Rome's Greatest Defeat E-Book

Adrian Murdoch

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 406

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Beschreibung

In AD 9 half of Rome's Western army was ambushed in a German forest and annihilated. Three legions, three cavalry units and six auxiliary regiments - some 25,000 men - were wiped out. It dealt a body blow to the empire's imperial pretensions and was Rome's greatest defeat. No other battle stopped the Roman empire dead in its tracks. Although one of the most significant and dramatic battles in European history, this is also one which has been largely overlooked. Drawing on primary sources and a vast wealth of new archaeological evidence, Adrian Murdoch brings to life the battle itself, the historical background and the effects of the Roman defeat as well as exploring the personalities of those who took part.

Leseprobe

ROME’SGREATESTDEFEAT

ROME’SGREATESTDEFEAT

MASSACRE IN THE TEUTOBURG FOREST

ADRIAN MURDOCH

First published in 2006 by Sutton Publishing

This edition published by The History Press 2008

Reprinted in 2009, 2010, 2012

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Adrian Murdoch, 2008, 2013

The right of Adrian Murdoch, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9455 5

Original typesetting by The History Press

 

For Susy

 

Contents

Maps

Family Trees

Introduction

This Savage Forest

One

The Tangled Paths of War

Two

A Wolf or a Shepherd?

Three

Pore Benighted ’Eathen

Four

This Terrible Calamity

Five

Give Me Back My Legions!

Six

Germany’s Might

Seven

A Second Troy

Appendix

The Finds

Notes

Select Bibliography

 

Maps

 

Family Trees

INTRODUCTION

This Savage Forest

Bones were all he could see. Although the German soil had reclaimed most of the traces, he was standing in the remains of what had been a marching camp. The ditches had slowly silted up and weeds had grown back over the boundaries and the fort’s streets. Not even the charred traces of campfires had survived. Six years previously three legions, three cavalry battalions and six auxiliary units had died around here. Some 14,000 men had been wiped out in a matter of days.

It was dangerous, an indulgence almost, to come here. It had been a brutal and gruelling year. He and his legions had been on campaign since the spring. He had first seen off the Chatti, a tribe that lived in what would become the state of Hesse, razing their capital and destroying their farmland. Then he had savaged the area around Münster in a combined cavalry, infantry and marine assault that had paralysed the enemy.

And now, in the early autumn of AD 15, he was here. In his mind’s eye he could see how the surviving cavalry and infantry had formed up in the cutting rain under the barbarian onslaught, as their colleagues built some protection. He could hear the trumpets of the heralds blasting out orders and centurions shouting at legionaries as they constructed a marching fort; tough veterans trying to rally shaken groups of soldiers with that same mixture of humour and contempt common to every army, doing anything to keep their minds off what could happen. It was the might of the Roman army working like clockwork, manoeuvres that every soldier present would have practised many, many times before.

He only had four legions with him today. His deputy, Aulus Caecina Severus, was currently patrolling the surrounding area with another four legions as planned. With any luck they should have been reconnoitring for ambushes, checking the passes and making the swamps and waterways safe with bridges and causeways.

He rode on. Ahead the second redoubt – the word ‘camp’ was too generous – spoke of dying men and of desperate and hurried construction. All that remained was a partially collapsed rampart and a shallow ditch. This could not contain three legions; it was space for hundreds, not thousands of men. This was the place for a last stand. The field was strewn with the remains of men. Some skeletons lay on their own, some in clusters, their bones now whitened and impersonal. Yet even after five German summers it was still obvious that the legionaries lay where they had fallen, some making a last stand, others caught trying to escape.

It was the perfect spot for an ambush, this unforgiving German landscape, along the main west–east road from the mid-Weser to the safety of the Roman camps and nascent towns on the lower Rhine. Near the remains of the camp he could see the 6km-long narrow pass, the via dolorosa along which Legions XVII, XVIII and XIX had marched to their deaths. The army had been funnelled along an uneven and difficult path, clogged with drifting sand and only 200m wide in places, with the oak- and beech-lined Kalkriese Mountain to one side, the waterlogged Great Moor on the other.

Some of the survivors of the disaster showed their commander around. They pointed out the stained and scorched altars. It was here that the Germans, under the command of the turncoat Arminius, had burned the tribunes and first-rank centurions alive. They reported, blow by blow, how the three eagles, Rome’s military standards, had been captured. They pointed out where senior officers had been killed. This is where Numonius Vala was cut down from his horse while trying to make a break for the river; that is where Ceionius surrendered once he realised that there was no chance for survival; over here is where Lucius Eggius was killed. And then they re-enacted Publius Quinctilius Varus’ final moments. This is where the architect of this disaster, the governor of Germany had first been wounded, where he had taken his own life, and finally where his adjutants had buried him.

It was his successor, Germanicus, who now stood deep within German territory. The governor of Upper and Lower Germany, commander of eight legions, adopted son of the Emperor Tiberius and heir to the Roman Empire had come on a pilgrimage, to try and lay to rest the shame of Rome, to exorcise some ghosts and to pay his last respects. The greatest emperor that Rome would never have, had to see it. His soldiers had to see it.

This expedition to the battlefield of the Varian disaster would earn Germanicus an official imperial reprimand. Romans, unlike Christians, did not sanctify death. His very presence at a mass grave, at a German sanctuary, was inappropriate and inauspicious for one of Rome’s most senior priests. More seriously, the remains of the makeshift gibbets from which Roman soldiers had been hanged, the pits into which still-living infantry men had been thrown, the skulls nailed to nearby trees were not an appropriate sight for Roman legionaries. It could be too much of a blow for morale and make them slow to fight. The visit was opening up old wounds that were, at any rate, barely healed.

To Germanicus and his men, the battlefield looked like the one-sided slaughter that it had been. He could see no trace of German corpses nor any of their weapons. Like the ancient Spartans, Germans came back with their shields or on them. The Germans who had fallen in battle were long since buried at home. If he had spotted it, an iron spur with a small, spiked wheel that lay on the battlefield was certainly of native design, but had the German auxiliary cavalry soldier who had lost it fought for Romans or had he fought for Arminius?

He could see only Roman arms, too broken for even the Germans to scavenge. A spearhead could not speak, could not tell Germanicus whether it had been thrown in anger or in defence. Some of those shattered and bent pieces had been used by the traitors, former auxiliaries for the Emperor Augustus who had then fought the Romans with their own weaponry. Anything usable had long been salvaged and handed out by the tribal chieftains as gifts and honours. Since the battle, whenever the Germans had met the Romans in warfare, they would use the spoils of Kalkriese against the legionaries. They were even, eventually, to use them against each other.

Germanicus did not care about any of this now. As the legionaries began to collect all the bones they could find, not knowing whether they were burying a friend, a relative or a stranger, he laid the first turf on the funeral mound himself. For his legionaries it was a sign of respect and honour from their commanding officer, seeing him share their sorrow for friends and colleagues they had known and fought alongside. It was a communal expiation of loss and guilt.

Germanicus’ tumulus was not to survive the year. At some point in the next few months it would be torn apart by Germans furious that the Romans had defiled what had been preserved by them as a cult site. But not all bones had been collected together. There were simply too many for a single barrow. During excavations in the mid-1990s, archaeologists found collections of bones which had been gathered together and buried in five pits. A muddle of human and animal remains, they were confirmed by scientific analysis to have been lying above the ground for some years. The human remains were all male and of military age (between 20 and 40), and a glance at the human teeth that were found, both singly and in sets, suggested that the individuals had been in good health. Trauma to the skulls from swords and blunt instruments pointed to the reasons for death. One – grave number five – speaks of the pains that some of the soldiers went to over the remains of their fallen comrades. Were they somehow recognisable? Rather than heaped into the pit, the bones look as though they were laid in there with care.1

Germanicus’ almost voyeuristic gamble paid off. The bones on the battlefield had made his men more angry and more anxious for a battle and for revenge, not slow to fight or afraid of the Germans. But however many triumphal marches through Rome were awarded to commanders who fought in Germany and however many jingoistic coins were issued that proclaimed victory in Germany, the defeat of Varus and his men in the autumn of AD 9 was a blow from which the Romans were never to recover fully.

Contemporaries visibly struggle to find an analogy large enough for the defeat. Even by the standards of a mechanised modern society, the losses give pause for thought, comparable as they are to total US losses during the campaign for the Philippines in the Second World War, and marginally smaller than British losses on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. Little surprise, then, that one Roman historian, an old Germany hand, called it ‘the heaviest defeat the Romans had suffered on foreign soil since the disaster of Crassus’, a reference to the loss of 22,000 soldiers two generations previously at the hands of the Parthians, Rome’s great imperial rival to the east. Another compared it to Cannae, the Roman Republic’s greatest defeat, when some 55,000 men were wiped out by the Carthaginian general Hannibal in 218 BC after he had crossed the Alps.2 But those stains were eventually washed off the military record; they only delayed the inevitable for those who dared oppose Rome. Parthia was levelled and Hannibal was defeated. After the Battle of Teutoburg Forest there was never another attempt to impose Roman life east of the Rhine. This truly was Rome’s greatest defeat.

‘I found a city of brick and I left it one of marble’, was Augustus’ proud boast of Rome.3 Glory, expansion and conquest dominate the emperor’s rule. By the end of his reign the empire had the use of twenty-five legions, some 140,000 men and as many auxiliaries. In the eastern empire the emperor’s legions had pushed south into the Sudan and across into the Persian Gulf, and had consolidated his hold in Armenia. In the southern empire he had taken on the African tribes. And in the west, the Alps, northern Spain and southern Germany all fell to the Romans. It was a legacy that none of Augustus’ predecessors could rival and few of his successors were to equal. The nature of Augustus’ imperialism still causes debate and divides scholars. Was it relentless expansion versus cautious growth, or imperialist aggression versus defensive evolution? In one sense the question is irrelevant. All that matters is that the Roman Empire was growing.

Roman citizens did not care whether it was pragmatism rather than policy that shaped the boundaries of Augustus’ empire. Jupiter had promised Aeneas’ descendants an empire without boundaries. Augustus’ power would be limited only by the ocean and the skies. In the 1960s, US president John F. Kennedy challenged Americans to ask what they could do for their country and they in turn raced to put a man on the moon. The same sense of optimism and enterprise pervades the writings of most of Augustus’ contemporaries. It was a world and many decades away from the catty asides of Martial and languid cynicism of Juvenal. Not only was Augustus ‘the son of a god who would bring back the age of gold’, but this new generation would ‘inherit the earth’. The poet Horace felt he could encourage the emperor to hurry up and mobilise against ‘the Britons, farthest of the world’. It was not that the poet particularly wanted to see Britain conquered, but that it was the furthest land he could think of.4 The divine impetus that drove on the British Empire in the nineteenth century and the self-belief that has been evident in US foreign policy since the Second World War would have been remarkably familiar to the Romans.

An empire built as much on mythology and self-aggrandisement as on action, however, had neither the language nor the emotional maturity to cope with defeat. As much as anything, Augustus needed foreign expansion as a distraction from the domestic. After generations of civil wars, foreign enemies that could be defeated were necessary. Arminius’ victory therefore had to be buried and ignored. The fact that Roman attempts to colonise Germany had been a total shambles were mentioned only indirectly. The only admission of failure is the historian Tacitus’ rueful and slightly oblique aside almost a century later that ‘in the course of the past 210 years much punishment has been given and taken by us in Germany’.5 Within a generation, Varus had become a scapegoat and the few survivors of the encounter in the Teutoburg Forest were quietly moved to other legions or banned from ever setting foot in Italy. And as for Germany, the Rhine became the border, the barrier between civilisation and barbarism, one only unwillingly crossed throughout the rest of the Roman Empire.

There are few defining battles in history that have stopped an empire in its tracks. The Battle of Britain, which halted Hitler’s western ambitions during the Second World War, or the Battle of Poitiers in 732, when Charles Martel saved Europe from the threat of Islam, are two that come to mind. It is fair to say that the reputation of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in modern times has to some extent rested on this. Edward Shepherd Creasy, in his 1852 classic, listed it as one of the Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, putting the Varian disaster on a par with the US victory over General John Burgoyne at Saratoga and the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. The brilliant German historian and Nobel prize winner Theodor Mommsen went even further, regarding it as the turning point in Germany’s national destiny.

The battle also reinforced another effect, one less tangible, but one that has had a profound psychological and social impact on Europe and is still being felt today. It confirmed the fault-line between north and south. History could now be used to back up long-held prejudices. This divide has been most archly articulated by the British journalist and writer A.A. Gill: ‘The slaughter in the Teutoburg Forest divided Europe into the warm south, who forever saw forests as dreadful places to be avoided and cleared, homes to dragons and trolls, antitheses of the civilised city, and the north, who understood them to be healing, protecting, mystical, spiritual places. How you feel about a silent birch forest at twilight says more about your blood and your kin than your passport.’6

For northern Europeans, forests are both spiritual spaces and a place of safety. One of the central themes of Norse mythology is that of Yggdrasil, the evergreen ash, beneath whose branches stands the well of wisdom. Similarly, when Nietzsche’s Zarathustra comes down from the mountains, the first person he meets is a holy man in the forest. Even in – some – British myths, the forest is a place of honour and refuge. Robin Hood preserves the memory of Richard the Lionheart and battles King John from the sanctuary of Sherwood Forest.

In southern European and Middle Eastern tradition, forests are places of fear and loathing. That they are to be avoided has been ingrained from time immemorial. The world’s first hero, the Mesopotamian warrior Gilgamesh, has to go into the Cedar Forest and defeat its guardian to prove that he has a right to rule. The book of Deuteronomy explicitly equates forests with pagan rites. ‘Ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire,’ it says.7 It is telling that one solution to suppress paganism, posited by Martin of Tours, patron saint of France and the first great leader of Western monasticism, was to chop down trees. The archetype and most moving articulation of this position is the opening few lines of The Divine Comedy, where Dante wanders in a ‘wilderness of sin and bestiality’, before his descent into the Underworld:

How hard a thing it is to say

What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,

Which in the very thought renews the fear.

Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

Not for nothing are forests the backdrop to, and scene of, the resolution of virtually every one of the folk tales that the Grimm brothers collected. Yet the fairy story that immediately springs to mind where the forest remains a source of fear and evil throughout is Little Red Riding Hood, written by the Parisian Charles Perrault. That same tradition is alive and well today. The one part of the school grounds that is out of bounds for the pupils at Hogwarts in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels is the appositely named Forbidden Forest. Whenever the narrative takes the young wizard there, it is invariably unsettling or dangerous.8

But forests are not just dangerous for the individual, they threaten the very fabric of society. In Euripides’ Bacchae, surely the most terrifying of all classical plays, when the Thebans reject Dionysus’ divinity, the god drives the king out of the city and into the countryside, where his mother and the women of Thebes in a bacchanalian frenzy tear him to pieces; when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, the Scottish king Macbeth is unseated. Forests are so dangerous they can even cost kings their thrones.

For all of these reasons, an account of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest is long overdue, or, more accurately, an account of the disaster in English is long overdue. The bimillenary celebrations of the battle, which will round off recent anniversary festivities for a number of German towns (Bonn, Cologne and Trier, to name just three) are only a few years off. But although Arminius and Varus are, naturally enough, part of Germany’s national consciousness, their names often warrant barely a flicker of recognition in the English-speaking world. It is fair to say that Roman Germany as a whole, specifically the country’s early history under the first emperors, has been conspicuously ignored outside Germany. Even in the academic field, only a handful of critical book-length studies have appeared in the last thirty years. The sheer volume and variety of discoveries in the last decade alone – archaeological, historical, epigraphic – make this nothing short of a scandal.9

The intention of the first five chapters of Rome’s Greatest Defeat is to reconstruct what happened and to put the events of AD 9 into some kind of context. Space is of course given to Augustan foreign policy and its implications, but the primary aim is to look at the personalities and events that led to the disaster. Too much of what we know is understood in the same way as the Battle of the Alamo or the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Myth has glossed reality and, all too often, Varus and Arminius are rendered as stereotypes. The former becomes an arrogant lawyer, incompetent and out of his depth, the latter a freedom fighter, throwing off the shackles of imperial Rome. Of course neither view is strictly fair. Above all, Varus and Arminius deserve to be looked at on their own terms.

Until fifteen years ago any historian attempting to look at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest would have been reliant on a handful of literary sources. It is worth taking a few moments to look at them, to understand their perspectives and, above all, to grasp the different intentions between history in the classical world and now. As the German historian Dieter Timpe warns, when reading Tacitus (though his observation holds for all classical writers), ‘a paraphrase of the text does not give a view of the war as a modern reader would understand it’.10

The earliest surviving accounts of the battle are arguably the most valuable. One such was published around twenty years after the event by a retired cavalry officer from Campania called Velleius Paterculus, and dedicated to a friend from his home town who had just become consul. His work is commonly called Roman History, though it was not given that title until the early sixteenth century. The word that he uses for his work is transcursus, a sketch, and that is certainly a more accurate description for this romp through world history.

Velleius’ name is rarely mentioned in the same breath as great historians like Livy or Tacitus. One translator goes so far as to suggest that Velleius ‘does not rank among the great Olympians of classical literature either as stylist or as historian’, concluding rather backhandedly that ‘there is much in this comparatively neglected author that is worth reading once, at least in translation’.11 Even if his sympathetic treatment of Tiberius has made many suspicious of his judgements, it is an unfair précis and it is Velleius’ partiality that makes him such a joy to read. Rarely do historians wear their bias so clearly on their sleeves.

Velleius’ significance lies not only in that he almost certainly knew Varus, but that he had unparalleled experience of Germany. When he writes that the Germans are so fierce and so treacherous that ‘it is scarcely credible to one who has had no experience with them’, it is clearly a comment that is written from the heart. His father had been stationed there, and both he and his brother had risen to become senior staff members under Tiberius during the German campaigns. Velleius was in his late twenties when Teutoburg occurred and, at the behest of Augustus himself, left a nascent political career in Rome to take part in retaliatory campaigns. His views of the Germans, therefore, are not tinged by any kind of idealism. ‘Humans only in shape and speech’ he calls them. From his soldier’s perspective, his view that the disaster was caused by bad leadership and Varus’ naivety – ‘the commander’s lack of judgement’, as he puts it – carries weight.12

Our second literary source is Publius (or Gaius – the matter is still debated) Cornelius Tacitus, arguably Rome’s greatest historian. Born almost half a century after the events discussed here, in the late 50s AD, Tacitus combined a stellar career in politics and oratory with writing. Although he was not of senatorial birth, his father had both the money and connections to set his son up on an upwardly mobile career path.

His father’s faith paid off. By the time he was 20, Tacitus had married the daughter of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, consul, governor of Britain and the first well-known invader of Scotland. Within a few years more, Tacitus was able to tick off the stages that indicated a serious political career: treasury official, member of the priesthood, a stint in the provinces. By AD 97 he had reached the pinnacle when he held the consulship in the latter part of the year.

It was around now that Tacitus embarked on a second career as a writer, the one on which his reputation would be based. After the death of his father-in-law, he published his first book, Agricola, a curious mixture of biography and political spin. This was followed soon after by Germania, a monograph on the customs and character of the people, again wrapped in political caul, inspired possibly by his own time as commander of a legion in Germany. These two books (as well as a third monograph on oratory and poetry) proved both popular and influential. Pliny the Younger wrote him a fan letter: ‘I was still a young man when you were already winning fame and fortune and I aspired to follow in your footsteps.’13 Tacitus’ final two greatest works, Histories and Annals, straddled his last political posting, as proconsul of Asia. Of the former, a twenty-seven-year history of Rome from AD 69, sadly only a third survives, while around half of his Annals of the reigns of Augustus to Nero have come down to us.

Tacitus was an incomparable prose stylist. In literary terms, few historians have managed so perfectly to keep the human element and the larger geopolitical themes in sharp focus at the same time. But he also had a clear political agenda and this must be borne in mind when looking at his allusions to the events of AD 9. He saw the role of the historian as that of a doctor, trying to find a prognosis for Rome’s ills. He found it in the nature and effects of power. Although he alludes to it frequently and covers the subsequent retaliatory campaigns, Tacitus does not write about Varus’ fated campaign directly. Nonetheless, like any Roman, especially one pondering his own generation’s failure to conquer Germany, he was profoundly influenced by where the previous generations had gone wrong.

It is important also to appreciate the extent to which Tacitus’ writings have affected the way that the battle has been perceived; indeed he gave the battle the name by which it is known today. As one historian commented, Tacitus ‘let a genie out of a bottle that could never again be controlled’.14 With the rediscovery of the manuscript in the fifteenth century, and the publication of the Annals in the early sixteenth century, the German people began to appreciate that they had a past; that their predecessors were brave and warlike and that they were nothing like the Romans. It was not just that modern Germans had a history of their own, their hero had a name: Arminius.

The third author is Cassius Dio, born in the early 160s in the prosperous provincial city of Nicaea (now Iznik in north-western Turkey) and writing in the first quarter of the third century. His Roman History is an account of the empire from Aeneas’ landing in Italy to the accession of Septimius Severus in AD 193, of which a third survives. It is sometimes forgotten that, like Tacitus, Dio was an exceptional career politician as much as a historian. He was consul twice, and municipal governor of Pergamon and Smyrna on Turkey’s western coast. Like Varus, he served as governor of Africa; and he also oversaw the provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia Superior. His achievements are the more remarkable, given the fact that it was rare to find a Greek in that position.

The raciest and one of the longest accounts of the battle – it takes up a significant part of Book 56 – Dio is generally more sympathetic towards Varus than either Velleius or Tacitus. Dio emphasises the frontier nature of Germany and, where he does criticise Varus, it is for his failure to recognise in what a fragile and unstable environment he found himself. Varus, he suggests, was trying to administer as if Germany were already a province. As if that were not enough, he was certainly overconfident in his security.

But what emerges most strongly of all in his history is Dio’s dislike of barbarians. He writes scathingly of their ‘ancestral habits’ and sneers that they ‘did not understand siege craft’. This is less inherent racism than cultural snobbery. In the ancient world, no one could hold a candle to the Graecophones for sheer social distain. Elsewhere in his Roman History he tells the story of an actor who ‘bombed’ in Rome, but was a theatrical triumph in Lyons. If that’s the level of sophistication you could expect from the provinces, then it is no wonder that they would stoop to trickery.15

Finally there is the brief Epitome of Roman History by Lucius Annaeus Florus, a stylish outline of Roman history, which was written at some point in the middle of the second century. We know little about the author; indeed even his name is suspect. He was born, so we are told, in Africa but came to Rome as a young boy. Disliking the cliques that dominated Rome’s literati, he travelled for a time before settling in Spain. At some later point, probably during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, he returned to Rome.

Although the Epitome was hugely popular throughout Europe as a school text in the seventeenth century, the reputation of Florus has suffered in recent times because of his notorious errors, inconsistencies and exaggeration. Nevertheless, he should not be dismissed out of hand. His account does furnish some details which have the ring of truth about them. He passes some of the strategic blame for the debacle on to Augustus – ‘Germany’s loss was a disgrace which far outweighed the glory of its acquisition’16 – but like his historian colleagues, he gives the non-military nature of Varus’ rule as reason that he so easily had the wool pulled over his eyes by Arminius.

Even though historians bemoan the fact that the classic Roman history of the region during this period, Pliny the Elder’s German Wars, has been lost, under normal circumstances only the most churlish would complain about the richness of this vein of history. There are many events throughout the classical age that rely on far fewer sources.

Germanicus and his men had been the last people to see the battlefield of Teutoburg Forest in person. This did not stop both amateurs and professionals looking for it. From the country’s first real flickerings of national consciousness in the early nineteenth century, fanned by what was the first recorded event in German history, debate about where the Battle of Teutoburg Forest had taken place became a national pastime. Some 700 different locations were proposed and debated in print.

Then in 1989 and armed only with a metal detector, Tony Clunn, at the time an officer with the Armoured Field Ambulance in Germany, found the site at Kalkriese, north of the modern town of Osnabrück. This discovery, an account of which makes up the final chapter of Rome’s Greatest Defeat, is on a par with Heinrich Schliemann’s excavation of Troy. Now archaeologists could corroborate – or not – the classical accounts of the battle from a part of the battlefield itself. It is difficult to stress quite how much of a significant find this was for the history of the west. As the leading German ancient historian Reinhard Wolters writes, ‘the possibility of an interdisciplinary overview like this is a rare piece of luck’.17

It is important here to emphasise that Kalkriese is not the battlefield itself. What rapidly became apparent as the archaeologists started their surveys is that, strictly speaking, the Battle of Teutoburg Forest is a complete misnomer: the conflict between Arminius and Varus took place over several days within a large area, estimated at some 50sq km. If you look at the remains plotted on a map, as one modern historian has written with painful poignancy, they bring to mind more modern conflict: ‘A German colleague told me that it reminded him of the scatter of arms and personal possessions along the line of flight which he had seen as a child when the German army was in full retreat after the Allies crossed the Rhine in 1945.’18 Instead what we have here is one of the – possibly decisive – climaxes of a battle.

More disconcerting still, not only was there no battlefield, there was comparatively little forest. The image that many have had in their minds, of a conflict similar to the opening moments of the Ridley Scott film Gladiator from 2000, of Romans and Germans fighting in heavy woodland, was proved false. Much of the surrounding area was farmland. Tacitus’ phrase, Teutoburgiensi saltu,19 which gave its name to the battle and to the range of mountains in Lower Saxony and North Rhein-Westfalia, where the battle was thought to have taken place, appears to have been misinterpreted. While it may indeed be rendered as ‘Teutoburg Forest’, it may also be translated as ‘Teutoburg Pass’. This seemed to be a much more plausible version as archaeologists examined the terrain.

If that seems slightly deflating, it must be emphasised that it is rare to have sight of a battle at all. Unlike other classical conflicts that can be precisely dated and that have been excavated – for example the site of Alesia, where Julius Caesar laid siege to the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix in 52 BC, or Masada, where the Jews made their last stand in AD 73/4 – here there is no connection with a camp or a settlement. The Roman army was on the march. It is an incredible archaeological discovery that adds a valuable dimension to our understanding both of the battle itself and Roman warfare in general.

On its own, this would be a rich enough treasure to prompt consideration of a re-evaluation of the period. But numerous other finds make a new account essential. Most noteworthy of all has been the discovery of an early Roman settlement, east of Koblenz, deep in the heart of Germany. Excavations which have continued at Waldgirmes in the Lahn valley since 1993, together with those at Gaukönigshofen and Marktbreit in Bavaria since the 1980s, have shed an entirely new light on our understanding of what it was that the Romans were attempting in the years before Varus’ governorship.

This newly acquired wealth of information aside, a caveat is still in order. When looking at the Roman protagonists of the period, few would argue that there is enough of a depth of knowledge about even members of the imperial royal family for a plausible biography in the modern, full-psychological sense of the word. That is not even the case with some of the other characters in this book. At best the historian is faced with a handful of comments scattered throughout the classical canon, together, if he is very fortunate, with a couple of inscriptions. At worst, he must extrapolate a life from the sparse lines on a gravestone.

If that appears a perilous task for the Romans, it is much more so for the Germans. Inevitably, given their non-literate culture, Arminius and his Cheruscan comrades start off as much more shadowy characters than their Roman counterparts. Conclusions may be drawn only from Roman sources (hostile or fictional in pretty much equal measure) and from archaeology. It is easy to slip into the trap of seeing the Germans as noble savages, roaming around their Elysium.

An additional and country-specific twist is the almost total lack of modern research that has been carried out on the various barbarian tribes. Despite the vast amount of work that has been done on Roman Germany in the last decades, German academics have, perhaps understandably, been unwilling to engage in discussions that touch on ethnicity since the end of the Second World War. The crisis of confidence in postwar archaeology in Germany resulted in the precedence of methodology over analysis, and of description over interpretation. The point is that hard facts are often few and far between. Almost more than for any other period, two historians are rarely going to agree on an interpretation of early Roman Germany. The path I have nonetheless tried to follow is one of consensus. Where I have strayed, my arguments for having done so can be followed in the endnotes.

While a deliberately tight focus on the events themselves is paramount, it is also important for the historian to see beyond this, to see the wood beyond the trees. Rome’s Greatest Defeat has the secondary aim of highlighting the ways in which the battle has been transmitted through history.

The last fifty years alone are littered with examples of forces finding ways to neutralise their technologically superior aggressors. A dinner party voguishness has crept over the whole branch of military science devoted to what has been dubbed ‘asymmetric warfare’. This technique of nullifying an opponent’s technological and numerical superiority to make him fight stupidly is very much a feature of modern warfare, with practitioners from the Viet Cong in Vietnam to rebels in Somalia; from groups like al-Qa’eda to insurgents in Iraq. The strategic and tactical decisions taken by Arminius have forceful parallels with the contemporary military landscape. It is telling that the US military has considered it worth analysing the Varian disaster, for the light it can shed on modern conflicts.20

While that is a significant form of transmission, I shall be focusing, later in the book, on the political lessons that have been drawn from the battle, rather than the military ones. All too often since the nineteenth century, Arminius’ uprising has been used as an excuse for war rather than a warning from history; a casus belli rather than an exemplum belli if you will. The ideologies that have co-opted Arminius himself range from the merely bellicose to the utterly abhorrent.

Despite the (comparative) modernity of the concept of nationalism, paradoxically it is history that suffers its indignities. In the past our nation was glorious, pure and unified, so the argument of nationalists goes. Now we are living in a present that has been degraded by some agency or trauma, be it the invasion of Napoleon or the perceived unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles. Only through collective action can we reverse this. While the two examples just mentioned, together with Arminius, had a specific resonance for Germany, the argument is as valid for France’s promotion of Charlemagne or Giuseppe Mazzini’s harking back to the glory of Rome during the Italian independence movement.

It would be wrong, though, to dismiss this as a nineteenth- or even twentieth-century phenomenon. It remains wholly apparent today. Some modern examples are obvious, such as the Serbian citing of the battle fought on the Field of the Blackbirds in 1389 as justification for taking Kosovo in the 1990s, or the relentless bickering between Macedonia and Greece over who owns Alexander the Great. But this kind of manipulation can also be more subtle. ‘Everything (well, almost everything) you know about American history is wrong,’ states the back cover of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, ‘because most textbooks and popular history books are written by left-wing academic historians who treat their biases as fact.’ In Thomas Wood’s agitprop, which spent a good part of early 2005 in the New York Times bestseller list, we see history being politicised, a reflection of the popular political climate in a country.

As one of the earliest battles in history to have been misused in this way (especially given the extreme depths to which this practice sank under the Nazi regime in Germany from 1933 to 1945), this transmission of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest is examined in chapter six.

A few concluding notes are in order. The potential pitfalls that face those who try to find a uniform contemporary style for the classical names of cities of the ancient world is well known. It is impossible to do so when, for example, Köln, Ara Ubiorum and Colonia Agrippinensis all refer to the city of Cologne at one time or another in its history. Although, generally speaking, modern names are used here, familiarity and common usage have prevailed over consistency.

As Rome’s Greatest Defeat has been written with a non-specialist audience in mind, all Latin and Greek texts have been translated mostly by the author and technical terms have been explained, except where context or linguistic similarities make that unnecessary. (For that matter, so too have comments in German.) For those who wish to follow up the translations in the original, all of the references to ancient authors are available in the Loeb Classical Library, and correspond with the chapter and section numbering in that series. In the small number of cases where I have been guided by another translation, this is mentioned in the footnotes.

I hope that purists will forgive the fact that I have followed the English convention with names. Thus Publius Quinctilius Varus is referred to as Varus throughout, Marcus Tullius Cicero is Cicero, and in the index they are to be found under ‘V’ and ‘C’ respectively rather than the more strictly accurate, yet more confusing, ‘Q’ and ‘T’. In much the same manner, I have simplified the names of the imperial royal family where it would cause confusion not to do so. Just as the Emperor Augustus was called Octavian until he took the throne, so too in some older translations, and even some secondary literature, the Emperor Tiberius is referred to as Nero. Here he is referred to as Tiberius throughout.

A brief explanation is also needed about the terms ‘Celts’, ‘Gauls’ and ‘Germans’. These were terms foisted fairly arbitrarily by the Romans upon people who lived in what modern geography calls Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. They themselves had no national ethnicity as we would understand it today and their loyalty and cultural identity was predominantly tribal. The geographical area west of the Rhine that corresponds to the Roman province, I have referred to as Gaul, and the peoples, interchangeably, as Celts and Gauls. The Roman tradition has been passed down to modern history. For the sake of simplicity, the people east of the Rhine have been dubbed ‘Germans’ or are referred to by their tribal names. As for the etymology of ‘Germani’, that remains shrouded in controversy and it seems unlikely that there will ever be any consensus on the name.

The final challenge to mention has been that of the bibliography. As mentioned above, much of the critical discussion and certainly the majority of the archaeological literature on the Battle of Teutoburg Forest are in German. For example, there is not a single piece of secondary literature solely devoted to Arminius or his tribe, the Cherusci, in English. Nonetheless it would be presumptuous in the extreme to take for granted that this would cause readers no difficulty. In the Select Bibliography at the end of the book, I have therefore purposely placed a greater emphasis on articles and books written in English. Where I have cited articles and books in German, it is in the hope that some will find them useful and because they are so critical to the discussion that to leave them out would be a disservice bordering on neglect.

The most enjoyable part of a project like this is to thank those who have been kind enough to help. First of all I would like to thank the Authors’ Foundation of the Society of Authors for its kind and generous grant that enabled several trips to Roman sites in Germany. Special thanks to Anthony Barrett, David Kennedy, Lawrence Keppie, Jan Hirschmann, Jona Lendering and Mike Middleton, who have all been extremely generous with their advice. I have also benefited greatly from the help of Ilona Gymer, David Derrick and Vernon Baxter. Christopher Feeney and his colleagues at Sutton Publishing have been unfailingly helpful, as have the staff of Glasgow University Library. The manuscript was much improved in Alison Miles’ hands. Finally, I must thank my father, Brian Murdoch, without whose constant counsel I could never have finished Rome’s Greatest Defeat. All mistakes, of course, remain my own.

As ever, I would like to thank my wife Susy for her patience and support, and to her this book is dedicated, with love.

ONE

The Tangled Paths of War

Towards the end of the summer of 17 BC, three German tribes revolted. An alliance of Sugambri, Usipetes, and Tencteri, all of whose territory bordered the Rhine, arrested some Roman nationals as illegal immigrants and crucified them. This ragtag gang of tribes then rampaged across the river and started to raid into Gaul itself.

Under normal circumstances the incident would have been barely worthy of note. While not irrelevant, events like this were not uncommon at the very edges of civilisation. But what turned a frontier incursion into a diplomatic incident is that sometime in late summer, the marauders then ambushed a Roman cavalry unit. Giving chase, they surprised the legate Marcus Lollius, commander of the armies in Gaul, who was out on patrol. At that time in his early 40s, Lollius was the senior officer in charge of Gaul.

Lollius is one of the more controversial bit-players in the early empire and few have ever had good words to say about him. The Emperor Tiberius disliked him so much that he was still ranting about him almost forty years later. To a contemporary who knew him, Lollius was greedy, dishonest, vicious and a traitor, while a modern historian refers to him as ‘egregiously incompetent and almost certainly corrupt’.1 They are difficult conclusions with which to disagree.

Although Lollius was obviously talented enough to be considered for high office – he had been consul four years previously, in 21 BC – and had served the empire well, he was widely disliked. There was the stench of new money about him and the sense of a man on the make. He exemplified everything the old guard hated about the nouveaux riches: he was subservient with superiors and arrogant to those whom he perceived to be beneath him. His daughter, briefly married to the Emperor Caligula, inherited her father’s vulgar sense of style; her conceits proved to be as large as her gems. The writer Pliny describes seeing her at a wedding ‘covered with emeralds and pearls, which shone in alternate layers upon her head, in her hair, in her wreaths, in her ears, round her neck, in her bracelets and on her fingers’, prepared, he continues wincingly, ‘to show the receipts’ to anyone who wanted to take a look.2

The most embarrassing aspect of the ambush was that the German bandits had captured the standard of Legion V. ‘The Larks’, as it was known, was a Gaulish brigade, indeed Rome’s first legion to be recruited in the provinces and it had been founded less than forty years previously by Julius Caesar. The loss of the eagle was a humiliation, but as soon as Lollius started to mobilise in earnest, the Germans backed off. The tribes withdrew into their own territory, made peace overtures and gave hostages as good faith.3

It was too late for Germany though. This was the excuse that the Romans needed. No matter that Augustus had been mobilising for at least the last twelve months or that this was little more than a border skirmish. Few in Rome would question its actual affront to imperial dignity. What was soon dubbed the ‘clades Lolliana’, ‘Lolliusgate’ in modern newspaper demotic, could prop up that great Roman lie, the imperial self-delusion that its foreign policy was always defensive. Augustus ‘never invaded any country nor felt tempted to increase the empire’s boundaries or enhance his military glory’, was the Roman historian Suetonius’ barefaced claim.4