But even as young Germanicus was rising from his seat in the Senate to formally announce the end of the Pannonian War, Tiberius was hastening to Germany. Rome would soon find out why, and would again be swept by panic—with the news of the Varus disaster.
AD 9
IX. THE VARUS DISASTER
Annihilation in the Teutoburg
It was September, in the dying days of summer. Strung out for miles, a large Roman military column was moving west toward the River Rhine after spending many months in Germany east of the Rhine. The column was led by the commander of Rome’s two armies of the Upper and Lower Rhine, Publius Quintilius Varus. A member of “a famous rather than a high-born family,” according to Velleius Paterculus, a Roman officer who knew him, Varus was in his sixties. [Velle., II, CXVII]
The general’s father, Sextus Quintilius Varus, had supported the Liberators, Brutus and Cassius, against Octavian, Antony and Lepidus, and had taken his own life following the defeat of the Liberators at Philippi in 42 BC. No doubt because Varus was related to Augustus by marriage, Augustus had not penalized Varus’ career, enabling him to serve as a consul in 13 BC and as governor of Syria the following decade. Varus was, in the words of Velleius, “a man of character and of good intentions.” [Ibid., CXX]
In Syria, Varus had acted with alacrity to counter a brief Jewish revolt in Jerusalem following the death of King Herod the Great. But now, a dozen years later, Varus had grown lazy and incautious. According to Velleius, who was at that time fighting the Pannonian War with Tiberius and Germanicus, Varus was no conquering general, but was “a man of mild character and of quiet disposition” who by AD 9 had become “more accustomed to the leisure of the camp than actual service in war.” [Ibid., CXVII]
Varus had been called out of comfortable retirement in AD 6 for this posting as overall Roman commander on the Rhine. Tiberius had been conducting a campaign in Bohemia against the Suebi Germans when he was forced to suspend those operations hurriedly, in order to lead his legions south to put down the major revolt in Pannonia and Dalmatia that became the grueling three-year Pannonian War. Tiberius, who, by AD 9 was still damping down the last embers of that revolt, had left Varus three legions on the Lower Rhine and another two on the Upper Rhine, where Varus’ nephew Lucius Asprenus was in charge.
This combined force of five legions on the Rhine compared to the twelve to fifteen legions that Tiberius and his brother Drusus had previously commanded here. Tiberius had also taken a large number of auxiliary and allied units away from the Rhine for service in the Pannonian War; Suetonius wrote that 75,000 auxiliaries and allied troops supported the legions fighting in Pannonia and Dalmatia. [Suet., III, 16]
To fill the gaps left by the departure of all these units, the German tribes in alliance with Rome had been expected to provide cohorts of allied German troops to serve under Varus, as their treaties required. Not that a larger force on the Rhine seemed necessary. As a result of the campaigns of Drusus, Tiberius and others, Augustus felt that Germany east of the Rhine was a pacified area. Flourishing Roman trade in eastern Germany seemed to support that belief. Over the three years that Varus had been in charge here, he had led his troops across the Rhine each spring and, after linking up with allied German contingents, had paraded through Germany between the Rhine and the Elbe both to awe and to inspire the locals.
At various German settlements along his route Varus had sat in judgment over local disputes. According to Velleius, Varus “came to look upon himself as a city praetor administering justice in the Forum, and not as a general in command of an army in the heart of Germany.” Varus was convinced that the German tribes were subjected peoples who wanted to embrace Roman ways and Roman justice. Varus’ campaigns in Germany had involved neither fighting nor booty for his legions; instead, according to Velleius, during this past year Varus had “wasted a summer campaign holding court and observing the proper details of legal procedure.” [Velle., II, CXVII]
Throughout that summer, Varus had been accompanied on his concourse through Germany by local kings and princes, including a prince of the Cherusci tribe who, said Velleius, “had been associated with us constantly on previous campaigns.” This young prince, who would be known to future generations of Germans as Hermann, had taken the Roman name of Arminius. [Ibid., CXVIII.]
Like his brother Flavus, Arminius served as an officer with the Roman army, being granted Roman citizenship and membership of the Equestrian Order. Flavus, who was apparently fighting for Rome in the Pannonian War at this time, had previously served under Tiberius on the Rhine, receiving numerous Roman bravery decorations. [Tac., A, II, 9, 10]
Arminius, this impressive “young man of noble birth,” was “brave in action and alert in mind” according to Velleius, who would have known Arminius, having served in Tiberius’ army on the Rhine as a prefect of auxiliaries and tribune. Velleius said that the young German “showed in his countenance and in his eyes the fire of the mind within.” [Ibid.] A marble bust of Arminius has survived from his years among the Romans; it shows a young man, clean-shaven in the Roman fashion but with wavy hair falling over his ears in the German style, and, in support of Velleius’ description, intense eyes.
Arminius, in his late twenties, “served in our camp as a leader of his fellow countrymen,” said Tacitus. [Tac., A, II, 10] With the equivalent rank of a Roman prefect, Arminius was the commander of a cohort of allied Cheruscan troops attached to Varus’ army. Arminius had become particularly friendly with Varus, and during this summer Arminius and Segimerus, brother of the king of the Chatti tribe, were so close to Varus that they “were his constant companions and often shared his dinner table.” [Dio, RH, LVI, 19]
But at the final feast hosted by Varus before he set off to lead his troops back across the Rhine for the winter, Segestes, king of the Chatti (who had been granted Roman citizenship by Augustus and valued the alliance between Rome and his people), stood up and warned Varus that Arminius and other German tribal leaders were planning an uprising against Rome. This was not the first time that Segestes had warned Varus against Arminius, but this time he was much more specific. Varus, as he had in the past, dismissed the old king’s warning. The Roman general, who had come to trust Arminius implicitly, put Segestes’ warning, like the rest, down to personal enmity between Segestes and Arminius, for Arminius had eloped with Segestes’ daughter Thusnelda after her father had promised her hand in marriage to another man. [Tac., A, I, 55] To add further to Segestes’ fury was the fact that Arminius’ father Sigimer had endorsed the subsequent marriage of Arminius and Thusnelda, in doing so failing to respect the objections of the bride’s father, his fellow king. [Tac., A, I, 55; Velle., II, CXVIII] These familial events had, to Varus’ mind, caused Segestes to invent a conspiracy involving his fine young friend Arminius, and to his peril Varus “refused to believe the story.” [Velle., II, CXVIII]
Varus would not even listen when Segestes urged Varus to arrest him and all the other German leaders present, including Arminius, and with them in chains question them about this conspiracy to rebel against Rome in contravention of their peace treaties. [Tac., A, I, 55; Velle., Ibid.] Others close to Varus urged him to take heed of Segestes, but, says Cassius Dio, Varus only became impatient, and “rebuked them for being needlessly excited and slandering his friends.” [Dio, LVI, 19]
Varus’ army was now making its way west, aiming to follow a line of Roman forts along the Lippe river. His intention was to cross back into Roman territory by a bridge of boats where the Lippe joined the Rhine at Castra Vetera, today’s Xanten in Holland, a journey that would involve a march of around ten days. The allied German troops had already taken their leave of Varus to head for their home territories, and, at the request of the German tribes, Varus had broken up his legions by distributing some of their cohorts to major settlements throughout eastern Germany, to spend the winter with the locals until his return in the spring. [Dio, LVI, 19]
Other Roman detachments had taken up residence for the winter at t
he forts east of the Rhine. This left Varus with a force that he now led toward the Rhine of the remaining cohorts of his three legions, plus six auxiliary cohorts and three wings of cavalry. [Velle., II, CXVII] The precise identities of these cohorts and wings are not known, but, according to Dio, at least one of the auxiliary cohorts was a unit of archers. [Dio, LVI, 21]
Of Varus’ legions, two are known to have been the 18th and the 19th, while the third was almost certainly the 17th. The 17th Legion had served in Aquitania under Tiberius, then had probably taken part in the 15 BC Raetian campaign before making its permanent winter camp at Novaesium on the Rhine, today’s Neuss. The 18th Legion had a similar background before it took up residence at the legion fortress at Vetera, while the 19th had served in Gaul with Tiberius before taking part in the Raetian campaign. The 19th’s home base was Cologne.
According to Roman historian Tacitus, as Varus was leading his legions back toward the Rhine, those legions were “unofficered.” [Tac., A, II, 46] That is, they were without their senior officers: legates or broadstripe tribunes. Tacitus’ statement is supported by Velleius, who wrote that, as the column headed toward the Rhine, two of the three legions were led by their camp-prefects, the legions’ third-in-command. The third camp-prefect, said Velleius, was in command of a Roman fort east of the Rhine. Accordingly, the cohorts of the third legion in the column were under the command of its chief centurion. [Velle., II, CXIX, CXX]
Neither Velleius nor Tacitus offers an explanation for this highly unusual absence of the legions’ senior officers. It is possible that the demands and casualties of the Pannonian War had drawn senior officers away from the Rhine legions; fifteen legions had been embroiled in the grueling three-year Pannonian struggle. [Suet., III, 16] Alternatively, ahead of his departure from eastern Germany, Varus had possibly allowed his senior officers to leave his column and return to Lower Germany, or even to go home to Rome for the winter.
Of Varus’ officers, we know the identity of the prefect of one of the column’s three cavalry wings, Vala Numonius, “an inoffensive and honorable man” according to Velleius, who would have been acquainted with him. There was also a young gentleman of high birth in the column, identified by Velleius as Caldus Caelius. [Velle., II, CXIX] Young Caelius would have been a thin-stripe tribune, an officer cadet, of whom five served with each of the legions.
Of the scores of centurions in the column, the identity of just one has come down to us. Fifty-three-year-old Marcus Caelius, no relation to the junior tribune above, was a first-rank centurion with the 18th Legion who had put in his full term with the Roman army and was serving an extended enlistment. The recipient of numerous bravery awards including two golden torques, Centurion Caelius, a burly, curly-headed man, was a native of today’s Bologna in northern Italy.
As Centurion Caelius rode at the head of his 18th Legion men, it is likely that his two servants, Privatus and Thiaminus, walked in the large train of non-combatants that trailed the military column. Thousands of civilians had followed the Roman army as it tramped around Germany that summer. Among them, Dio would write, were “not a few women and children,” the illegal families of legionaries, “and a large retinue of servants” such as the freedmen of the centurion Caelius. [Dio, LVI, 20]
A number of German leaders escorted Varus as he set out for the Rhine with his army; Arminius was not among them. Segestes was to claim that, following the feast during which Varus had refused to listen to his last warning, the Chattian king had put Arminius in chains, hoping to prevent a rebellion. But the next day Arminius had been freed by his fellow Cheruscans, who in turn put Segestes in chains. [Tac., A, I, 58]
Meanwhile, the German leaders riding with Varus were present when urgent news arrived of an uprising among German tribes to the north. Varus immediately turned the column north, to march to the scene of the uprising and put it down. At this point, the German leaders with Varus “begged to be excused from further attendance, in order, so they claimed, to assemble their allied forces, after which they would quickly come to his aid.” [Dio, LVI, 19] The Germans galloped away. But most had no intention of bringing forces in support of Varus as they had promised; their tribesmen were actually waiting to launch a surprise attack on Varus’ army.
King Segestes had spoken the truth. Arminius was planning an uprising of the tribes. “This young man made of the negligence of the general an opportunity for treachery,” said Velleius, “sagaciously appreciating that no one could be more swiftly overpowered than the man who fears nothing.” [Velle., II, CVIII] At first, Velleius wrote, Arminius had involved just a few leaders of other tribes. Even among Arminius’ own Cherusci tribe there were leading men, such as his uncle Inguiomerus, “who had long been respected by the Romans,” and with whom Arminius did not feel able to broach safely the subject of revolt against Rome. [Tac., A, I, 60]
The first German leader to join Arminius, Dio indicates, was Segimerus, brother of Segestes, who would go against the king and bring the majority of the powerful Chatti tribe into the revolt. [Dio, LVI, 19] Once the Chatti had voted to go to war, it became easier for Arminius to draw “a large number” of other tribes into the plot. [Velle., II, CXVIII] Convincing other tribal leaders that “the Romans could be crushed” if the Germans acted furtively and in concert, Arminius, knowing that Varus planned to leave Germany in September, set down a date when all the tribes would rise as one. [Ibid.] In the meantime, they were to arm and train their warriors secretly.
On the chosen day, “the men in each community had put to death the detachments of soldiers for which they had previously asked.” [Dio, LVI, 19] Having disposed of the Roman troops quartered at their settlements, the German warrior bands then set off for a prearranged rendezvous point in Cherusci territory. At the same time, the message was sent to Varus to tell him that an uprising had taken place in the north, to entice him into the carefully planned ambush.
On Arminius’ orders, German leaders likely to remain supportive of the Romans were put in chains. One such German was Boiocaulus, a prince of the large Ampsivarii tribe. Later king of the Ampsivarii, Boiocaulus would remain an ally of Rome for over half a century. Probably in his twenties at this time, Boiocaulus is likely to have been serving as a prefect of German auxiliaries with Varus in AD 9. Overpowered by Arminius’ henchmen as he rode to raise his warriors in support of Varus following the first report of an uprising, Boiocaulus was held in chains at a German village. Although he was able to escape and cross the Rhine, he arrived in Roman territory too late to give warning of the uprising. The deed had by that time been done, and Roman blood spilled, in abundance. [Tac., A, XIII, 55]
Meanwhile, Varus and his troops were marching unwittingly to meet their doom in a forest which Tacitus called the Teutoburgium. The precise location of the ambush is not revealed by any classical author, but Dio says that through the Germans’ trickery Varus was drawn “far away from the Rhine into the land of the Cherusci, toward the Visurgis,” the Weser river. [Dio, LVI, 18] According to Dio, to reach the chosen place of ambush Varus’ column had to pass through territory dominated by “mountains [that] had an uneven surface broken by ravines [where] the trees grew close together and very high.” [Ibid., 20]
Since the 1700s, German historians became convinced that these mountains referred to by Dio were in fact the Weser Hills, for to reach the Weser from the Lippe, Varus’ column would have had to cross those hills. In emulation of Tacitus, the forest covering the Weser Hills was given the name of the Teutoburger Wald. Here, heavily wooded limestone and sandstone ridges arc south from the River Ems for 60 miles (96 kilometers). In 1875, in celebration of the AD 9 victory over Varus’ legions, the Hermann-Denkmal, a massive statue of Arminius, was raised on top of the Grotenburg hill outside Dortmold, at the southern end of the Weser Hills.
As early as 1716, however, Roman coins were found by German farmers in the vicinity of Kalkreise, at the other, northern end of the Weser Hills. Kalkreise, just to the northeast of the town of Osnabrück, was then cons
idered to be one of many possible locations of the German ambush of Varus’ army. [Wells, 3] Then in 1987–88, British Army officer Tony Clunn also discovered numerous Roman artifacts buried at Kalkreise, the discovery of three lead sling bullets convincing German authorities that this was a site connected with the Roman military. This led German archaeologists to conduct a series of major digs at the site which, over ten years, revealed more than 4,000 Roman artifacts, most of them with military connections. [Ibid.]
Ironically, the lead bullets which spurred the German archaeologists may have been German, not Roman. Tacitus, in describing the AD 70 Battle of Old Camp at Vetera, on the eastern bank of the Rhine, wrote of that battle commencing with “a discharge of stones, leaden balls, and other missiles” unleashed by the Germans and Batavians opposing the Roman army. [Tac., H, V, 17] It is possible that, under the direction of Arminius and other Germans who had served in the Roman military, the tribes had, by AD 9, acquired the means and the skills to make and use lead slingshot.
These archaeological discoveries, and the situation of the Kalkreise site—which was on Varus’ likely route to the Weser—have convinced many that this was indeed the location of the last stand of Quintilius Varus and his legions. We know that Varus, rather than break up the column, marched north with his entire force, including a large baggage train. Some of the camp followers appear to have left the column to await the legions’ return, taking refuge at the Roman forts east of the Rhine. But, Dio wrote, many civilians, including women and children, continued to tag along behind Varus and his troops, either for protection, or in expectation of booty and celebration once the legions put down the “uprising” that was luring them north. [Dio, LVI, 20] Finds of women’s jewelry at the Kalkreise site support this. [Wells, 3]
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