Rome's Greatest Defeat

by Adrian Murdoch

  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 resulte
d 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.