Give Me Back My Legions!

by Harry Turtledove

  He braced himself. The courier didn’t reach into the sack—he didn’t want to touch what it held, and who could blame him for that? Instead, he turned it inside out, spilling the head onto the mosaic floor. The stench the sack had contained filled the audience chamber. Gagging, Augustus’ freedman beat a hasty retreat. He knew no more of battlefields than Claudia Pulchra or the younger Varus did. His ignorance—the ignorance of so many in the Empire—was Augustus’ doing, and something for Augustus to be proud of.

  But battlefields hadn’t disappeared altogether, even if Augustus wished they—and one in particular—would have. He stalked around the severed head, examining it from every angle, weighing the wreckage here against what he remembered of his grand-niece’s husband. His gorge didn’t rise—yes, he remembered what death and its aftermath could do to flesh.

  “Well, sir?” asked the courier, who’d stood his ground—and won credit with Augustus for doing it. “Is it him?”

  “Yes,” Augustus said in a voice like iron. “That is Publius Quinctilius Varus, or what remains of him. The bald crown, curly hair at the temples and nape, the nose, the chin… There can be no doubt. That is Varus.”

  “He died well, sir, from what people say.” The courier offered such solace as he could.

  “So he did. But too many died with him—too many died because he let Arminius trick him.” Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions! Quinctilius Varus never would. The disaster in Germany was no nightmare to wake up from. It was real, and would stay real forever. With a sigh, Augustus nodded toward Varus’ remains. “Would you be kind enough to put—that—back in the sack?” he said to the courier. “I will give it decent burial, but not right now.”

  “Yes, sir,” the other man answered resignedly. Getting the head back into the sack wasn’t so neat as taking it out had been. When the nasty job was done, the courier said, “May I wash my hands?”

  “Of course.” Augustus called for some slaves, for a basin of warm water, for scented oil—“The sweetest and strongest we have, by the gods”—and for a bronze strigil so the courier could scrape his fingers clean.

  “Thank you kindly, sir,” the man said as the slaves brought what Augustus required.

  “No. I have to thank you: for your help there, and for the word you brought me,” Augustus said. “Now we know what became of… this much of Quinctilius Varus, anyhow. And now we can lay this much to rest.”

  After the courier had scraped off as much of the corpse-reek as he could, Augustus dismissed him with a gift of five goldpieces for all he had done. The ruler of the Roman world wished he could have dismissed the whole German problem as easily. But the foul odor from Varus’ head lingered in the audience chamber even after a slave gingerly carried away the sack. The larger problem that foul smell symbolized lingered, too.

  And he couldn’t do anything about it. He’d tried, and he’d failed, as he’d failed against death. The death reek here brought back memories of those earlier failures. Wild German tribes would go on prowling the Roman Empire’s northern borders.

  Because they were separate tribes, a canny ruler might be able to play them off against one another. Maroboduus and Arminius had no love for each other now. Chieftains in years to come would also surely be rivals. Augustus knew he could exploit a situation like that.

  But he also knew his day was passing. If he lived five years more, he would be surprised; if he lived ten more, he would be astonished. How many of those who came after him would share his peculiar combination of talents?

  He grimaced. He couldn’t do anything about that. He’d done every-thing he could about Germany, and it hadn’t been enough. If only he’d had two Tiberiuses. If only Pannonia hadn’t rebelled when he was about to lay hold of Germany once and for all. If only…

  “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!” he cried once more. The empty, useless words echoed back at him from the antechamber’s walls.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  What happened in the middle of Germany two thousand years ago has had a profound effect on the history of Europe ever since. The battle of the Teutoburg Forest (Teutoburger Wald in German), in A.D./C.E. 9, made sure that Germany would not become part of the Roman Empire, and that the Germans would not become Romanized as the Gauls had before diem. To this day, the division between Romanized and non-Romanized peoples in Europe is easily visible in the languages and cultures of the nations that grew up on the wreckage of the Roman Empire in the West: a collapse accomplished in military terms primarily by Germanic tribes whose histories would have been altogether different had Germany been annexed to Rome (if, indeed, they would have had separate histories for long after that point).

  Our written sources for the battle are less good than we might wish they were. Closest in time is the account of Velleius Paterculus, a retired military officer who wrote his epitome of Roman history around A.D./C.E. 30. His work does not get much respect from modern historians; he was no great stylist, and he was an admirer of Augustus’ successor, Tiberius, whose character had a good many features less than admirable. Imagine a modern U.S. colonel who served in Vietnam and some years later wrote a memoir full of extravagant praise for Richard Nixon. That will give you some notion of why historians raise an eyebrow at Velleius Patcrculus.

  On the other hand, the man actually served in Germany. He knew at least some of the people involved in these campaigns. And he has information about them that we simply can’t get from anyone else. So his account is certainly worth reading.

  Other historians in the Roman Empire who touched on the fight in the Teutoburg Forest wrote at least a lifetime after the events occurred. They include Florus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio (also known, at least as often, as Dio Cassius), the last of whom wrote in Greek rather than Latin. In addition, Tacitus mentions the battle in passing as he treats in more detail the retaliatory campaigns the Romans waged in Germany in the early years of Tiberius’ reign. Augustus’ anguished cry of “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!” comes from Suetonius.

  For manv years, the actual site of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest was unknown. There is a large, heroic statue of Arminius holding an upraised sword near Detmold, Germany, which was believed to be close by the battlefield. In fact, it is farther north and east, near the village of Kalkriese. This was proved beyond a reasonable doubt through the excavations conducted by Tony Clunn, one of the gifted amateurs who have contributed so much to archaeology. In the 1980s, Clunn was a British Army officer serving in Germany; the coins and other artifacts he uncovered—including the remains of the rampart Arminius’ men built up—demonstrate where the fight took place.

  Clunn has written a fascinating book detailing his discoveries: The Quest for the Lost Roman Legions: Discovering the Varus Battlefield (Savas Beattie: New York, and Spellmount, Limited: Staplehurst, UK, 2005). Also extremely valuable, in addition to the primary sources, was Peter S. Wells, The Battle That Stopped Rome (W. W. Norton & Company: New York and London, 2003). I have not always agreed with their conclusions, but console myself by remembering that I am writing a novel, not history. (Clunn also includes his own fictional version of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, its installments separated by italics from the rest of the book. I carefully did not read those installments, not wanting his take on things to influence my own.)

  Arminius, Augustus, Caldus Caelius, Ceionius, Lucius Eggius, Publius Quinctilius (sometimes spelled Quintilius) Varus, Segestes, Sigimerus, Thusnelda, and Vala Numonius are real historical figures. So are Claudia Pulchra, Flavus, Julia, Maroboduus, Tiberius, and Varus’ son (to whom I have given the praenomen Gaius; his actual praenomen is unknown), who are mentioned but stay offstage, as it were. Accounts of Caesar’s deeds in Gaul and Germany a couple of generations earlier than the time in which Give Me Back My Legions! is set are as accurate as I could make them; so are those of Crassus’ less fortunate deeds farther east. Varus’ father did commit suicide as described.

  Two key questions underlie the events leading
up to the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. First, why was Segestes so strongly opposed to Arminius? Second, why did Quinctilius Varus prefer to believe Arminius rather than Segestes?

  Arminius did elope with Thusnelda, Segestes’ daughter, after Segestes betrothed her to another man. When this happened is uncertain; it may well have been later than I’ve put it, perhaps even after the battle. I’ve chosen to move it forward in time to give Segestes a strong motive for disliking Arminius—and to give Varus a reason for discounting Segestes’ claims about Arminius, as he reckons them fueled by personal animosity. I’ve also made Varus especially susceptible to Arminius’ deceit by having the German remind the Roman of his own son. I can’t prove either of those speculations. Then again, I don’t have to: I’m writing fiction. I can, and do, hope my readers will find them plausible.

  In the novel, I’ve mixed modern and ancient place names. Where modern names are likely to be more familiar to the English-speaking reader, I’ve used them: e.g., Rome, Athens, Rhine, Danube. Less widely known places go by the names the Romans gave them: e.g., Vetera rather than Xanten, the Lupia River rather than the Lippe. Gaul is a special case; to call it France after the Franks, the Germanic tribe that later affixed a new name to it, would be anachronistic. The Romans’ large encampment in central Germany was built where the modern town of Minden lies. No one knows what the Romans called it, so I’ve given it a classical-sounding name based on the modern one.

  Thusnelda’s giving birth to Sigifredus is fictitious, as is, of course, that baby’s death. A few years later, she did bear Arminius a son. To this day, no one has discovered just where the Roman fortress of Aliso lay. Roman forts east of the Rhine were abandoned in great haste after the Battle of Teutoburg Forest.

  Arminius and the pro-Roman Flavus faced each other in war when Flavus served with the punitive expedition in the time of Tiberius. Arminius was killed by men of his own tribe, the Cherusci, in A.D. /C.E. 21. Maroboduus, the king of the Marcomanni, ended his days in exile inside the Roman Empire. While the Germanic tribes did eventually help overthrow the Empire’s western half, this did not happen till centuries after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. The battle marked a crucial turning-point in history, but no one should make the mistake of thinking it marked an immediate one.

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