Rome's Greatest Defeat

by Adrian Murdoch

  However transitory the practical achievements of the last two years might have been – the feats of 11 BC were broadly reversed the following year – Augustus was impressed enough to grant Drusus a triumph, the right to ride through the city of Rome on horseback. It was an event still remembered half a century later. The Emperor Claudius, by then Drusus’ only surviving son, had a gold coin struck in his father’s memory. The commander sits triumphant on a trotting horse over a victory arch on which is inscribed ‘Victory over the Germans’. So pacified was Germany perceived to be that the Senate voted that the shrine of Janus Quirinus be closed that winter. This was an event that was supposed to occur only when the empire was at total peace.23

  The following year, back on the frontier, Drusus continued his attacks on the Sugambri and the Chatti. When he returned to Gaul’s provincial capital in Lyons, he was joined that summer by Augustus, who had come to the city to monitor the German situation and to oversee an altar, the Ara Lugdunensis, which was set up in the city to honour both him and Rome. It was hoped that the imperial cult would be a foil to the constant military activity in the province, help break down tribal loyalties and tie the Gauls even closer to the greater Roman family. As Roman mythology was later to have it, Drusus’ second son, the future emperor Claudius, was born on 1 August 10 BC, the day the altar was dedicated.

  Although Drusus was named consul in absentia for 9 BC and was riding high yet again in imperial honours, Rome might have been forgiven for thinking that his fourth campaign must soon signal the end of barbarian Germany. The more astute, on the other hand, could see him trying to recapture yet again what had been lost the previous year, this time from a base in Mainz. His camp there was situated on a flattened hill, some 30m or so above the River Rhine, giving him an unparalleled view of the surrounding country. Drusus crossed the Rhine and headed north into the territory of the Cherusci via that of the Chatti – once more – and the Suebi. It was clearly a difficult campaign. Cassius Dio comments on the ‘considerable bloodshed’ and mentions that the Roman army conquered only with ‘difficulty’.24 Drusus then crossed the River Weser and finally reached the Elbe, destroying everything in his path.

  Drusus failed in his attempt to cross the River Elbe and instead built an altar, a monument to the difficulty of the season’s campaign and to the glory of Rome. The language of the contemporary historians deliberately recalls Alexander the Great, the conqueror chasing the end of the world, halted by a river – in the Macedonian’s case the River Jhelum. Alexander also constructed a monument when he had travelled as far as he could.

  But now, for the emperor’s heir, disaster. Never shy of invoking the supernatural, Cassius Dio reports the appearance of a gigantic barbarian goddess, Germania personified, predicting doom. ‘Where are you hurrying to, insatiable Drusus? You are not fated to look on all these lands. Leave! The end of your campaigns and of your life is already at hand.’25

  The German historian Dieter Timpe convincingly argues that the real reason for the halt at the Elbe had less to do with apparitions and more to do with a threatened mutiny – the goddess a narrative device after the fact. Certainly military discontent after a 500km march into unknown, dangerous and terrifying territory is hardly beyond the realms of possibility.26

  Whatever the reality of the putative mutiny or indeed Drusus’ actual military intentions, the commander was not to get any further. A nasty tumble from a horse towards the end of the campaigning season resulted in a broken leg. Then – the sources are a little vague – either gangrene set into the leg itself or the fall had caused internal injuries and Drusus began to sicken.27

  When it became apparent that he was failing, Tiberius rushed 1,000km to his brother’s side. There was certainly a political element to Tiberius’ concern. It was imperative that the fractious legions be calmed down, but genuine concern seems to have driven him on and the trip soon became a literary ideal of fraternal love. The writer Valerius Maximus, writing at the end of the 20s AD described it like this:

  How swift and headlong his journey, snatched as it were in a single breath, as evident from the fact that after crossing the Alps and the River Rhine, travelling day and night and changing horses at intervals, Tiberius covered two hundred miles through a barbaric country recently conquered, with his guide Antabagius as his sole companion and without a break. But in this very time of stress and danger, left without moral attendance, the most holy power of Piety and the gods who favour pre-eminent virtues and Jupiter, most faithful guardian of the Roman empire, kept him company. Drusus, too, though closer to his own fate than to duty towards anyone, in the collapse of spiritual vigour and bodily strength, yet at the very moment that separates life from death ordered his legions with their standards to go and meet his brother, so that he be saluted as commander-in-chief. He bowed to his brother’s majesty and out of his own life at the same time.28

  Drusus’ body was brought back to Rome and his stepfather, the emperor, had his ashes interred in the mausoleum he had built for himself on the banks of the Tiber at the northern end of the Field of Mars. At 12m high and with a diameter of almost 90m, it was, and remains, the largest Roman tomb in the world. ‘A mound of earth raised upon a high foundation of white marble, situated near the river, and covered to the top with evergreen shrubs’ is how the geographer Strabo describes it.29

  Today it stands somewhat incongruous and remote in the Piazza Augusto Imperatore in Rome. In 1937, overenthusiastic archaeologists cleared the area of the structures that surrounded it and erected instead the unpleasant Fascist buildings that the visitor can see there now. Its isolation is mirrored by the dynastic loneliness that grew around Augustus from now on. By the time of the emperor’s death, the mausoleum already housed a large number of his friends and family.30

  Drusus was given the posthumous honorific ‘Germanicus’, a title that passed on to his son. Some idea of the international sense of tragedy that afflicted the empire can be gleaned from the cenotaph that was also raised to his memory on the banks of the Rhine in Mainz. It was a memorial that was protected up to the end of the Roman Empire and can still be seen today. Now rather forlorn in the city’s predominantly Baroque citadel, then the 30m-tall memorial stood alone on a ridge overlooking the town, along the road that led south-east from the main military fort to another camp slightly further down the Rhine at Mainz-Wiesenau. It is significant that the structure, locally referred to as the Eichelstein, was made of stone at a time when even the fledgling town’s military buildings were made of wood.31

  No matter that the accident could have happened anywhere, the Germans were to blame. A contemporary poem that commemorates Drusus’ death encapsulates the depth of feeling:

  There is no pardon for you, Germany,

  but only death, the supreme penalty;

  cold chains will bind the great kings of your race,

  by neck and hand, with fear on every face.

  The evil that rejoiced when Drusus fell

  will meet its doom inside a gloomy cell,

  and I shall see, at ease and with a smile,

  the naked dead bestrew your byways vile.

  Goddess of Dawn, Aurora, with your might,

  hasten the day that brings so great a sight!32

  It is important not to be too distracted by imperial propaganda and to ask what it was that Drusus had actually achieved. An altar and a triumph was the stuff of assault not of invasion, the Germans were cowed not beaten, the country was mapped not conquered. And even if a couple of permanent bases like Oberaden had been established along the River Lippe, not too much weight should be placed on one Roman writer’s claim that ‘Drusus built more than fifty forts on the Rhine alone.’33

  One should not forget that Drusus had twice led his army into serious danger. In his first campaign along the North Sea, a misreading of the tides meant that his fleet had to be saved by his allies. More pertinently, as mentioned above, in his second campaign, he was tricked in an ambush and trapped in a narrow pass. It i
s clear that from the outset the German tribes were aware that there was no point in trying to defeat Rome on the open battlefield. Guerrilla tactics and ambushes would always be at the heart of their arsenal and as such, the Battle of Teutoburg Forest should be seen less as a tactical innovation, rather the refinement and culmination of a long-term strategic development.

  Command now passed on to Drusus’ younger brother Tiberius and, with this, Rome’s policy towards Germany moved up a gear. Aside from his more general imperial ambitions, Augustus realised that any sign of lassitude following Drusus’ death would be exploited by the Germans. What was now clearly an intended province needed a show of force. It needed to be conquered.

  Aged 34 when he headed the Rhine armies the following year, 8 BC, the future emperor Tiberius was one of Rome’s most efficient commanders. History remembers him as an old man; it recalls the tabloid gossip of the aged roué cavorting with his catamites on the island of Capri, not the young and successful general he had been.

  Large, tall and broad, with fair colouring, marred only by recurrent acne, Tiberius was never popular, despite his success. Certainly he was rather a dour man with a parched sense of humour. On one occasion he compared his provincial governors to gorged flies on a sore – better to leave them than to drive them off and invite new ones he said. On another he chastised a governor’s punitive tax policy, saying that he expected his sheep shorn, not flayed.34 It is overly simplistic to say that his character was shaped because he was left-handed, but he is certainly one of the few figures in the ancient world who were attested as such. Almost the only sign of human weakness we have is that as a young man he was a heavy drinker. A nickname given in his earliest army days stuck. In an admittedly not especially clever wordplay, his name Tiberius Claudius Nero became Biberius Caldius Mero or ‘Neat Wine Drinker’.

  As a commander, he was slow and deliberate in all that he did. His caution won plaudits from his men if not from historians. Velleius Paterculus’ praise of him is sincere and stands in sharp contrast to Augustus, overheard after a cabinet meeting to say, ‘Alas for the Roman people, to be ground by jaws that crunch so slowly!’35 But personal dislike did not mean that the emperor did not recognise his qualities.

  The details of Tiberius’ campaigns that year are vague. It seems he spent most of the time stabilising Roman power in territory that his brother had conquered. Velleius Paterculus, as ever, is hyperbolic. ‘Tiberius so subdued the country as to reduce it almost to the status of a tributary province,’ he writes.36 It appears that the commander had targeted the Sugambri on the lower Rhine and, if any credence can be given to Velleius’ account, it can be seen in the fact that treaties were signed with some tribes. The campaigns were perceived as successful enough to honour Tiberius with a triumph. A silver cup, found in Boscoreale in Italy and now in the Louvre Museum in Paris, shows Tiberius riding through the streets of Rome crowned with the victor’s wreath.

  From the time of Tiberius’ command it is possible to detect the change in strategy on the ground as well. The site of Oberaden on the River Lippe was abandoned around now, and then burned. In and of itself this should not necessarily be thought of in terms of either failure or even of Germanic aggression; rather it is an indication that the first phase of Romanisation was over. A new general, naturally enough, decided that the military imperatives required a different disposition of troops. Oberaden had simply served its purpose. The burning that the archaeologists have uncovered was not the effect of attacks, just standard procedure. The Jewish historian Josephus explicitly writes that when Romans withdrew from a site, ‘they set fire to their camp, because it is easy for them to erect another one and so that it may never be of use to their enemies’. It was a policy followed throughout the empire. When the fort of Inchtuthil, on the banks of the Tay in Perthshire, was abandoned in AD 87, following a systematic withdrawal from Scotland under the Emperor Domitian, the site was deliberately and carefully dismantled.37 What can be seen in Germany is a formal and organised withdrawal, possibly, but not definitely, to the Roman camp at Haltern.

  Frustratingly for the historian, a largely impenetrable veil descends on Germany for the ten years from 6 BC. Irritated and disillusioned at perpetually playing second fiddle, Tiberius withdrew from public life and settled himself on the other side of the empire – in semi-exile on Rhodes. The reasons are as debated now as they were at the time. Most plausibly it was a combination of exhaustion – imperial expectations had rested largely on his shoulders since the death of his brother – and a desire not to get involved in succession politics.38 But as he did so, the attention of the historians shifted away from Germany. Indeed we know shockingly little about the empire as a whole during this period.

  This is not to say that the western front was quiet. The familiar pattern of attack and counter-attack continued. Tiberius was replaced by Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, again a family promotion. Ahenobarbus was the emperor’s nephew by marriage and since he had married the elder of Mark Antony’s daughters, he was Drusus’ brother-in-law.

  Even though he had had a successful political career – Ahenobarbus had notched up a consulship in 16 BC and ran Africa four years later – by almost all accounts the grandfather of the Emperor Nero was a deeply unpleasant man. ‘Haughty, extravagant and cruel’ and so addicted to games that Augustus was forced to rebuke him on at least one occasion, writes one. The one note of sympathy, and again, it is possibly a reflection of his reputation with Rhine armies, comes from Velleius Paterculus, who praises his ‘eminent and noble simplicity’.39

  Ahenobarbus had become involved in the German theatre of war indirectly. As legate for the province of Illyria, he had led an expeditionary force which had crossed the River Elbe, penetrating further into Germany than any Roman before him, where he erected an altar to Augustus and concluded a non-aggression treaty with tribes beyond the river.40 He received a triumph and was promoted to the German commission, though in this Ahenobarbus was much less successful, managing somehow to alienate the Cherusci.

  He was succeeded by Marcus Vinicius, the grandfather of the man to whom Velleius Paterculus dedicated his volume of history. His tour of duty was dominated by an escalating tribal revolt that became a vast war (‘immensum bellum’ is the phrase that Velleius Paterculus uses)41 which staggered on for three years. No further details have survived other than that he must have acquitted himself adequately as he too was awarded a triumph on his return to Rome.

  In AD 4 the veil begins to lift. The emperor appointed a new man to Germany – Gaius Sentius Saturninus. In his late fifties when he took command there, Saturninus, like virtually all the others posted here, was part of the inner circle of commanders that included Marcus Lollius, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus and, of course, Varus. He was already in position, presumably from the spring if not the autumn before, when Tiberius arrived to command the Rhine armies once more. His return was greeted with relief by his armies. ‘The tears of joy in the soldiers’ eyes at the sight of him, their enthusiasm, their exuberant greetings, their longing to touch his hand, and their inability to restrain such cries as “Is it really you, commander?” “Are you safely back with us?” “I served with you, general, in Armenia!” “And I in Switzerland!” “I received my decoration from you in Vindelicia [the area from Switzerland to the Danube]!” “And I mine in Hungary!” “And I in Germany!”’ writes Velleius Paterculus, who was there.42

  This acclamation was the preface to two years’ campaigning, most of which was focused on the northern reaches of Germany well beyond the River Rhine. It is likely that Tiberius was intermittently based at Anreppen on the upper Lippe, the most easterly base that has been found on the river, and perfectly positioned for action beyond the hills to the east and towards the River Weser.

  At first sight, Anreppen, which was discovered by accident in 1967, is peculiarly sited. For self-evident reasons, Roman camps were conventionally situated on higher ground to give the legionaries the greatest protection. Here, however, there wa
s a more obvious spot, only 3km away, that was not used. The reason lies in the river and its role in transportation. Although it is not the case any more, the River Lippe was navigable this far, up to the Middle Ages. The camp, south of the river and just east of the confluence with the Stemmeckebach, is long and thin, some 750m by 330m, to take advantage of the land that was above the river’s flood zone. It has a re-entrant some 140m long and 90m deep, which has been convincingly identified as a harbour docking zone for loading and unloading. As the German archaeologist Siegmar von Schnurbein has explained, Tiberius ‘deliberately sacrificed tactical advantages in favour of proximity to the river’.43

  During that first year, which took him to the Weser, three tribes – the Canninefates, the Attuarii and the Bructeri – were defeated, while the ever-quarrelsome Cherusci were subjugated. His second campaign took Tiberius to the Elbe, possibly as far as the modern city of Dresden. Velleius exaggerates the seriousness of the resistance put up to Tiberius during these two campaigns. His commander was certainly not the first Roman general to cross the Elbe, nor was he the first to winter on the wrong side of the Rhine. Nonetheless, it is clear that Rome now believed that the bulk of the pacification in Germany had been completed. ‘Nothing remained to be conquered in Germany’, is Velleius’ overly optimistic conclusion.44

  At any rate by the spring of AD 6, Germany was deemed secure enough for a campaign to be considered against Maroboduus, king of a tribe called the Marcomanni in what is roughly the western half of the Czech Republic, what used to be called Bohemia. Tiberius rated him as one of Rome’s most formidable enemies. Philip of Macedon had not been as dangerous to Athens, nor any of those who had stood against Rome in the days of the Republic, as Maroboduus was to Rome, he said.45 In one sense he was right. Maroboduus was later to become a significant factor in the war against Arminius, though not remotely in any way that Tiberius could have expected.