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 h
er 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
In the same way that popular opinion saw the Jameson Raid in 1895 as the precursor to the Boer War, so too the Lollian disaster achieved a prominence out of all proportion to its actual importance. In the imperialist tub-thumping of the contemporary poet Crinagoras:
The Roman warrior, by the Rhine’s wide strands
prostrated, from his wounds half-slain,
saw his beloved Eagle in barbarian hands
and rose up, as if brought to life again,
and slew the man who’d held it in those lands,
and died, but earned himself undying fame.
Several generations later, by the time of the Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus, Chinese whispers had made this a disaster as ‘severe and ignominious’ as that of Varus.5
Although it is with the Lollius incident that Rome set off on the path that would lead to the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, it is worth stepping back for a moment to look at Roman–German relations before then. Rome had been aware of the Celtic nations for centuries, certainly since the meanderings of the Greek traveller Pytheas in the fourth century BC, but it is really with Julius Caesar’s campaigns against Gaul in the early 50s BC that the Germans enter recorded history. For him, in stark contrast to the effete Gauls, the tribes that lived east of the Rhine were a brave and martial race. ‘Gradually accustomed to inferiority and defeated in many battles, the Gauls do not even pretend to compete with the Germans in bravery,’ he writes.6 He also believed that the Germans lived a more simple life than the Gauls and this is corroborated to some extent by the archaeological evidence of the settlements on the lower Rhine, which were comparatively small-scale.
In 58 BC Caesar was petitioned for help by a tribe called the Aedui, in what is now roughly Burgundy. They were voicing a genuine concern that within a few years they would be driven off their land and that ‘all the Germans would cross the Rhine’. Three years later – the fateful year for British history when Roman soldiers also first landed on Deal Beach in Kent – Caesar crossed the Rhine. The exact spot is much debated. Traditionally it was held to be around Bonn; nowadays it is thought much more likely that Caesar crossed the river somewhere near Koblenz or Andernach. It had taken him ten days to build a bridge, and the two and a half weeks he spent in Germany were little more than reconnaissance. The same might be said about his second visit in 53 BC, but symbolically they resonated out of all proportion to their strategic importance. As one modern historian has it, his objectives were not dissimilar from US president John F. Kennedy’s in placing a man on the moon: ‘Both achievements beamed a warning of technical supremacy eastwards and a signal of pride and reassurance westwards.’7
Strangely, after his murder on the steps of the senate house six years later, on 15 March 44 BC, Caesar became an object of reverence in Germany. His sword stood in the Shrine of Mars in Cologne, near where the town hall stands today.8 Respect for his personal prowess, however, did not mean that the Germans were prepared to bow down to Roman might. After the defeat of Vercingetorix at Alesia, Gaul might have been bruised and punch-drunk, but the Germans were still fighting fit and not even the Roman propaganda machine claimed that Caesar’s forays across the Rhine had been anything more than punitive raids. To be fair to him, he had never intended them otherwise. Caesar’s attention rarely wandered from the object in hand, which for him was the conquest of Gaul.
But with the accession of Augustus, Julius Caesar’s adopted son and Rome’s first emperor, Germany began to emerge as a territory in its own right, worthy of its own policy and not just an adjunct to Gaul. Augustus’ specific intentions towards the Rhine frontier remain a matter of intense scholarly debate. It would clearly be wrong to suggest that Augustus and his cabinet had conceived a northern boundary of the empire that ran across the Danube and up the Elbe from the mid-teens BC. That credits the emperor with divine foresight. But few would argue with the idea that the general strategy was hawkish expansion.
Broadly speaking, there are three distinct phases in the Roman relationship with Germany up to the time of the Varian disaster. The first period was characterised primarily by intimidation, the result of policies inherited from Julius Caesar. Roman intervention was generally limited to occasions when Germanic tribes threatened security considerations in Gaul. In the decade after, from 17 BC to the end of Tiberius’ campaigns in 7 BC, attitudes hardened. Thus the second chapter became one of conquest. Roman armies, often large in number, trudged along rivers, through forests and against violent native opposition. From then on, for the twelve years before Arminius’ revolt, the policy of civilisation – misplaced as it turned out – was adopted.
If there is a constant in all of this, it is in the articulation of the inner conviction that Germany was Rome’s for the taking. From as early as 29 BC, the great elegiac poet Propertius celebrated the ‘slavery of the marsh-living Sugumbri’ and the mood became gung-ho, if not complacent. Horace was able to ask, ‘While Caesar lives unharmed, who would fear the Parthian, who the icy Scythian, who the hordes that rough Germany breed?’9 There was never a question whether the Germans would be subjugated; it was merely a matter of when. And there was certainly no question that the Romans were the chosen people to do so.
Augustus confirmed his position as leader of the west at Brindisi in the spring of 40 BC. The consolidation and, crucially, the security of the western empire now became a priority. As under Julius Caesar, Gaul was the primary object of military attention and in 38 BC, Marcus Agrippa, the emperor’s consigliere and the future victor of the Battle of Actium, was sent west as governor of Gaul. As well as coping with Gaulish uprising, Agrippa became ‘the second Roman to cross the Rhine for war’.10
It is apparent that Roman policy during this period was to secure the Rhine as the border, to create a marked and physical zone of differentiation between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Yet one of the more curious aspects of Augustan politics is the enthusiasm with which entire tribes were resettled in more diplomatically appropriate areas. The Ubii had long been supporters of Rome and in the late 30s BC Agrippa relocated them – a tribe from around the River Lahn, east of the Rhine – across the river in the sparsely populated low-lying area of the Cologne basin. This was not a punitive measure, it was at the request of the Ubii themselves. They had suffered numerous attacks from a neighbouring and much larger tribe called the Suebi for many years.
Their relocation was not a gesture born solely out of magnanimity on Agrippa’s part. As allies, the Ubii could now act as a buffer zone – traces of small Ubian settlements have been found on the west bank of the Rhine from Bonn northwards – and shield Gaul from marauding Germanic tribes. They proved to be much more than that. Even in the times of Julius Caesar the tribe had been known for its commercial prowess. He called them ‘more refined than the rest of the Germans
’ and ‘comfortable with Gaulish ways of doing business’. By the turn of the first century AD this emigration had become more formalised with the construction of the urban and economic hub that was to become Cologne.11
The resettlement should not give the impression that the Romans were moving into the second, more developed, military phase just yet. Germany was still the wild and the untamed. In the four years between 31 BC and 28 BC, there were three significant Germanic uprisings that required action, on top of the many Gallic uprisings throughout the decade that were bolstered by German assistance.
By April 27 BC Gaul was deemed sufficiently stable for the Romans to risk taking a census. This was always the first step before the real nuts and bolts of Roman life were attached: taxes and laws. But it is likely that the move was more a gesture of optimism than a reflection of the political realities in the province. In an experience that was mirrored, much more fatally, a generation later when Varus was governor, the frontier remained fragile and unsecured. Two years later, tensions were still high enough for a Roman commander to have to cross the Rhine seeking revenge for the murder of a number of Roman traders.
It should not seem curious that the business community was so swift to rush into such an unstable region. Despite the physical dangers, Roman traders were frequently to be seen in the frontier regions throughout the empire. That’s where the greatest profits were. For the Romans, the military and the economic generally evolved together; a model for development that is alive and well today. As the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman acerbically notes in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, his book on globalisation, ‘McDonalds cannot exist without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the US Air Force F-15.’ When the Rhine became formalised as a frontier, the ad hoc back and forth between tribes became restricted and Roman businessmen moved in to tap these virgin markets.
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