Rome's Greatest Defeat

by Adrian Murdoch

  The main protection for the Cheruscan warriors was an ornate shield ‘marked with very choice colours’, so Tacitus tells us.28 It is a fact confirmed by archaeologists. Six shields have been found in Scandinavia decorated with faint traces of paint – half with blue, the others with blue and red paint. They were much lighter than Roman models. From the evidence of illustrations on graves, they were made in a variety of shapes and were covered in leather with large metal bosses in the centre, so that they could be used as a defensive weapon as well as for protection.

  The question of armour is one that needs to be addressed. Tacitus does say that warriors were ‘naked’ or ‘lightly clothed in a little cloak’29 and the image of the naked barbarian warrior has remained with us since Roman times. Did Arminius’ troops or indeed any Germanic tribesman actually fight in this manner? Practical considerations aside, a quick survey of Roman art in the western Roman Empire suggests that nudity was a convention of heroic art rather than an accurate reflection of what really happened.

  Two themes appear most commonly. The first shows barbarian prisoners as captives – inevitably chained, sometimes standing, sometimes hunched down in despair. On a well-preserved statue base, now in the Landesmuseum in Mainz, two Germans, their hands tied behind their backs, strain at the chains round their necks. Grim-faced and naked apart from small cloaks, the two men are pulling in opposite directions. The second image is more martial. Here, reliefs often show a horseman rearing over a prostrate and naked barbarian. It is a theme that can be seen on Rhine gravestones (there is a particularly fine one in the museum in Wiesbaden, that of the cavalryman Dolanus) and as far west as Scotland. The Bridgeness slab, one of the largest and most elaborately carved records found in Britain, was erected by Legion II ‘The Emperor’s Own’ to celebrate the completion of a section of the Antonine Wall in the AD 140s. Here, three naked barbarians lie on a ground littered with weaponry; the fourth barbarian, futilely trying to flee, is on the point of death. A spear shaft is already sticking out of his back; he has spun round in pain, stumbling on to one knee as the Roman cavalry officer, red cloak billowing behind him, raises his determined spear ready for the final kill.

  In actual fact, it seems as though German warriors fought wearing trousers and a short cloak, as can be seen in less stylised representations, such as on Trajan’s Column in Rome. A more detailed look at the literary evidence backs this up. The Latin word that Tacitus and other writers use is nudus, which can indeed be translated as ‘naked’. It is after all where we get the English word ‘nude’. It can also, however, be translated as ‘without armour’, which is almost certainly the sense intended. To the Romans, going into battle without armour was as good as going in naked. It is not until the fifth century that we find evidence of German use of protection in battle. Then we begin to see the emergence of what is called the Spangenhelm, a conical armoured helmet, often with hinged cheek pieces and a nose guard. Certainly in graves which date to the time of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, armour is almost completely unknown.

  Aware as the Cherusci themselves will have been that they could not defeat the Romans in an open battle, and conscious of recent defeat after defeat, it is easy to understand the enthusiasm with which the tribal hawks latched on to Arminius. Of course, the insights that he brought would have had appeal and even if Arminius had no thoughts of betraying Rome when he returned, it is not difficult to see that he might have been turned soon thereafter.

  Arminius may have had a cachet because of his Roman experience but he was not universally welcomed. It is clear that at the time of his return there were at least three factions, or perhaps more accurately, two other nobles vying for influence in Cheruscan politics: Segestes, Inguiomerus and Arminius himself, all three of whom had significant followers. An additional frisson is added, in that all three were related to each other either by blood or by marriage.

  Arminius of course represents the anti-Roman point of view. His uncle Inguiomerus wavered between the two parties. Initially he appears to have been pro-Rome, yet after the successes of AD 9 he came over to Arminius’ point of view. That allegiance seems to have lasted as long as the threat of Roman reprisals for Teutoburg Forest was real. Thereafter, Inguiomerus was confident of enough influence to speak out against Arminius during the campaigns against Germanicus and in the end he was to betray him.

  Segestes remained consistently pro-Rome, views diametrically opposed to those of Arminius. The influence and support that Segestes continued to command is a sharp reminder that Arminius was not leading a universally popular rebellion. The older man comes across as a pragmatist; a Ulysses to Arminius’ Achilles. Certainly he was far-sighted enough to recognise the advantages of being considered an imperial friend and ally (the Romans had a technical diplomatic term for people like this – socii et amici), and that the offers of citizenship and money to flash should not be rejected out of hand.

  Theirs was a relationship that was dripping with dramatic conflict. On one level it was an ideological struggle between pro- and anti-Roman points of view; on another it was between accepting the status quo and challenging law and order; on yet another it can be seen as the conflict between generations; and finally it represented a bitter personal estrangement. After the battle, Segestes’ daughter Thusnelda eloped with Arminius while betrothed to another man.30

  The depth of the rifts within Cheruscan society are personified in the career of Arminius’ younger brother Flavus, who followed a much more conservative or orthodox career path. So much so, in fact that, it should be noted that we have no trace of his original Germanic name. His name in Latin is descriptive and means ‘the golden-haired one’. The divide between the two brothers is, of course, heightened for literary reasons by Tacitus; however, it highlights not just a family disagreement, but the rift within the Cheruscan hierarchy itself over a relationship with Rome. Not only did Flavus serve with Tiberius (he lost an eye in one of the campaigns after the Teutoburg Forest), he remained loyal to Rome throughout the events of AD 9 and later saw action with Germanicus in his campaigns against the Germanic tribes in AD 15 and 16. Over the years, he had risen through the ranks from the position of private to centurion and was eventually to retire to Rome in some comfort, married to the daughter of the chieftain of the Chatti. During the reign of Claudius, the Romans foisted Italicus, Flavus’ son, Arminius’ nephew, on the Cherusci. That he was welcomed as chieftain says much about the reputation of Rome; that he was sent off with ‘a present of money’ says much about Roman understanding of what counted.31

  Above all what this speaks of is that there was no unity in Cheruscan politics. How did Arminius stay on top? The answer is military might. What kept Germanic society together in the earliest times was the common interests of territory and resources, but what held the tribes themselves together was primarily strong military leadership. Arminius’ real power and status rested with his soldiers. Success on the battlefield conveyed status. For the chieftain, loyalty was based on, and grew or declined in relation to, success in battle. As Tacitus succinctly points out, ‘The chiefs fight for victory, the companions for their chief . . . fame is easier won among dangers and you cannot maintain a large body of companies except by violence and war.’32 It was a status that can only have been augmented by the military sophistication conferred on him by having fought for Rome.

  The crux of the matter is, why did Arminius revolt? Cassius Dio gives two reasons. First of all, he writes, the Germans were given orders ‘as if they were actually slaves of the Romans’.33 The disadvantages of the change in status from being a friend of Rome to a conquered nation would have been immediately apparent to Arminius and his men. Cheruscans would now have to fight as troops, subject to Roman discipline and conditions rather than as mercenaries. The perceived loss of freedom would have been a difficult and unpalatable pill to swallow.

  But it is the second half of Dio’s explanation that is the important one. ‘Varus exacted money as he would from subject nations,’ he continue
s. It was about the money. Taxes would have hit the tribe hard. More financially sophisticated parts of the empire, like Egypt, had long been used to taxes. Roman rule simply meant the replacement of one payee with another. No matter whether tax had to be paid in cash or indirectly in goods (for example Drusus had arranged that the Frisii pay their taxes in ox hides),34 the less-developed parts of the empire received a sharp lesson in economics. And as provinces were pretty much self-running, all expenses, such as salaries, building and garrison costs, had to be paid for the province from itself. Naturally in a fledgling province these sums could be high. Furthermore, taxes were likely to increase as the province developed. There was the danger that the bill for roadworks, for buildings and for towns would land in the laps of local worthies. Not only would the Cherusci suddenly have found themselves in the position of having to pay money out, but as they were comparatively wealthy – the tribe’s loyalty to Rome had been encouraged with denarii for the last few generations – it was Arminius and his men who would have to carry the strain of these new tariffs.

  Resentment would have been fuelled by the continuous presence of the Roman army in their territory. Of course, economically there were some benefits, especially for local businessmen and for nearby villages which supplied the camps with food, manufactured goods or services. The assurance of the first-century orator Dio Chryostom that troops in provinces were like shepherds who guarded the flock of the empire must, however, be taken with a hefty pinch of salt. More plausibly, the poet Juvenal satirises the difficulty in bringing soldiers to court or even getting anyone to testify against them. ‘Who is such a friend that he would set foot inside the walls of a military camp?’ he asks.35 It might be a point exaggerated for comic effect, of course, but if it was one that was recognisable in Rome, it would certainly have been even more so in the front-line provinces.

  Given this armed presence, it would be surprising if stories of army corruption had not come down to us. In fact, what evidence we have points to widespread, institutional brutality. Threats, extortion, theft and blackmail were common. A private set of accounts dating from the second century sets out:

  To the soldier on duty:

  2 drachmae, 1 obol

  Gift:

  240 drachmae

  Suckling pig:

  24 drachmae

  To the guard:

  20 drachmae

  For extortion:

  2,200 drachmae

  To two police agents:

  100 drachmae

  To Hermias, police agent:

  100 drachmae

  To the [. . .]:

  100 drachmae.36

  For the unnamed man to list his extortion payments so blatantly is an indication of how endemic the problem was. And while we have no direct corroborative evidence from Germany (the above is from the eastern half of the empire), it is safe to assume that the Roman soldiers were not at their most sensitive in the young province after years of warfare.

  It was precisely this lack of cultural awareness that lay behind numerous native revolts in the early empire, a fact that points to an inherent weakness in Rome’s policy towards the barbarians.37 It is useful to compare Arminius with, for English speakers, the best-known native revolutionary – Boudicca, the queen of the Iceni. The parallels are quite remarkable. Britain in AD 60, like Germany, had passed the initial phase of Romanisation. The Iceni had been exposed to Roman culture and military occupation for the past twenty years but, as was the case with the Cherusci, taxation and Roman brutality were the triggers for a widespread revolt. Just as pertinently, the British governor Suetonius Paulinus massively underestimated British discontent, much in the same way that Varus had.

  If the issue of why it was that Arminius revolted is straight-forward, the two difficult questions that it opens up are considerably more problematic. Answers can only be tentative. The first concerns the reason behind the timing of the Cheruscan revolt. Certainly with the benefit of hindsight, and even at the time, it should have been apparent that it would have been easier to attack the Romans at almost any other moment in the previous three years. Not only was Varus new to the job in AD 6, but from the spring of that year onwards, Augustus and the empire were distracted by events further south and the Pannonian revolt. A strike against the Romans could well have caused untold damage to the west as a whole. Plausible answers are that Arminius was still finding his feet as leader and consolidating his power or that Roman taxes had not yet begun to bite.

  The very fact that Arminius’ plot was revealed to the Roman high command suggests that his anti-Roman stance was not entirely popular. It does not matter whether it was self-interest or pragmatism that had kept them loyal to Rome for the past few years, but many, like Segestes, were clearly happy to become stakeholders in a Roman government.

  We enter even choppier waters when we consider what it was that Arminius was trying to achieve at this moment. Did he even have something as specific as the liberation of the Cherusci in mind? On the various occasions in the previous generations where there had been revolts, the Romans had always returned in force. It would do Arminius a massive disservice to underestimate him; by no stretch of the imagination was he a stupid man or a bad tactician. After his experiences in the Roman army itself, he was aware that whenever a tribe attacked Roman troops, the imperial reaction was inevitably fast and brutal.

  The broader ambitions that emerged after Varus’ defeat do not yet come into play. Any consideration of this is coloured by Tacitus’ flattering, yet flawed epitaph that Arminius was the ‘liberator of Germany’.38 This is too Roman a perspective. As was to become apparent, Arminius did lead a confederation of tribes against Varus, but neither he nor his allies would have presumed that he spoke for them or indeed had any authority to command them beyond the immediate engagement at Kalkriese. He certainly cannot be spoken of as liberator of a broader geographic area that would have meant little to him. If we look at the geographical reach of Arminius’ campaigns, he never went across the Rhine. Doubtless the German historian Harald von Petrikovits is correct to suggest that his aim was simply ‘against Roman intention to set up a province between the Rhine and the Elbe’.39

  Whatever the answer, Arminius must have spent the spring and summer of AD 9 plotting and planning his revolt, at times cajoling and convincing both allies and members of his own tribe to join him. For the Romans, part of the horror of the episode is that, all through this, he stayed close to Varus. According to Cassius Dio, Arminius ‘often shared his mess’.40 Who could consider that a man, a friend who had broken bread at your table could be conspiring against you? Like a good magician, his skill was in misdirection. But by the time the harvest was in and as the evenings began to draw in, all of the pieces were in place. Now Arminius could attack.

  FOUR

  This Terrible Calamity

  P. Quinctilius Varus spent the end of August closing up the summer camp at Minden on the River Weser, a few kilometres downstream from the historic Minden Gap. Contemplating the narrow defile known as the Porta Westfalica, where the river quits the mountains and enters the North German Plain, he had no reason to think that it had been anything other than a successful season. The process of turning Germany into a province appeared to be on track and there had been no military action to speak of. Now, everything had to be packed up, the inevitable civilian camp as well as the military one. Supplies had to be double-checked, accounts settled and business closed for the year before the army headed back to Xanten.

  In actual fact, it is not known exactly where Varus had been based that summer, though more than a few have suggested Minden. Like so much about the battle, there is little agreement, either ancient or modern, about what Velleius Paterculus calls ‘this terrible calamity’.1 There is not even any consensus about whether Varus and his men were marching west–east or east–west. Some have him marching towards the Rhine, some away from it. There is even a minority, if a vocal one, which refuses to accept the thesis that Kalkriese is the site connected w
ith the ancient accounts of the loss of Varus’ legions at all.2

  So although it is possible to piece together a plausible account of what happened as Legions XVII, XVIII and XIX stamped towards the abyss, there are discrepancies between all of the classical historians that go well beyond their personal biases. Tacitus describes the battlefield but not the battle; Velleius Paterculus gives a considerable amount of background to the events and Florus adds colour. Only Cassius Dio gives us the details of the battle itself. All of them are wise after the event and none of them were there. Any one modern historian’s account can be only a reconstruction selecting elements from the versions that have survived; like a police sketch, the evidence – literary and archaeological – can come up with different answers.

  Varus had spent the summer of AD 9 on the minutiae of provincial governorship. It was the setting-up of governmental infrastructure, day-to-day diplomacy, a drudge of community patrolling and escort duty – all that went with a new province. There had been no sign of trouble all summer and the governor had little reason to expect any now.

  Some days before departure, Segestes had come to Varus with a ridiculous and outlandish tale of intrigue and treachery. Arminius and some co-conspirators were plotting to overthrow Roman rule. The Cheruscan demanded that the plotters be thrown in chains immediately or at the very least that the governor be on his guard. Varus rejected these demands out of hand. The old man was paranoid, hysterical even. There was no truth to this slander of his relatives and friends. ‘After this warning there was no time left for a second,’ writes Velleius Paterculus rather piously.3