Initially the Romans received the worst of it. Although the legionaries made it through the lines as far as the Temple, the Jews caused heavy casualties when a large number climbed on to the roof of the colonnade round the Temple enclosure and bombarded the Romans from above. Only by setting fire to the portico did Sabinus turn the battle in his favour, after which his troops ransacked the Temple.
The sacrilege was enough to strengthen resistance against Rome, and when Sabinus refused the offer of safe passage out of Judaea for himself and his legion, he was besieged in the palace, impotently awaiting Varus.
The debacle at the Temple alone was a diplomatic disaster that would have tested any governor, but the situation that Varus faced was much, much worse than this. Sabinus had triggered a full-blown civil war. The majority of Herod’s troops had sided with the rebels – worryingly 2,000 of Herod’s veterans in south-west Jordan revolted, converting eventually a further 8,000 to their cause – on top of which the region seemed suddenly to be swarming with claimants to the throne: at least three were recorded.
Varus gathered his army at Ptolemais, now known as Akko. He had brought two legions and four cavalry battalions with him from Syria and picked up some 1,500 heavy infantry as he passed through Beirut. Fortunately, either through Sabinus’ dispatches or more likely from other intelligence sources, the governor had realised the severity of the revolt and had also mobilised Roman allies, who were ordered to bring troops. It does not require too much interpretation to realise that the enthusiasm of their attendance had as much to do with hatred of Herod and his family as obedience to Rome.
Dispatching some of his men to secure Galilee and to protect his rear, which they did rapidly and efficiently, Varus marched south with the majority of his men. As a commander, Varus showed his strengths in the march south. He was aware that if he was to have any chance of maintaining the pax Romana, then this had to be a clinical campaign. It could not be a free for all that would alienate the population further. He purposely skirted round the city of Sebaste, now Sabastiyah in central Palestine, which had kept itself out of the revolt. The troops there had remained loyal to Rome and so were left in peace.
Varus soon began to find some of his allies more of a hindrance than a help. The two towns the army had camped by en route to Jerusalem had been sacked in the search for booty by his Arab allies. ‘Fire and bloodshed were on every side and nothing could be done to halt the pillaging of the Arabs,’ writes Josephus.24 This was hardly the way to capture the hearts and minds of the locals, and so the governor was forced to send them away. After a brief side-journey to Emmaus, which he had burned both in revenge for an ambush on his troops earlier and to secure his flank, he approached Jerusalem from the west.
The capture of the city was almost an anti-climax. Such was the reputation that preceded him, and the size of the army that followed him, that the Jewish forces simply ‘melted away’.25 The rest of the campaign was a straightforward clean-up operation. Ringleaders were arrested and dealt with – some 2,000 prisoners were crucified round the city – and the rebels in south-west Jordan eventually surrendered. Before he headed back to Antioch, Varus sent them to Rome to be dealt with. As for the hapless Sabinus? The last that history records of him is that, rather than face Varus, he headed out of Judaea on a ship.
There is no doubt that the governor’s management of what the Talmud calls ‘Varus’ War’ was exemplary from Rome’s point of view. His reactions were decisive and quick. He was enough of a tactician to secure his lines of communication and was never caught between enemy forces. Modern sensibilities may flinch at the harsh and punitive manner in which rebels were treated, but if anything this would have endeared him to Augustus. To give some sense of perspective, 2,000 crucifixions would not have seemed excessive compared to the 6,000 crosses and remains of the followers of Spartacus which had lined the Appian Way from Capua to Rome within living memory. In Varus’ favour he showed compassion when it was justified and expedient from a publicity point of view.
Following his return, history loses Varus for much of the next decade. His marriage to Vipsania had hitched his fortune to that of Tiberius and with the future emperor in self-imposed exile, it is tempting to read into this that Varus’ star was also in decline. A more prosaic reason may be simply semi-retirement. But if he was under a cloud, then it did not last long. Within a few years of his return, in around 3 BC, Varus married for the final time. Wife number three, Claudia Pulchra, was the daughter of another of the emperor’s nieces and it confirmed Varus’ status within the imperial inner circle. It also signalled a shift in the balance of power in Varus’ favour. As well as Augustus’ niece, Claudia was also a cousin to Agrippina, whose husband, Germanicus, had just been adopted as the emperor after next.
In AD 6–7, Varus received what was to be his final posting. Now in his late fifties, yet again he relieved Gaius Sentius Saturninus, as he had done in Syria, who had been seconded to assist Tiberius with the campaign against Maroboduus. With five legions, Legions XVII, XVIII and XIX and Legion I Germanica and Legion V ‘The Larks’, under his command and numerous auxiliary units, some 60,000 men in total, Varus was now in control of Germany. Of what was he actually in charge? Was the region perceived as a province at this time or was it deemed to have the potential to become one? Some, like the eminent historian Herwig Wolfram, believe that a province existed only ‘on the papyri or the wax tablets of Roman administrators’.26 It is a political nuance that is much debated, but it is ultimately insignificant if we are looking at Varus’ actions.
A governor’s power in his province was practically unlimited. Needless to say this gave him ample scope for corruption. The most high-profile case in recent Roman memory was that of Gaius Verres, famously prosecuted by Cicero in 70 BC. Romans had lasciviously soaked up every tabloid detail of the way the former governor of Sicily had demanded bribes, looted works of art and executed provincials and Roman citizens at will.
Augustus had instituted a number of changes from the status quo under the Republic. Governors were now put on the payroll, supposedly removing the need for administrators to line their own pockets quite so shamelessly. There was also much greater accountability. Contact between Rome and the provinces improved beyond all measure with the expansion of the imperial post. But the behaviour of governors appears to have changed little. The position remained a way to pay off debts and to supply a comfortable pension. One of the leaders in the Pannonian revolt blamed the uprising on the governor. ‘It’s your fault,’ he said to Tiberius. ‘You send wolves to guard your sheep, not shepherds or dogs.’ Varus himself was charged with financial aggrandisement in Syria. ‘He entered the rich province a poor man, but left it a rich man and the province poor,’ writes Velleius Paterculus sourly – a charge possibly more aphoristic than accurate.27
A governor managed a large staff. In a semi-official capacity, the sons of friends and younger relatives will have petitioned Varus in Rome to be on his staff; for them it was useful experience and a step up onto the political ladder. As well as this, his staff would have been swollen by a retinue of bureaucrats, messengers, slaves and soldiers on secondment. We know at least something about his senior officers. Varus had three legates as deputy-governors, who were predominantly occupied with military affairs. Two of them played significant, if very different, roles in the months to come: Lucius Nonius Asprenas and Gaius Numonius Vala.
Asprenas, Varus’ nephew, was the perfect imperial legate. It may seem odd that he sat so firmly on the coat-tails of his uncle, but that was a conventional way of advancement. He was born in around 28 BC but, as is so common, nothing is known about his early life. His wife, Calpurnia, was from a good family and politically a good match. It is not attested anywhere, but it is impossible to imagine that he did not accompany his uncle to Syria, almost certainly as a military tribune. A curious note in Velleius Paterculus accuses him of being an immoral property speculator, appropriating the property and inheritances of those who had died at the
hands of Arminius.28 Although it is odd for Velleius to relate such a piece of gossip (that in itself gives it some credence), such rumours do not appear to have harmed Asprenas’ later career. Now in his mid-thirties, he was posted by Varus to Mainz in Upper Germany to command Legion I Germanica and Legion V ‘The Larks’.
Vala, the ‘quiet and honourable man’ presents a very different figure from Varus’ slightly shady nephew. Without Asprenas’ advantages of relation to the governor and connections to Augustus, Vala had a less straightforward career and was several years older then Asprenas, possibly in his early forties. He was from an upwardly mobile, if not well-known, family that originally came from the region of Campania, south-east of Naples. His father appears to have been a coiner of some repute. For more details we must turn to Horace, who dedicated one of his Epistles to him and mentions his ‘substantial country estate’.29
His age would suggest that his command in Germany was not his first military posting. These were generally two to three years in duration, though it was not unknown for tours of duty to be extended in times of crisis – such as, indeed, the Pannonian revolt. This suggests that Vala was legate and in position before Varus and Asprenas appeared. In itself this is not surprising. It is unlikely that a province’s entire senior command vanished on the promotion of a new governor and some continuity of command is to be expected. It is a theory that was given a boost in the mid-1990s when archaeologists began to discover Augustan coins of this period which were countermarked ‘C VAL’. Vala was well-enough known both to bother doing this and for the mark to carry weight – something that is unlikely if he had just appeared in Germany.
Going down the chain of command, while nothing is known of Asprenas’ camp commanders in Upper Germany, we know that Vala commanded three camp commanders in Lower Germany: Lucius Eggius, Ceionius and Lucius Caedicius. The precise status of the camp commanders, the praefecti castrorum, has been comparatively little studied, but their position was based on management of the camps rather than on an attachment to any one particular legion. It is for this reason that Lucius Eggius and Ceionius were both marching with Varus at the time of the disaster. One would have been commander of the summer camp, while the other, at the time of the battle, was preparing to take over some of the forces when they returned to winter quarters. Caedicius himself was in charge of Haltern, preparing the camp for the arrival of the rest of the legionaries in mid-September.
As for Varus’ legions, the history of the three ill-fated brigades before the events of AD 9 is frustratingly obscure. The only one we have any idea about is Legion XIX, which appears to have been associated with advances on the northern frontier from the time of Drusus onwards. An impressive iron catapult-bolt, 5cm long, was found at Döttenbichl in southern Bavaria in the early 1990s clearly stamped ‘Leg XIX’, which places its legionaries there at some point.30 It is possible that the legion was stationed at Dangstetten on what is now the Swiss border, after the Alps were opened up in 15 BC, though the evidence of a small bronze label found at the camp bearing the number XIX is rejected by some. The legion could have policed the road between the Great St Bernard pass to the Rhine, although it is impossible to reconstruct its movements in anything other than the most sketchy form.
A point often forgotten is that not one of the main historical sources mentions Legions XVII, XVIII and XIX by name in connection with the battle itself; they only mention that three legions were lost. That Legion XVIII was involved is confirmed by the 1.4m-high gravestone of Marcus Caelius, found near Xanten where he had probably been stationed. Set up over an empty grave by his brother Publius, it pictures Caelius in full regimental honours – five medals on his armour and honorific oak leaf crown, gained for saving the life of a citizen – flanked by two of his slaves. In his hand he holds his centurion’s staff, on each wrist he wears a bracelet and on his shoulders are ceremonial rings. The epitaph reads:
To Marcus Caelius, son of Titus, of the Lemonian district, from Bologna, First Centurion of the Legion XIIX, 53 years old.
He was killed in the Varian War. Let his bones be buried here. Publius Caelius, son of Titus, of the Lemonian district, his brother erected this.
Although there are dissenters who doubt whether this refers to the Battle of Teutoburg Forest at all, it is generally accepted as such. We know about Legion XIX’s involvement from an indirect allusion in Tacitus’ Annals. He mentions that the brigade’s eagle, ‘which had been lost with Varus’, is found.31
Not a single reference to an Augustan Legion XVII, either literary or epigraphic, has ever been found. Both Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great had legions of this number. Coins are also comparatively common of a brigade called Legion XVII ‘Of the Fleet’ raised by Mark Antony. None of them are the army unit here, which was in all likelihood raised by Augustus in the early 40s BC. In fact there is no evidence at all that there ever was an Augustan Legion XVII. Its presence is attested, however, by its absence in later history from the numerical sequence of legions. Logic dictates that it be associated with its numerical compatriots.32
In short, the movements of the three legions before the Battle of Teutoburg Forest is little more than guesswork. The only thing we can say with some semblance of certainty is that they were based on the lower Rhine in AD 9.
Varus’ chief duties as governor in Germany would have been first and foremost to secure the province militarily both against external and internal dangers. By all accounts he set to these tasks with great aplomb. He cracked down on crime and arrested robbers, soldiers were garrisoned in undefended communities when asked for, and security details were sent out to escort provision trains.33
His second task was the crux of what the empire was about and one of the sticks with which Varus has been beaten by history. He had to introduce the lex provinciae, the Roman Empire’s code of law. The Roman Empire was always much more about taxes than it was about paved roads and underfloor heating. Varus did introduce a tax system. ‘He exacted money as he would from subject nations,’ writes Cassius Dio.34 It is, however, not an especially illuminating passage. The method of assessment, even the speed with which it was carried out, are not mentioned. We are left merely with the impression that the Germans did not like paying taxes, which hardly puts them in the minority.
Along with taxes came the more formal introduction of law and order, proper Roman laws that were the foundations on which a province could be built. Varus seems to have thrown himself into the task. Did he really think, as Florus suggests, that he could tame the savages ‘by the rod of a lictor and the proclamation of a herald’? Clearly he did. It is an intriguing insight into the process of Romanisation that the governor led by example. Velleius Paterculus complains that he wasted the summer of AD 9, time that should have been spent on campaign, in holding court and observing the proper details of legal procedure.35 For Velleius, the trappings of civilisation led Varus into a false sense of security. But as a cavalryman by both training and temperament, Velleius was always more comfortable in the army camp than in the law court. Sitting in session was exactly what Varus was supposed to do.
Varus’ third task as governor was by far the most sensitive and follows on from the last point. Control of a province had to be, to a large extent, indirect. It would have been impossible for the Romans to have managed every aspect of every region in the empire without the trust and cooperation of the locals. Governors, therefore, relied heavily on the communities within the province. The challenge was that in less developed parts of the empire, like Germany and Gaul, the people they had to convince of the benefits of the pax Romana were tribal. And the best way that the empire had found of doing so was by encouraging urbanism.
Popular belief has it that Varus was in charge of a 300km militarised zone between the Rhine and the Elbe, one that was barely touched by man, let alone civilisation. The country was wet in the north and windy in the south. It was ‘either covered by bristling forests or by foul swamps’, as Tacitus snippily dismisses it.36 Nothing could
have been further from the truth. There had been a deep and consistent policy of urbanisation that had gone much further than the cannabae, the civilian shanty towns that developed near a Roman camp, with their pottery manufacturers, wine shops and brothels.
Most obviously this can be seen in the way that Cologne was being groomed and moulded into a civilian capital. A shrine for all of Germany, the Altar of the Ubii, the Ara Ubiorum, had been set up in around 1 BC. Similar to the one erected eleven years previously by Drusus in Lyons, this iconic focus for Roman Germany had been built by Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. Neither representation nor description exists, and no archaeological trace has yet been found, but from images of its sister shrine in Lyons, it is likely to have been a rectangular altar flanked by Victories on facing columns. What was important, though, was the very fact of the altar. It projected the image of Rome and the emperor; it brought the barbarians into the fold, but with priests who were German.
Alongside the spiritual was the temporal. Elsewhere in the city there was quite clearly some hefty building work going on. The 6.5m stone-built structure called the Ubiermonument on the banks of the Rhine, which can still be visited, has been dated to AD 4–5 by dendrochronology. Although its exact role is debated (it has variously been described as part of the city fortifications and as an uncompleted mausoleum), the oak-pile foundations covered with 20cm of concrete leave no doubt as to its intended permanence.
Given Cologne’s strategic position it is possibly not so surprising that it was being built up. But excavations since 1993 at Waldgirmes, in the Lahn valley, east of Koblenz, and at Haltern along the River Lippe, east of Xanten, show that urbanisation was being pushed beyond the Rhine. Both sites were abandoned in AD 9 and therefore provide a snapshot of how far Roman urbanisation had developed up to and during the governorship of Varus. ‘Cities were being founded. The barbarians were adapting themselves to Roman life, were becoming accustomed to hold markets, and were meeting in peaceful assemblies,’ was Cassius Dio’s description. Along with Tacitus’ allusions to ‘new colonies’, traditionally these comments have been dismissed as fictional exaggerations, but archaeologists over the past decade have proved that the Roman historians were telling the truth.37
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