Rome's Greatest Defeat

by Adrian Murdoch

  Compared to the manner in which barbarian kings were normally written off, and certainly how Arminius was described, Maroboduus stands out as the exception. As such, his career bears closer examination. Even Velleius Paterculus accords him respect. ‘It would be inexcusable to omit him for reasons of haste,’ he writes as introduction to a most generous characterisation. It is so extraordinary that it is here cited in full: ‘A noble man, strong in body and courageous in mind, a barbarian by birth but not in mind, he achieved among his countrymen no mere chief’s position gained as the result of internal disorders or luck or liable to change and dependent upon the whims of his subjects, but, conceiving in his mind the idea of a definite empire and royal powers, he resolved to take his tribe far away from the Romans and to migrate to a place where, inasmuch as he had fled before the strength of more powerful arms, he might make his own people all-powerful.’46

  Maroboduus had come to Rome as a young man and had caught Augustus’ eye. He had been educated at the elite school of princes on the Palatine Hill in Rome, where the sons of kings were taught the tools of their craft alongside the emperor’s own grandsons.47 This education, the experience of international Machtpolitik and the exposure to the Roman military, made Maroboduus a powerful figure. It gave him authority at home and in Rome.

  It is not known either how or when Maroboduus became the leader of the Marcomanni, but he had certainly been chief for almost twenty years, since Drusus had pushed through their homeland on the River Main. As Velleius mentioned, the king had reacted to Roman encroachment by emigrating. He moved his tribe to the Bohemian basin, an area naturally protected by impenetrable virgin forest – far from the long arm of Rome.

  In his woodland stronghold, Maroboduus subjugated and welded local tribes together, to create what one modern historian rightly calls ‘the first German empire known to history’.48 By the time that Tiberius started to mobilise against him, it is likely that Maroboduus’ empire stretched from the Danube up to the Elbe.

  Although the official reason was that the king intended to attack the Danube frontier, the justification for war was quite simply the perennial Roman casus belli; that he existed. It was irrelevant that Maroboduus had given every indication of wanting to avoid direct conflict with the Romans. It did not matter that Roman traders enjoyed a healthy and presumably profitable relationship with his empire. Assimilation of his territory would not only have cleared a path from the Balkans to the North Sea, it would also have removed the danger of uprisings in supposedly conquered territory. It would even have addressed the nagging fear of Maroboduus’ army. Rumours circulated that it now had an infantry of 70,000 men with 4,000 cavalry and, unlike other barbarian forces in Germany, this was a standing army. The king had learned Rome’s lessons well.

  Tiberius assembled a huge task force (Tacitus has the force numbering some twelve legions, although that seems a trifle large)49 split into two, in preparation for what was clearly a pincer strategy. Saturninus controlled one part, heading out from Mainz from the west and into the Hercynian Forest, while Tiberius himself led the force from Carnuntum, near Hainburg in Lower Austria, then one of the main crossings of the Middle Danube.

  It was not to be. Five days before campaigning was due to start, Dalmatia and Pannonia exploded in revolt. ‘Glory was sacrificed to necessity,’ writes Paterculus, and Tiberius was rapidly forced to sign a peace treaty with Maroboduus.50 This reaffirmed friendship between the two states gave the king favoured-trading-nation status. From the way that Maroboduus behaved during Arminius’ revolt, there must also have been a clause of non-interference in each other’s domestic troubles. Tiberius then rushed back to manage one of the most dangerous revolts the Romans ever had to face. It was the first sign of the general move in imperial policy away from ebullient expansion to gritted retrenchment.

  What had happened? With Illyria relieved of troops which were all mobilising in the north for the invasion of Bohemia, with even the legate of the province marching out with Tiberius, it was the worst time to realise that the province was not as pacified as the Romans thought. Quiet resentment became a rebellion when a draft was demanded of the Dalmatians. With no troops available to prevent it, the revolt soon spread. Roman citizens were overpowered, traders were massacred, and a largish detachment of veterans stationed in the region was exterminated to a man.

  An uprising of this magnitude shocked Rome. Augustus, not normally given to panicked pronouncements, was heard to say that unless something was done quickly, the enemy would be at the gates of Rome within ten days, while Suetonius described it as ‘the most serious of all foreign wars since those with Carthage’.51

  This was not exaggeration. Much like the wars against Hannibal, the three-year rebellion stretched Rome to the limit. As many as fifteen legions were involved (two were summoned from the eastern theatre); not only was the draft reintroduced, but freemen found themselves in the army too. The cost was so large that the exchequer imposed a 2 per cent sales tax on slaves. At one point the provinces saw the greatest concentration of soldiers since the dark days of the civil wars a generation earlier.52

  Although Tiberius and the attention of the bulk of the Roman army was focused on Illyria, Augustus could not afford to disregard the rest of the empire, specifically newer provinces, given that it was imperial neglect that had encouraged this one. At this time almost more than any other, the emperor needed a safe and solid pair of hands to the north in Germany. He needed both a commander and an administrator; one who could carry on the policy of pacification and civilisation, yet who could be relied upon to act with military decisiveness should the need arise; a bureaucrat with the experience of managing a geographically large and difficult terrain, and a soldier with experience in tribal unrest and guerrilla warfare; one who would not panic if any of the unrest from Illyria overflowed into his province. The man he picked was Publius Quinctilius Varus.

  TWO

  A Wolf or a Shepherd?

  A lingering and widespread suspicion remains, even today, that Augustus chose a second-division governor in Varus. The view persists that he was not up to a posting like Germany and certainly not to be spoken of in the same breath as either Marcus Agrippa or Germanicus. One modern historian has subtitled his profile of Varus ‘the picture of a loser’, another highlights the governor’s ‘limited experience’ of warfare, and a third simply calls him ‘inexperienced’. Even the cartoon of Varus that is featured on one of the websites of the Lippe Tourist Board is a grotesquely rotund caricature perched on a little horse.1

  It is a point of view that comes directly from Varus’ contemporaries. Immoral, proud and cruel, writes Florus; imperious, naive and militarily incompetent, suggests Cassius Dio; careless, notes Suetonius. But for true, out-and-out invective, it is necessary to turn to Velleius Paterculus. Lazy, greedy and negligent with a faint whiff of cowardice about him, is his conclusion. ‘Varus was a man of mild character and of a quiet disposition, somewhat slow in mind as he was in body – more accustomed to the leisure of the camp than to actual service in war.’2

  Given that he knew Varus, an understandable weight has been placed on Velleius’ views, but to accept them is to buy into the sour grapes of a retired cavalry officer. If that alone is too revisionist a starting point, one should ask from the outset whether it is at all plausible that Augustus would have entrusted the command of the Rhine armies to an incompetent at a time of uprising in the west.

  In reality, Varus had a career that verged on, even if it did not quite touch, the glittering, and there were few more able and talented sons of the empire among his contemporaries. He had proved his worth both on the battlefield and to the exchequer: he could collect taxes with an iron glove. Until the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, he had barely put a foot wrong and had steadily climbed almost to the pinnacle of Roman political life.

  An intriguing parallel is with the Victorian hero General Charles Gordon, who was killed in Khartoum defending the city against Sudanese rebels. Gordon had distingui
shed himself in the Crimean War and had been so successful in successive campaigns in Beijing and Shanghai in the early 1860s that an adulatory British public dubbed him ‘Chinese’ Gordon. Sent out to the Sudan as governor-general, Gordon was famously skewered on the steps of his residency at Khartoum, trying to defend the city from the Muslim mystic the Mahdi in January 1885.

  While their careers do follow superficially similar trajectories, the crucial difference between Varus and Gordon can be seen in the way they were treated after their deaths. Almost immediately, Gordon was canonised as a secular British saint, a martyred warrior, while popular opinion rounded on the British government. The monumental painting of the event, by George William Joy, in Leeds City Art Gallery captures it all. The proud but fated Gordon, arrogantly facing down those sent to kill him. The Romans on the other hand rapidly distanced themselves from the governor of Germany. With no cult of heroic failure, the blame was thrown squarely on to Varus’ shoulders. It is inconceivable to imagine any coins, statues or medals commemorating his life. Varus had become a national embarrassment.

  It is valid to ask whether it is at all possible to build up any kind of a three-dimensional picture of Varus. A great part of the written material that survives relates to that final desperate adventure in Germany and it would certainly be unwise to form a character sketch based on those accounts alone. But though any modern characterisation of Varus’ life can only ever be impressionistic rather than photographic in its detail, there are enough literary hints and allusions, and archaeological titbits, to flesh out the man and his life.

  Publius Quinctilius Varus was born in the late 40s BC (the precise date does not survive) which makes him in his late fifties or early sixties at the time of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. He came from a minor patrician family, not exactly first flight, but senior enough to be a known quantity within the group of around 600 aristocrats which made up the Senate, the self-perpetuating and executive arm of Roman government. What his family did have in its favour was longevity, prized above all else.

  A Sextus Quinctilius Varus had been consul in 453 BC and we know of Publius Quintilius Varus, a praetor in 204 BC in the middle of the Second Carthaginian War, who commanded two legions and governed the province of Cisalpine Gaul. He narrowly won a set battle against Hannibal’s brother, acquitting himself honourably with one wing of the army while his son Marcus commanded the cavalry.

  But the family did not achieve continuous prominence – become a political dynasty if you will – until the first century BC. Varus’ father, Sextus Quinctilius Varus, was in his late twenties when his son was born. Something of a liability, Sextus managed consistently to back the wrong political horses in the dying days of the Roman Republic. In 49 BC, during the civil war, Sextus was one of the senators who held the town of Corfinium for Pompey the Great against Julius Caesar, fruitlessly as it turned out. A magnanimous Caesar pardoned him, something Sextus repaid by immediately flitting across to Africa to fight against him once more. Again Sextus lost. Showing astute foresight of how much clemency he could expect from Caesar a second time, he vanished for the next few years. Even though he is not named, it is not implausible that he was one of the sixty conspirators including Brutus and Cassius who assassinated Julius Caesar on 15 March 44 BC. Certainly he was there in mind, if not in body. The next we know for certain is that he was on the battlefield of Philippi in northern Greece with his co-conspirators when they were defeated by the coalition of Augustus and Mark Antony in October the following year. Without asking for mercy, Sextus committed suicide soon after the defeat, or rather forced his freeman to kill him.3

  We know nothing of Varus’ personal life before his late twenties. It is conceivable that with his father dead he was brought up by his uncle. The evidence here is sketchy in the extreme and based on guesswork and folk tradition, but a Quintilius Varus, a plausible uncle, is found at around this time in Tivoli, an ancient Latin town that still stands on a high hill covered with olive groves and dominates the route to the east along the line of the ancient Via Valeria. A favourite resort of the patrician class, the ‘gentle soil’ of Tivoli would have been a pleasant place for Varus to have grown up.4 There was something of the moneyed Bloomsbury about the town; it was certainly more elegant and closer to Rome than the vulgar Baian coast. Virgil’s patron Maecenas had a villa here; Virgil himself was a visitor; and the poet Horace had a farm down the road, some 8km away.

  The little that is known about Quintilius Varus must be gleaned from the poetry of Horace. He appears to have been a lawyer from Cremona in northern Italy, certainly a patron of the arts, a friend of Virgil, rich enough to have a house at Tivoli (though of the equestrian, not senatorial class) and well-known enough for Horace to dedicate at least one poem to him. The poet leaves an affectionate portrait of Quintilius as a critic:

  Read to Quintilius, and at every line:

  ‘Correct this passage, friend, and that refine.’

  Tell him, you tried it twice or thrice in vain:

  ‘Haste to an anvil with your ill-formed strain,

  Or blot it out.’ But if you still defend

  The favourite folly, rather than amend,

  He’ll say no more, nor idle toil employ:

  ‘Yourself unrivalled, and your works enjoy.’5

  Although there is no direct literary corroboration for a connection with our Quinctilius Varus, he has long been popularly tied to the town. The Via Quintilio Varo crosses the Via Valeria, and the church of S. Maria di Quintiliolo sits on the remains of what is popularly thought to have been his villa. It is at least plausible that Varus inherited the estate in Tivoli on Quintilius’ death in 11 BC.6

  Consideration of Varus’ professional life is less speculative. It can be reconstructed, albeit sketchily, by virtue of the rigid nature of a Roman public life. The dubious track record of his father’s political leanings does not appear to have hindered his climb either on to or up the cursus honorum, the greasy pole of Roman politics. It can be presumed that he had dipped his toes in politics at the age of 18 as one of Rome’s minor magistrates, the testing ground for any young man who had political aspirations. Then in his early twenties he would have seen army life as aide-de-camp or military tribune to a senior commander in one of the provinces, before heading back to Rome.

  The first we know for certain is that by 22 BC as quaestor, an official akin to a private secretary, he accompanied the 41-year-old Augustus on a three-year tour of the East. Only two quaestors were chosen personally by the emperor and to be selected was a huge sign of favour for Varus, now in his mid to late twenties. Acting as the emperor’s adjutant brought him an enviable intimacy with power and an insight into how the empire worked. From Sicily to Greece, the imperial party then wintered in Samos. When the sea routes opened again in the spring, Varus accompanied the emperor on to Asia. There, Cassius Dio writes that the emperor ‘instituted various reforms when they were needed, donated money to some cities and commanded others to pay a surcharge on their usual tribute’.7 As financial affairs were part of his portfolio, Varus would have been busy meeting town councils and city officials. We know, for example, from an inscription dedicated to him in the city of Pergamon, now in Turkey, that he must have spent some time there.

  He clearly acquitted himself well, because in 13 BC, after what must have been stints as chief magistrate and as a legionary commander, Varus reached what he could reasonably expect to be the peak of his power. Now in his late thirties, he shared the consulship with his brother-in-law, the future emperor Tiberius.

  One of the keys to Varus’ political success was marriage. Trying to untangle the various familial and factional bonds of the early empire can be maddening and brings to mind the comment on the Habsburg monarchy that they conducted marriage not war. But it is something that Varus clearly understood, as can be seen from the way he managed to ally himself to the most powerful men of the era.

  His own standing was buttressed by the nuptials he had arranged for his three sisters
. These connections, all contracted in the earliest phase of Varus’ career, probably in the mid to late 20s BC, supported and accentuated the young man as a person to watch. A fair amount is known about them and Varus made such good and early matches for his sisters that four of his nephews were to serve as consuls.

  His eldest sister married new money. Her husband, Lucius Nonius Asprenas Snr, was the son of a recent consul and a close friend of Augustus. He is infamous for having committed arguably the ultimate social faux-pas. He managed to poison 130 of his guests at a dinner party by accident. Asprenas was eventually acquitted of malicious intent and although, presumably as a result, he was never made consul, it appears not to have done his family too much harm in the long term.8 Their first son, Lucius Nonius Asprenas, was to play a significant role in the events of AD 9.

  His second sister’s husband, Cornelius Dolabella, had been a close companion of Augustus during the war against Mark Antony. That he was trusted can be seen in that he was chosen by the emperor to lead his negotiations with the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra.9 His third sister, Varillia, the only one whose name has survived, came the closest of all to the throne. Her husband was one of Augustus’ nephews, a certain Sextus Appuleius. He had a remarkable international career. As governor of Spain he had the honour of celebrating the last triumph from the province, before stints as proconsul of Asia and then, finally, as governor of the province of Illyrium.

  As for Varus himself, of his first wife we know nothing other than that she must have existed. It was unheard of for a senior politician to be unmarried. His second wife, conventionally referred to as Vipsania, was the daughter of Marcus Agrippa. Their marriage, concluded probably just before 13 BC, allowed Varus into the imperial inner circle. It also brought him close to Tiberius, who was married to Vipsania’s sister. The following year Varus and Tiberius delivered the orations at Marcus Agrippa’s funeral. The great general had died in March 12 BC. While at this distance of time it is difficult to get more than just an impression of the importance played by his relationship with the future emperor, it does appear as though Varus’ star followed that of Tiberius as long as it was in the ascendant.10