burghers gave the name Drususgasse.207 In the two centuries that followed the German-speaking peoples rediscovered their ancient past. The trigger was the publication of Tacitus’ Germania in Venice in 1470, and its translation into German 26 years later, which revealed that ancient Germany had not been a surly subject of the Roman Empire but proudly independent.208 In 1492 the Holy Roman Empire’s poet laureate Conrad Celtis spoke emotively and appealed to his countrymen’s ancient spirit of independence and strength that had once terrified the Romans.209 In 1517 reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) evoked the name of Arminius, calling him by the less Latin-sounding Hermann, and co-opting him in his protest against the hegemony of the Church of Rome.210 Recalling from the mists of time the valiant struggles of the ancient Germanic heroes against the legions of Rome fed into a deep vein of frustration at Roman Catholicism, Luther roused his listeners and finally succeeded in establishing the Protestant movement. This success also inspired a new sense of German nationalism and in the years that followed, the Holy Roman Empire broke apart becoming Austria, The Netherlands, The Swiss Confederation, numerous small German kingdoms and electorates, and the Duchy of Prussia.211 The German-speaking people then fell under the control of Napoléon Bonaparte’s France in 1804 and the Rhineland suffered a brutal occupation.212 When the French army left a decade later, the Prussians took over but their rule was almost as humiliating – yet forged out of a common anti-French sentiment the sense of German national identity continued to grow.213

  In this context with its heightened but politically motivated curiosity about the distant past, Heinrich Luden (1778–1847) of Jena began work on his monumental history of the German-speaking people. Dedicated to the eccentric and avowed philhellene Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, the first volume of Geschichte des teutschen Volkes appeared in bookshops from October 1825. In Luden’s account broadly all things Germanic were deemed good, all things Roman, bad. Luden cast Nero Claudius Drusus as the arch-villain in discussing Rome’s wars of conquest. In his view, Drusus the Elder had duped the Batavi and Cananefates, waged a bloody war on the Germanic nations in which he threatened and rained down destruction on the local tribespeople, and made grave errors that would have lasting consequences.214

  Figure 10: Nero Claudius Drusus as envisaged by Dr August Benedict Wilhelm in Die Feldzüge des Nero Claudius Drusus in nördlichen Deutschland, May 1826 – a hero for uncertain times.

  A day’s ride away in Kloster Rossleben, Saxony, Dr August Benedict Wilhelm did not much like what he read. Eighteen months earlier he had been commissioned by the Geographical Society of Paris to prepare a study of Germania and its peoples and he felt a new urgency to complete his short volume. In under eight months, he published Die Feldzüge des Nero Claudius Drusus in nördlichen Deutschland, a detailed account of Drusus’ wars in northern Germany. In his foreword he explained that he wrote the book to “defend his hero” (fig. 10) against several contemporary adversaries – singling out Luden in particular – who were seeking to use the ancient past to develop a national German consciousness, but twisting history in the retelling of it.215 He drew from the same Latin and Greek authors, meticulously acknowledging his sources, yet tried to strike a fairer balance in telling the story. The essential truth of human nature should be seen, he argued, despite the “superfluous ornaments” applied by other authors to disguise it. Quite deliberately he quoted the author of the Consolatio ad Liviam:

  The hero’s deeds and hard-won fame shall live;

  They can alone the funeral pyres survive.216

  Eighteen hundred years after his death, Drusus was still being used as a political pawn.

  A loose German Federation of smaller independent nation states – 38 in all – was founded but now dominated by Prussia and Austria.217 In 1871, amidst the smoke and flames of the Franco-Prussian War, the Deutsches Reich or Kaiserreich was forged – ironically echoing the cognomen of the Roman general who had first stepped on to the right bank of the Rhine.218 A new generation of scholars, notably Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), sought to understand contemporary Europe through the complex story of its Roman origins even as the new German Empire led by Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) promoted the region’s agricultural, industrial and political interests and with it widening inequality and pressures for expansion and empire.219 It ended in the bloody mudfilled trenches of Belgium and France in 1918.220 Depression followed and an era of extreme nationalism embodied in Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) who sought to establish a land expanded by conquest and whose leading architect designed bombastic buildings inspired by the monuments of the Caesars to fill the capital city of the country to be renamed Germania.221 Instead the cruel ambition of the Führer brought the country to its utter destruction during the cataclysmic war of 1939–1945, splitting asunder its east and west halves for two generations. Chastened, but reborn as a democracy, West Germany looked steadfastly to the future and determined to become a founding member of the European Economic Community, bound, with some irony, under Treaties of Rome, that later became the European Union. After the two Germanies were reunited in 1990, the nation looked once again to its past for reassurance and a sense of continuity and longevity. Several of Germany’s cities celebrated their foundation by the Romans, promoted by the issue of special ‘2000 Jahre’ stamps by Deutsche Bundespost. The stamp for Mainz (plate 41) prominently featured the Drususstein in a bucolic setting presented as a woodcut engraving mimicking the style of a Mediaeval print.222 Special stamps followed for Neuss and Trier in 1984, Augsburg in 1985, Bonn in 1989, Speyer in 1990 and Koblenz in 1992. While the cities expanded over the years of the wirtschaftliche Wunder of the later twentieth century, many German town planners chose to commemorate their country’s association with the young Roman prince by naming streets after him – which is how many towns acquired their Drususstraßen.

  Augustus, Drusus the Elder’s stepfather, was ‘first man’ of Rome. He reinvented his own family, transformed Roman political society and had ambitions for the empire that included Germania Magna.

  Livia Drusilla divorced her husband Ti. Claudius Nero to marry Augustus, a marriage that lasted 52 years. Nevertheless, she was a devoted mother to her sons by her former husband, Tiberius and Nero (Drusus the Elder).

  Tiberius, Drusus’ elder brother, had a reputation for being intense, boorish and a stern disciplinarian, but was a military leader of considerable talent.

  4. Drusus as a teenager with his head covered by his toga during a religious rite. He was devoted to traditional Roman customs his entire life.

  5. Drusus in his twenties was considered handsome, charming and good-natured in his lifetime.

  6. Antonia Minor, beautiful daughter of M. Antonius, portrayed as Hera. Wife of Drusus the Elder, she never remarried.

  7. The only portrait of Drusus known to have been carved in his lifetime appears on the Ara Pacis in Rome.

  8. The centuria, led by the centurio, aided by his optio, was the basic combat unit of the Romanarmy. Other officers relayed commands by music and motions of a signum or vexillum standard.


  9. Legionarius of the late 1st Century BCE 10. Scale armour offered better protection in Coolus-type helmet and chain mail shirt than chain mail and was often worn by with oval shield and unsheathed gladius middle-ranking officers, musicans and ready for action. standard bearers.