Rome's Greatest Defeat

by Adrian Murdoch

  The strategy this year was very different. Germanicus planned a predominantly marine expedition and much of the spring was spent in rapidly constructing a fleet that could drop the army right in the heart of Germany. This obviated the need for a long and potentially casualty-rich march, as well as maintaining an element of surprise. Tacitus suggests that the existing Rhine fleet was boosted by a thousand ships of all shapes and sizes: some flat-bottomed assault craft, some with decks to carry the artillery, others kitted out to transport horses.27

  The rendezvous point was set for the territory of the Batavi, a tribe which occupied the area between the rivers Rijn and Waal around where the modern town of Nijmegen is now situated and which, conveniently, was a significant supplier of auxiliary troops. While the army was being mobilised, a flying column was sent under Gaius Silius to make sure that the Chatti did not attack them from the rear (bad weather hampered Silius, but he did manage to kidnap the chief’s wife and daughter), while Germanicus, who had received news of an attack on a Roman fort on the Lippe rushed north with six legions. The spirit of Varus still haunted them. The tribes had destroyed the barrow containing the bones of Legions XVII, XVIII and XIX that they had built last year, and torn down an altar that had been built by Drusus.

  By now the fleet had made it to the mouth of the River Ems. Peculiarly, they landed on the wrong side of the river, so were delayed for a few days, building bridges. Another brief distraction was caused by a revolt at their rear by another tribe, the Angrivarii, but nothing else halted the march north. Soon Germanicus and his army were camped on the left side of the River Weser, opposite Arminius and his troops, which were massed on the right side.

  Here, Tacitus describes how Arminius and his brother Flavus shouted at each other across the river; the former berating the latter for his slavery at the hands of the Romans. It may even reflect a real incident. What is interesting is Tacitus’ comment that the conversation happened in Latin, a reminder to his readers, and to us, that Arminius had once been a Roman auxiliary officer.28

  Germanicus found himself trapped in a stalemate. Arminius would never attack, and he was unwilling to commit to a crossing without a bridgehead on the other side. Several cavalry attacks were launched. The Batavian allies forded the river but they failed to draw the Cheruscan army into an ambush. The chieftain was killed in that action and the Roman cavalry had to come to the rescue to stop a rout. But it was a successful enough distraction to allow the Romans to cross the River Weser.

  Intelligence reports suggested that Arminius and his allies had mobilised nearby in a sacred forest dedicated to their god Donar and were planning to attack the Romans at night. Thus forewarned, the Romans were able to ensure that the attack did not take place that night. Instead, a Latin-speaking German shouted over the Roman ramparts, offering all deserters almost half their annual salary a day as long as the war lasted, together with wives and farmland. All this did was to galvanise the legionaries and had as little success as a tentative attack that morning on the Roman camp.

  The military foreplay was now at an end. It was about to come to pitched battle – Arminius’ final confrontation with what he called the ‘cowardly runaways from Varus’ army’. The exact site of what has become known as the Battle of Idistaviso remains uncertain. Tacitus’ description of the battlefield itself is detailed – it was between the River Weser and a range of hills with a forest to the rear – but does not allow more precise identification and archaeological traces are still to be found.29

  That it had come to pitched battle is curious. What had made Arminius so outstanding as a commander so far was his recognition that he could not compete with the Romans on a level playing field. However much of an advantage the Germans had had topographically by knowing the countryside, or emotionally because they were fighting to free their own land, Arminius had always managed to minimise the effect of Roman military technological supremacy. It is tempting to suggest that he had been overruled by his fellow commanders, as he had the previous summer. Whether it was this or simply confidence, Arminius’ battle formation showed how much he had developed as a military thinker. Despite the fact that this was his first set battle against Rome, his deployment was professional and notably Roman in style. He and the Cherusci kept to the higher ground, with other tribes to the fore, the River Weser to his left, and forest to the right to keep the Roman attack front narrow.

  The gods favoured the Romans though. As the battle started that morning, Germanicus saw eight eagles fly into the woods. ‘Follow the Roman birds, true gods of our legions,’ he said.30 It gave the legionaries the encouragement they needed as they prepared themselves for battle. Allied auxiliaries from Gaul, Switzerland and Bavaria, along with the foot archers to give them covering fire, marched at the front. They were followed by Germanicus himself with four legions, the best of the cavalry and a couple of cohorts of praetorian guards. The remaining four legions, horse archers and other allied battalions brought up the rear.

  The battle itself, which cannot have lasted for more than an hour or so, is difficult to untangle, other than in the broadest outline. Against their orders, the Cheruscans charged, while Germanicus sent the best of his cavalry round to fall on the German flank and rear. The legionaries and the two cavalry arms began to tighten their grip on the German horde, which began to weaken and crumble. Arminius tried to rally the troops and himself led the head-on attack towards the Roman archers. He would have broken through, too, had it not been for the native auxiliaries blocking his way. Injured in those first moments, he smeared his face with his own blood to disguise his face, regained control of his horse and charged off to safety.

  As it became obvious that the Romans had won, and with notably few casualties (the majority were killed in that first German assault), the legionaries routed and slaughtered the remnants of the barbarian army during the rest of the day. Many of those who were not slain tried to escape by swimming across the River Weser, but either archers or the strong current saw to them. Tacitus records the blackly humorous detail of Roman archers taking pot shots at Germans who had hidden themselves in trees.31 Those who were not chasing down Germans raised a commemorative monument on the battlefield, inscribed with the names of the tribes they had just defeated.

  It was the sight of the smug and gloating monument to foreign dominance that reignited the spark for battle the Romans thought they had just extinguished. Even tribesmen who had planned to withdraw across the River Elbe heard Arminius’ call to arms. In a curious moment of historical symmetry, this battle was a mirror image of Teutoburg Forest.

  The Germanic tribes had planned an ambush along the route the Roman army was marching. A narrow path was chosen, hemmed in by river and forest and within a narrow, swampy plain. Rather than have his warriors build a wall, this time Arminius could use one that was already there – an earth rampart that had been built as a territorial boundary marker between the Cherusci and one of their neighbouring tribes – and he ranged his foot soldiers there. The cavalry was hidden in the woods, ready to take the Roman army in the rear.

  But this time the Roman commander both had and used his intelligence, turning the enemy’s position to his own advantage. His infantry was split in two: half to charge those in the forest, the other to attack the wall behind which the Germans were hiding, while the cavalry was sent to secure the path and the swampy plain. Initially the legionaries sent over the ramparts came off badly, but an organised withdrawal, followed by a protective bombardment from slingers and artillery, soon allowed the Romans to make a second attack.

  Germanicus himself was one of the first over the top. He had even removed his helmet to make himself more visible to his own troops. In contrast to Kalkriese, the forest here hindered the Germans. Hemmed in as they were, they could not make use of their spears and were forced into close combat, where the Roman short stabbing sword became lethally advantageous. With Arminius himself conspicuously subdued on the battlefield (the wound from Idistaviso clearly more serious tha
n anyone had imagined), the Romans soon had the day. As night drew in, one legion built a camp, while the rest of the army ‘glutted themselves with the enemy’s blood’.32

  After signing a swift non-aggression pact with a nearby tribe, Germanicus erected a second memorial to his victories. It was now time to return to winter camp. Some legions, as in the previous year, went overland. The majority, however, went by sea. Once again, they were caught out by the weather, though much more seriously this time. The Roman fleet sailed down the River Ems without incident, but storms broke out when the flotilla hit open sea. Some ships were sunk, others were scattered, and some were blown so far off course that they ended up as far away as Britain.

  An eyewitness was Albinovanus Pedo, whose poetic description of the storms was quite rightly described in ancient times as ‘inspired’:

  . . . now they think the vessels

  Are sinking in the mud, the fleet deserted by the swift wind,

  Themselves left by indolent fate to the sea beasts,

  To be torn apart unhappily.

  Someone high on the prow struggles to break

  Through the blinding mist, his sight battling.

  He can discern nothing – the world has been snatched away.33

  Germanicus’ fleet eventually staggered into port, some ships towing others, clothing used for sails in others, those that could make it often with only a few rowers. But it was still not over. Galvanised by accounts of the sea disaster, the Chatti and Marsi rose up again. Gaius Silius dealt with the former, while Germanicus himself attacked the latter. The year’s campaigning ended on a high note. After a tip-off from the Marsi, a commando raid managed to recover the second of Varus’ eagles.

  On that inconclusive note, Roman involvement on the eastern side of the Rhine ended. Germanicus’ plea for one more campaign fell on deaf ears and he was recalled. Why the halt now? Despite the desire of ancient authors to read this as imperial jealousy, the much more prosaic reasons were the immense financial and manpower pressures the previous years had imposed on the empire’s finances. The German historian Erich Koestermann believes that Germanicus knew what he was doing and lays the blame squarely at the feet of Tiberius. He suggests that the campaigns of AD 15 and 16 were a complete waste of money and resources: the emperor should either have had the courage of his convictions and finished the war or should never have started it.34 It is a blunt view and not entirely fair. Tiberius should not be wholly blamed: Germany was, after all, an inherited problem for him.

  The difficulty that now arose was what to do with Germanicus. From the perspective of Rome, he had achieved very little. The final shrine that Germanicus had ordered to be erected on the River Weser boasted: ‘The army of Tiberius Caesar, after thoroughly conquering the tribes between the Rhine and the Elbe, has dedicated this monument to Mars, Jupiter, and Augustus.’ But that solitary sentence smacks of self-deception rather than achievement. Germanicus could not be replaced, and therefore the most elegant solution was to present the campaign as a victory. The German historian Dieter Timpe points out the self-justifying argument by using the analogy from Aesop’s fable of the fox who cannot reach the grapes and so decides that they must be sour.35 There was no public demonstration of a lack of belief in the empire, no great disavowal of the dream, but Romans only rarely ventured across the Rhine again.

  Germanicus himself was fobbed off with the delayed triumph for the wins of AD 15, held on 26 May AD 17, and a second consulship. A sop it might have been, but that did not detract from the glory of the occasion as the Roman public cheered the spoils that were carried through the city, entertained by tableaux representing mountains, the rivers and battles and, of course, the opportunity of gawking at the prisoners.36

  Some of the stains from the Varian disaster had been washed away with the recovery of two of his eagles. So important was this that a coin dating from the reign of Germanicus’ brother, the Emperor Claudius, depicts Germanicus with the legend: ‘After the recovery of the eagles and victory over the Germans’. Their recovery was also enough to warrant a memorial: the so-called Arch of Tiberius. A single-span arch which stood in the Forum between the Temple of Saturn and the Basilica Julia, it no longer survives (though its foundations were discovered in the first half of the nineteenth century) but representations of it can be seen on a relief on the Arch of Constantine.37

  Rome’s conquering hero was sent out east, where he was to die under somewhat dubious circumstances in Antioch, three years later, on 10 October AD 19, at the age of only 33. The sheer depth of what one modern historian has called ‘frenzied mourning throughout the empire’ was confirmed in the spring of 1982 with the discovery of two bronze tablets in the town of Siara, near Seville in southern Spain, called the Tabula Siarensis. One of the most significant epigraphic discoveries in modern times, they contain the remains of several decrees relating to honours for Germanicus after his death. The first fragment concerns the erection of several arches in his memory, one of which, pointedly, was to be set up in Germany near that of his father. Dedicated by the Legion XIV ‘The Twins’ just beyond the bridge over the River Rhine from Mainz, its remains were found in 1986.38

  The most apparent sign of Germanicus’ failure in Germany is that Arminius was still at large. His wife and son might have been paraded through the capital in chains, taunted by Romans, but the Cheruscan was still very much a potential danger. And yet, he was never to come up against Rome again. Arminius’ defeat at the Battle of Idistaviso had been a turning point for his own power. Cheruscan warriors began to move east in the search for new homes, far away from any future Roman threat. News of Germanicus’ recall had not yet reached them, and even if it had, who was to say that another, even more bellicose commander might not be sent out against them? This migration inevitably brought the settlers directly against the Bohemian king Maroboduus, who had made himself unpopular with both Germans and Romans by his isolationist foreign policy over the last seven years.

  With the external threat of Roman attack removed, Germanic rivalries flared into hostilities within a year. Arminius would never have contemplated any moves against Maroboduus while Romans were marching through German territory. He was much too canny a general to be seduced into a war on two fronts. He now had no such qualms. In many ways the cause of the war that now broke out was ego. The two German leaders were fighting for the hearts and minds of their fellow men.

  Arminius was still sounding the clarion call of freedom. It was a seductive call, partly because he had effectively succeeded in pushing the Romans back to the Rhine and partly because the loyalty he was counting on was one that the tribesmen would have recognised. He was trying to tighten the bonds of traditional tribal allegiance. Maroboduus, however, was the ruler of a real empire. The political structures that he was trying to institute were precisely those the Germans had so recently fought against.

  The cold war continued until several of Maroboduus’ tribal subjects on the Elbe shifted their allegiance to Arminius, and the Cheruscan leader’s uncle, Inguiomerus, went over to the Bohemian commander. The reason for the latter’s move is opaque. Tacitus’ suggestion that the uncle refused to submit to his nephew’s command as it was beneath his dignity has the air of an excuse.39 Whatever the real reason, these political chess moves were enough to tip the balance of power.

  There is something grimly comic in the thought of the battle that the two fought in AD 17 somewhere north of Bohemia. For all of the effort that the two, very different, commanders had made in distancing themselves from Rome, the battle itself was fought in classic Roman style. Although it was a close call, Arminius was deemed to have won. Maroboduus found himself increasingly deserted by his allies and had to turn to Tiberius for help. A diplomatic solution kept Maroboduus in power for a year, but his authority had been so undermined that a young revolutionary captured his residence and treasury and deposed him. He was forced to come to Rome a supplicant, ‘like the serpent under the spell of his salutary charms’, writes Velleius Patercu
lus. It was a trip from which he was never to return. He spent the remaining eighteen years of his life sinking quietly into senile dementia (‘He lost much of his renown through an excessive clinging to life,’ writes Tacitus) in Ravenna, the same city as Thusnelda and her son. He died in AD 37.40

  For Arminius, this should have been the greatest moment of his life: the consolidation of his power. He had won. The Romans had been pushed back to the other side of the Rhine and his greatest rival was gone, caged up in Ravenna. But he was not up to the task. Arminius fell for the very reasons he had attacked Maroboduus, in trying to meld the tribes into a single nation. He was ‘aiming for royalty’, writes Tacitus.41 By giving up his call for freedom, Arminius gave up the source of his power and became simply another oppressor.

  With admirable political straightforwardness, the chief of one of the Germanic tribes wrote a letter to Tiberius that was subsequently read out loud in the Senate. If poison were to be sent, he wrote, then he would make sure that Arminius was removed permanently. The emperor rejected the plan. This was not the kind of behaviour for Romans, he sniffed. Poison was for barbarians. The battlefield was the Roman way to do things.

  Tiberius was right. That was how barbarians did things. Arminius was faced with a civil war and although he had some initial successes, he was soon murdered by a member of his family in somewhat murky circumstances. History has not preserved any more details; we do not know who killed him or how he died.

  It is a tidy coincidence of history that the same year that saw the death of Germanicus saw the death of Arminius, too. In the end the Romans were denied the satisfaction of a hand in their enemy’s demise. His death, or perhaps more accurately the internal feuding that led to his murder, appears to have weakened the Cherusci chronically. By the time that Tacitus was writing his Germania, they were no longer players, on the periphery of Roman interest. ‘Once good and upright, they are now called cowards and fools,’ he says. When the geographer Ptolemy was map-making in the second century, they had shrunk even further – just a small tribe, south of the Harz mountains.42