Did Drusus’ conquests amount to anything? The answer is yes – at least in the short/medium term. In the years immediately after his death, Rome did hold on to his hard-won gains in Germania Magna. Augustus was still in charge and a succession of commanders was dispatched to advance the conquest. In contrast, Alexander left no instructions for what should happen when he died. Following the Macedonian’s death his empire immediately shattered among his generals like a krater striking a stone floor and resulted in fifty years of bloodshed, leading one author to recently dub him ‘Alexander the Great Failure’.17When Drusus died many of the allies in the region remained unquestioningly loyal to Rome – even supplying troops for her army for several years after. The conquered Germanic élites even began adjusting to the new Roman order of things. Significantly, the sixty nations of the Tres Galliae also stood firm and loyal to Rome, and mourned the loss of their governor. The commanders of the legions and auxiliaries he led also remained loyal. Had he lived to be as old as Alexander, could he have taken Roman arms beyond the Elbe River to the Oder or the Vistula? Probably, but again that is speculation.
And what of that title ‘the Great’? Romans were very careful about lauding their heroes. Greatness comes with a price attached, usually at the cost of both great deeds and equally great flaws.18Rome’s other high achiever, Gn. Pompeius, was actually accorded the honour of using Magnus after his name by L. Cornelius Sulla, not the Senate or Roman People. But it was a different age. There could only be one strong man during Drusus’ lifetime, and he was Augustus. He would not tolerate rivals and he carefully managed which honours his sons and deputies could garner. The Senate and Augustus did, however, recognise Drusus’ achievements by awarding him first an ovation and later a full triumph, and posthumously they voted a honorary name they had coined just for him – Germanicus. He joined an élite group of Roman generals proudly bearing their battle honours as part of their name, including P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus, L. Aemilius Paulus Macedonicus and Q. Caecilius Metellus Numidicus. Augustus might appear mean when he overruled the Rhine legions’ acclamation of Drusus as imperator and by taking the title for himself. It was a political calculation, and Augustus was a very shrewd politician. It could be said, of course, that in death Drusus could no longer be a threat to Augustus, so he could afford to be generous by approving the bespoke agnomen. On the contrary, Augustus had much more to gain from exploiting his stepson’s achievements while he was still alive. Drusus’ deeds reflected well on him. Augustus had affection for, and confidence in, both of his stepsons and he promoted the fact. The frieze on the Ara Pacis Augustae and the decoration on the exquisitely crafted Boscoreale Cups graphically “illustrate the strength of Augustan propaganda centered on his stepsons and testify to the real success that the grieving Augustus and Tiberius had in keeping alive the memory of Drusus’ exploits”.19Drusus was a popular Roman hero and both stepfather and brother stood to benefit from promulgating his legend. Drusus’ reputation in death, like Alexander’s, could still move men, especially those living who had served under him. When the men of the Rhine legions mutinied in 14 CE it was his son, Germanicus accompanied by his wife Agrippina, who went to face them down. The men were complaining about harsh conditions, poor pay and the long years of service they had to endure before being discharged. Germanicus appealed to their feelings of shame for betraying the memory of “father Drusus” as one of the factors to bring the mutineers to heel.20Thus, a great man does not need the title ‘Great’ after his name to be recognised as one. If the measure is charismatic leadership, heroic stature and martial brilliance, Drusus goes a long way to qualifying as a Roman Alexander the Great.
The noted historian Ronald Syme correctly observed that scholars have not properly estimated the contributions of Tiberius and Drusus in the years 12–9 BCE.21Some historians have even characterised the campaigns in Germania as little more than ‘punitive raids’.22This assessment is quite wrong. Considered together with the Alpine and Norican Wars, the German Wars shaped Rome’s northern frontier strategy and policy for the next quarter century. While Augustus assigned Tiberius the supposedly conquered Balkan provinces and used his talents to quell rebellions there, Drusus was granted the honour of conquering new and unchartered territories. The lands across the Rhine River would forever become the fields of honour on which Drusus and his male descendants would establish their place in Roman military history.23The vast investment in military infrastructure and the commitment of such a significant proportion of army resources to the project are eloquent witnesses to a desire at the highest levels for annexation and assimilation, not punishment. It was Drusus who opened up Germania for exploration and exploitation for the next generation. Directly resulting from Drusus’ campaigns the Romans had the best ever ground intelligence of the region. New topographical and ethnographical studies of Germania Magna were henceforth available for other commanders to build their war plans upon. Through his work, Drusus prepared the way for future missions, such as those of Domitius Ahenobarbus who actually crossed the Elbe River. He also built alliances with several nations that laid a path forward for assimilation in the years immediately following his death. By successfully leveraging a strategy, by parts diplomatic and military, he achieved much more than his relatively small fighting force could by violence alone.
The written accounts suggest Drusus was respected even by those he fought and had defeated. As he lay dying even “his very foes had reverently honoured his sick-bed by maintaining peace along with us; nor did they dare to desire what their interests demanded”, wrote Seneca.24Shortly after his death, the subjugation of Germania was deemed sufficiently effective in places that plans were already in hand when Tiberius assumed command of the Rhine legions to begin urban development of the acquired territories. As early as four years after Drusus’ death the timber foundations of a fortified market town were being established at Lahnau-Waldgirmes in what had only a decade before been considered hostile territory. When news of Drusus’ death spread, several of the Rhineland Germanic peoples saw a chance to oust their invader – but not all and it was sufficient deterrent for Tiberius to return with an armed force and to merely raise the threat of violence for the rebel tribes to sue for peace. They had seen enough evidence under Drusus to know the Romans were serious about bringing them under their control. Any further than that goes beyond Drusus’ own life story. His successors lacked his deftness of touch, personal charm and charisma. To wit, the failure by men sent to govern the region after his death to understand the fierce streak of independence in the Germanic character led to errors of judgment which fanned the smouldering embers of resentment that would lead to disaster for the Romans at Teutoburg. When the time came to reclaim lost Roman conquests it was again to Drusus that the new commander of the Rhine army looked for guidance. The son and the heir to his hereditary title, Germanicus, followed almost exactly in his father’s footsteps, replicating the invasion plans by both land and sea almost to the last detail. His fleet of ships even became the nucleus of the future classis Germanica that patrolled the Rhine as part of the limes frontier.25
For hundreds of years, Roman ships sailed down the Rhine into the North Sea by way of the fossa Drusiana. Built to carry Drusus’ men and arms to a far away battlefield, it now carried trade goods that brought Roman influence to barbarian peoples beyond Rome’s sway. Yet Rome’s obsession with its northern frontier never waned. Her ambition for absolute control of the right bank of the Rhine was only crimped – in another irony – by his own brother Tiberius. A succession of late first and second century emperors tried their hands at emulating Drusus, including the Flavian Emperor Domitian. Even into the third and fourth centuries Roman troops traipsed deep into Germania Magna in the hope of taming the land and its unruly peoples, but without success. In the end the Germanic peoples came to the Romans – and stayed.
When Tiberius decided to limit and consolidate the frontiers of his imperium on the left bank of the Rhine, it was in the centres founded
by Drusus that Roman power was invested. He had chosen their locations wisely and as any visitor to the places today will attest “it is surprising what a good eye the Romans had for strategic positions”.26In time, the civilian vici around the military encampments Drusus built along the Rhine from which to launch his invasion routes quickly became the trading and cultural centres of the northern edge of the Empire, surviving into the Middle Ages right down to the present day. The Rhine cities of Nijmegen, Xanten, Neuss, Bonn, Mainz and Strasbourg have become his enduring legacy in bricks and mortar. Tantalisingly in other towns in France, the Rhineland and southern Germany perhaps the imprint of the unit of measurement named after him and used by Roman surveyors, the pes Drusianus, can still be traced in the ancient street plans.
It is deeply ironic that the man who would have wanted to see Rome restored to a democratic res publica unintentionally established a dynasty that actually continued the autocratic principate. Strictly speaking, it was not the bloodline of the Iulii which succeeded Augustus (he was adopted into the Julian clan) but that of the Claudii Nerones. After his brother’s death, first Caligula, his grandson by Germanicus and then Claudius, his youngest son, ascended the throne of the imperial monarchy. Through marriage to the great-granddaughter of Augustus, Claudius adopted an older boy, Nero, who he made joint heir with his own son Britannicus (just as Augustus had done years before with Gaius and Lucius). When Claudius died in 54 CE, Nero succeeded him, not Britannicus and his ensuing reign brought the rule of the Julio-Claudians to an end. The imperial autocracy, however, continued.
Drusus’ greatest weaknesses were a deeply ingrained drive to win and an unshakeable belief in his own abilities – traits he shared with Alexander and Caesar. It expressed itself in his need to overachieve that sometimes bordered on the reckless, none more so than in his quest for the spolia opima. In 12 and 11 BCE he almost led his men to disaster in Germania and he took unnecessary risks with his own life in his pursuit of these prized spoils. That quality, perhaps, even killed him in the end. Yet it would be unfair to say Drusus was vainglorious. He did not have an inordinate pride in his own self-importance or achievements, nor did he display excessive vanity. In Suetonius’ phrase, “it is the general belief that he was no less eager for glory than he was for civilian government”.27Like many who carried the Claudian genetic code, he could certainly be stubborn and headstrong. He seems, rather, to have been acutely aware of his place in – perhaps even in awe of – the great family of the Claudians from which he was descended and of his civic duty. If it was a failing at all, he was motivated by a desire to be counted among the best of his lineage and to have enhanced, not diminished, its reputation by his deeds. Drusus eagerly sought out glory and was greedy for praise. For a Roman, regardless of class, it was the approval of one’s fellow citizens that was the only measure of value that counted. In that regard, Drusus was remarkably traditional.
As long as a Claudian was in power, the legacy of Drusus lent prestige, even glamour, to the incumbent. Claudius fully exploited his filial connection with Drusus and his right to inherit the honorary title Germanicus to bolster his own weak image in the early part of his reign by using specially minted coins to get the message out to all levels of society. It was only after he had invaded Britain, and received the accolade Britannicus for his victories in that remote island, that he felt he had gained the confidence of his people and could be his own man. Thereafter, Drusus’ fame waned. When Flavius Vespasianus beat the last of Nero’s successors and installed a new clan on the Palatine in 69 CE Drusus’ name was too closely associated with the old regime. Politically the new rulers needed to establish their own credentials that were independent of what went before. They needed their own Flavian heroes. There was little to be gained for them and subsequent rulers by promoting the name of Drusus and in any case they were not related. He belonged to a different family and to a different age. Add to which, the passing of time has not been kind to Drusus’ memory. The biography written by Augustus and the twenty volumes of The German Wars composed by Pliny the Elder, which fully told his story, have all since been lost. Even the monuments of brick and marble – the triumphal arch in Rome, the tumulus in Mogontiacum, the Drusion tower in Caesarea – have crumbled away. As they turned to dust, memory of Drusus’ life and exploits faded under the shadow of men whose life stories and exploits have largely by chance survived more completely in books and edifices down to our own time. Drusus was gradually lost in the footnotes of a bigger story of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Thus Ann L. Kuttner observed,
the frequent neglect of the brothers’ [Drusus and Tiberius] role in the first part of Augustus’ reign seems due to the nature of the extant historical sources, and to fashions in modern scholarship. These factors in turn seem conditioned by two historical catastrophes, the untimely death of Drusus in 9 B.C. while campaigning in Germany and Tiberius’ self-exile to Rhodes in 4 B.C., an action for which modern and ancient observers alike have no unambiguous explanation, only the record of its primary effects. The result has often been to leave Drusus out of any comprehensive analysis of Augustan dynastic policy, as if his death canceled any prior significance, and to regard Tiberius’ ultimate elevation to the throne as an unwelcome act forced on Augustus by the lack of any alternative due to the deaths of his grandsons and adopted sons Gaius and Lucius. This gap in scholarship is just beginning to be filled by a series of recent German investigations interested primarily in Drusus but also in the linked roles of the brothers as a pair; it has yet to be redressed in the English scholarly literature.28
With good reason the ghost of Drusus appeared before Pliny and expressed his fear that the story of his life and achievements would fade into oblivion!
In the ancient accounts, there is a sub-plot to Drusus’ life, a narrative of ongoing interactions between the world of the living and that of the gods and spirits of place. The mystical dimension to Drusus’ story strikes modern readers as strange. To Roman readers this would be completely normal. His is the story of the man who embodies the traditional mores and respects the mos maiorum. For most of his young life, Drusus is lucky. Fortune seems to be his protector. He chases the spolia opima at great personal risk, but he is never harmed. He erects the altar of Roma and Augustus in Lugdunum and instigates an annual festival. He inaugurates a temple to the cult at Andemantunnum. He is forewarned of trouble before the battle at Arbalo, to which he shows the appropriate humility: the Cherusci have a change of heart and, turning near defeat into victory, he goes on to lead his men safely to camp. However, he becomes increasingly arrogant. It is the trait of all heroes, who come to believe in their own invincibility. Omens and portents foretell of catastrophe and the priests advise Drusus to be careful; but he grows impatient, disregards the warnings, departs anyway and drives deep into Germania. By reaching the Albis, the Roman achieves his mission but he has offended the genius loci, the spirit of the place who appears to him as a superhuman Germanic woman. He heeds the warning and decides to abort his quest, but, alas, it is too late. His luck has run out. A price must be paid for hubris. His fate is sealed. Strange sights and sounds presage an end to his life. His last act, a demonstration of pietas, is to ensure his brother is treated with the dignity due him on his arrival at the ‘Accursed Camp’. Drusus’ spirit passes into the next world with a record as a courageous, honourable and decent man. In an ironic twist, he himself appears as a ghost or a dreamworld figure to Pliny the Elder to plead with him to tell his story. These unusual events may appear to be dramatic devices to good story telling, but the respectful Roman reader knew better than to dismiss them.
Nero Claudius Drusus, acclaimed in life by his troops as ‘commander’ and honoured in death as ‘conqueror of the Germani’, lived a truly glorious life. In Eager for Glory, I hope his story, so often confined to footnotes, has now been restored to prominence and his legacy, for so long overlooked, has been revealed anew. In the words attributed to Pliny the Elder,
True glory consi
sts in doing what deserves to be written, in writing what deserves to be read, and in so living as to make the world happier and better for our living in it.29
Stemma Claudiorum (Father’s side)
Stemma Drusorum (Mother’s side)
The Step-Children of Augustus
Gazeteer
Drusus the Elder travelled widely during his lifetime. The places listed below are some of the most important ones associated with his life and military campaigns, while the museums included here contain items connected with him or the times he lived in.
Austria
Magdalensberg
Archäologischer Park Magdalensberg (Magdalensberg Archaeological Park) A-9064 Pischeldorf
http://www.landesmuseum-ktn.at/Landesmuseen/Magdalensberg/magdalensfr.html
Principal city of the Kingdom of Noricum taken by Drusus during the Norican War of 15 BCE.
Via Claudia Augusta
Via Claudia Info, A-6521 Fließ, 89, Austria
http://www.viaclaudia.org/
The exact course of the route chosen by Drusus during the Alpine War of 15 BCE is still somewhat conjectural, but the road built by his son, which was supposed to follow it, has largely been identified – with a few educated guesses along specific sections. It now forms a 516 kilometre (320.6 miles) long touristic road connecting Italy to Germany by way of Austria. The route passes through some of Europe’s most spectacular valleys and prettiest towns. The two feeder routes begin respectively in Altino and Ostiglia in Italy, converging at Trento. The road then rises up through the Reschen and Fern Passes of the Tyrol in Austria, before descending through the Bavarian Alps to Augsburg, and terminating at Donauwörth in Germany.
Eager for Glory Page 26