Rome's Greatest Defeat: Massacre in the Teutoburg Forest

Rome's Greatest Defeat: Massacre in the Teutoburg Forest

by Adrian Murdoch
Rome's Greatest Defeat: Massacre in the Teutoburg Forest

Rome's Greatest Defeat: Massacre in the Teutoburg Forest

by Adrian Murdoch

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Overview

In AD 9 half of Rome's Western army was ambushed in a German forest and annihilated. Three legions, three cavalry units and six auxiliary regiments - some 25,000 men - were wiped out. It dealt a body blow to the empire's imperial pretensions and was Rome's greatest defeat. No other battle stopped the Roman empire dead in its tracks. Although one of the most significant and dramatic battles in European history, this is also one which has been largely overlooked. Drawing on primary sources and a vast wealth of new archaeological evidence, Adrian Murdoch brings to life the battle itself, the historical background and the effects of the Roman defeat as well as exploring the personalities of those who took part.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780752494555
Publisher: The History Press
Publication date: 07/14/2008
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 256
File size: 414 KB
Age Range: 18 Years

Read an Excerpt

Rome's Greatest Defeat

Massacre in the Teutoburg Forest


By Adrian Murdoch

The History Press

Copyright © 2013 Adrian Murdoch
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9455-5



CHAPTER 1

The Tangled Paths of War


Towards the end of the summer of 17 BC, three German tribes revolted. An alliance of Sugambri, Usipetes, and Tencteri, all of whose territory bordered the Rhine, arrested some Roman nationals as illegal immigrants and crucified them. This ragtag gang of tribes then rampaged across the river and started to raid into Gaul itself.

Under normal circumstances the incident would have been barely worthy of note. While not irrelevant, events like this were not uncommon at the very edges of civilisation. But what turned a frontier incursion into a diplomatic incident is that sometime in late summer, the marauders then ambushed a Roman cavalry unit. Giving chase, they surprised the legate Marcus Lollius, commander of the armies in Gaul, who was out on patrol. At that time in his early 40s, Lollius was the senior officer in charge of Gaul.

Lollius is one of the more controversial bit-players in the early empire and few have ever had good words to say about him. The Emperor Tiberius disliked him so much that he was still ranting about him almost forty years later. To a contemporary who knew him, Lollius was greedy, dishonest, vicious and a traitor, while a modern historian refers to him as 'egregiously incompetent and almost certainly corrupt'. They are difficult conclusions with which to disagree.

Although Lollius was obviously talented enough to be considered for high office – he had been consul four years previously, in 21 BC – and had served the empire well, he was widely disliked. There was the stench of new money about him and the sense of a man on the make. He exemplified everything the old guard hated about the nouveaux riches: he was subservient with superiors and arrogant to those whom he perceived to be beneath him. His daughter, briefly married to the Emperor Caligula, inherited her father's vulgar sense of style; her conceits proved to be as large as her gems. The writer Pliny describes seeing her at a wedding 'covered with emeralds and pearls, which shone in alternate layers upon her head, in her hair, in her wreaths, in her ears, round her neck, in her bracelets and on her fingers', prepared, he continues wincingly, 'to show the receipts' to anyone who wanted to take a look.

The most embarrassing aspect of the ambush was that the German bandits had captured the standard of Legion V. 'The Larks', as it was known, was a Gaulish brigade, indeed Rome's first legion to be recruited in the provinces and it had been founded less than forty years previously by Julius Caesar. The loss of the eagle was a humiliation, but as soon as Lollius started to mobilise in earnest, the Germans backed off. The tribes withdrew into their own territory, made peace overtures and gave hostages as good faith.

It was too late for Germany though. This was the excuse that the Romans needed. No matter that Augustus had been mobilising for at least the last twelve months or that this was little more than a border skirmish. Few in Rome would question its actual affront to imperial dignity. What was soon dubbed the 'clades Lolliana', 'Lolliusgate' in modern newspaper demotic, could prop up that great Roman lie, the imperial self-delusion that its foreign policy was always defensive. Augustus 'never invaded any country nor felt tempted to increase the empire's boundaries or enhance his military glory', was the Roman historian Suetonius' barefaced claim.

In the same way that popular opinion saw the Jameson Raid in 1895 as the precursor to the Boer War, so too the Lollian disaster achieved a prominence out of all proportion to its actual importance. In the imperialist tub-thumping of the contemporary poet Crinagoras:

    The Roman warrior, by the Rhine's wide strands
    prostrated, from his wounds half-slain,
    saw his beloved Eagle in barbarian hands
    and rose up, as if brought to life again,
    and slew the man who'd held it in those lands,
    and died, but earned himself undying fame.


Several generations later, by the time of the Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus, Chinese whispers had made this a disaster as 'severe and ignominious' as that of Varus.

Although it is with the Lollius incident that Rome set off on the path that would lead to the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, it is worth stepping back for a moment to look at Roman–German relations before then. Rome had been aware of the Celtic nations for centuries, certainly since the meanderings of the Greek traveller Pytheas in the fourth century BC, but it is really with Julius Caesar's campaigns against Gaul in the early 50s BC that the Germans enter recorded history. For him, in stark contrast to the effete Gauls, the tribes that lived east of the Rhine were a brave and martial race. 'Gradually accustomed to inferiority and defeated in many battles, the Gauls do not even pretend to compete with the Germans in bravery,' he writes. He also believed that the Germans lived a more simple life than the Gauls and this is corroborated to some extent by the archaeological evidence of the settlements on the lower Rhine, which were comparatively small-scale.

In 58 BC Caesar was petitioned for help by a tribe called the Aedui, in what is now roughly Burgundy. They were voicing a genuine concern that within a few years they would be driven off their land and that 'all the Germans would cross the Rhine'. Three years later – the fateful year for British history when Roman soldiers also first landed on Deal Beach in Kent – Caesar crossed the Rhine. The exact spot is much debated. Traditionally it was held to be around Bonn; nowadays it is thought much more likely that Caesar crossed the river somewhere near Koblenz or Andernach. It had taken him ten days to build a bridge, and the two and a half weeks he spent in Germany were little more than reconnaissance. The same might be said about his second visit in 53 BC, but symbolically they resonated out of all proportion to their strategic importance. As one modern historian has it, his objectives were not dissimilar from US president John F. Kennedy's in placing a man on the moon: 'Both achievements beamed a warning of technical supremacy eastwards and a signal of pride and reassurance westwards.'

Strangely, after his murder on the steps of the senate house six years later, on 15 March 44 BC, Caesar became an object of reverence in Germany. His sword stood in the Shrine of Mars in Cologne, near where the town hall stands today. Respect for his personal prowess, however, did not mean that the Germans were prepared to bow down to Roman might. After the defeat of Vercingetorix at Alesia, Gaul might have been bruised and punch-drunk, but the Germans were still fighting fit and not even the Roman propaganda machine claimed that Caesar's forays across the Rhine had been anything more than punitive raids. To be fair to him, he had never intended them otherwise. Caesar's attention rarely wandered from the object in hand, which for him was the conquest of Gaul.

But with the accession of Augustus, Julius Caesar's adopted son and Rome's first emperor, Germany began to emerge as a territory in its own right, worthy of its own policy and not just an adjunct to Gaul. Augustus' specific intentions towards the Rhine frontier remain a matter of intense scholarly debate. It would clearly be wrong to suggest that Augustus and his cabinet had conceived a northern boundary of the empire that ran across the Danube and up the Elbe from the mid-teens BC. That credits the emperor with divine foresight. But few would argue with the idea that the general strategy was hawkish expansion.

Broadly speaking, there are three distinct phases in the Roman relationship with Germany up to the time of the Varian disaster. The first period was characterised primarily by intimidation, the result of policies inherited from Julius Caesar. Roman intervention was generally limited to occasions when Germanic tribes threatened security considerations in Gaul. In the decade after, from 17 BC to the end of Tiberius' campaigns in 7 BC, attitudes hardened. Thus the second chapter became one of conquest. Roman armies, often large in number, trudged along rivers, through forests and against violent native opposition. From then on, for the twelve years before Arminius' revolt, the policy of civilisation – misplaced as it turned out – was adopted.

If there is a constant in all of this, it is in the articulation of the inner conviction that Germany was Rome's for the taking. From as early as 29 BC, the great elegiac poet Propertius celebrated the 'slavery of the marsh-living Sugumbri' and the mood became gung-ho, if not complacent. Horace was able to ask, 'While Caesar lives unharmed, who would fear the Parthian, who the icy Scythian, who the hordes that rough Germany breed?' There was never a question whether the Germans would be subjugated; it was merely a matter of when. And there was certainly no question that the Romans were the chosen people to do so.

Augustus confirmed his position as leader of the west at Brindisi in the spring of 40 BC. The consolidation and, crucially, the security of the western empire now became a priority. As under Julius Caesar, Gaul was the primary object of military attention and in 38 BC, Marcus Agrippa, the emperor's consigliere and the future victor of the Battle of Actium, was sent west as governor of Gaul. As well as coping with Gaulish uprising, Agrippa became 'the second Roman to cross the Rhine for war'.

It is apparent that Roman policy during this period was to secure the Rhine as the border, to create a marked and physical zone of differentiation between 'us' and 'them'. Yet one of the more curious aspects of Augustan politics is the enthusiasm with which entire tribes were resettled in more diplomatically appropriate areas. The Ubii had long been supporters of Rome and in the late 30s BC Agrippa relocated them – a tribe from around the River Lahn, east of the Rhine – across the river in the sparsely populated low-lying area of the Cologne basin. This was not a punitive measure, it was at the request of the Ubii themselves. They had suffered numerous attacks from a neighbouring and much larger tribe called the Suebi for many years.

Their relocation was not a gesture born solely out of magnanimity on Agrippa's part. As allies, the Ubii could now act as a buffer zone – traces of small Ubian settlements have been found on the west bank of the Rhine from Bonn northwards – and shield Gaul from marauding Germanic tribes. They proved to be much more than that. Even in the times of Julius Caesar the tribe had been known for its commercial prowess. He called them 'more refined than the rest of the Germans' and 'comfortable with Gaulish ways of doing business'. By the turn of the first century AD this emigration had become more formalised with the construction of the urban and economic hub that was to become Cologne.

The resettlement should not give the impression that the Romans were moving into the second, more developed, military phase just yet. Germany was still the wild and the untamed. In the four years between 31 BC and 28 BC, there were three significant Germanic uprisings that required action, on top of the many Gallic uprisings throughout the decade that were bolstered by German assistance.

By April 27 BC Gaul was deemed sufficiently stable for the Romans to risk taking a census. This was always the first step before the real nuts and bolts of Roman life were attached: taxes and laws. But it is likely that the move was more a gesture of optimism than a reflection of the political realities in the province. In an experience that was mirrored, much more fatally, a generation later when Varus was governor, the frontier remained fragile and unsecured. Two years later, tensions were still high enough for a Roman commander to have to cross the Rhine seeking revenge for the murder of a number of Roman traders.

It should not seem curious that the business community was so swift to rush into such an unstable region. Despite the physical dangers, Roman traders were frequently to be seen in the frontier regions throughout the empire. That's where the greatest profits were. For the Romans, the military and the economic generally evolved together; a model for development that is alive and well today. As the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman acerbically notes in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, his book on globalisation, 'McDonalds cannot exist without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the US Air Force F-15.' When the Rhine became formalised as a frontier, the ad hoc back and forth between tribes became restricted and Roman businessmen moved in to tap these virgin markets.

The commercial influence of Rome should not be underestimated, nor should it be thought of as a case of Roman merchants pushing their goods on to an unsuspecting and naive market. Traders were reacting to a demand for their wares. A useful analogy is the way that companies like Levi-Strauss and Coca-Cola, whose products were deemed to confer social status, were pulled into eastern Europe as the communist economies fell in the 1990s. Linguistic evidence can give some idea of how important this was. The Old High German word for 'trader' ('choufo' or 'koufa'), indeed the modern German verb 'kaufen' meaning 'to buy', derive from the Latin for 'wine merchant' ('caupo'). Both wine and wine-drinking sets were hugely popular and have been found as far afield as northern Poland and Denmark. It was not just a case of high-value items being traded though. More than 1,600 Roman bronze vessels dating to the first or second centuries AD have been recorded in northern Europe from burials and other sites. It goes without saying that business must have been profitable for the merchants. The gravestone of Quintus Atilius Primus, which dates to the first century, tells us that he began his career as a translator and, in all likelihood, commercial attaché on the Danube frontier. After he had completed his military service with the rank of centurion, he capitalised on his linguistic skills and became a merchant.

It would be a misapprehension to think of this trade as confined to the river regions. Roman traders did not just sell to intermediaries who then acted as distributors for them. There is evidence of both long-distance and direct trade that went far beyond the immediate Rhine frontier. Pliny the Elder records a story of Julianus, the manager of the gladiatorial exhibitions for the Emperor Nero, who travelled north to trading markets around the Baltic Sea and acquired a vast amount of amber, including one lump that weighed 5.9kg. It is inconceivable that Julianus' trip was unique. The discovery of large numbers of Roman coins close to the Sambian Peninsula in the oblast of Kaliningrad suggests that it was a trading centre. It requires little interpretation to guess that up until now the amber trade had been a German monopoly and that Nero's agent was reconnoitring the area to see if he could cut out the middle men.

Despite the fact that virtually every commander who had crossed the Rhine had been granted a military triumph in Rome, when Agrippa returned for his second stint as governor of Gaul in 19 BC, he found the region unchanged, in virtually the same state as it had been twenty years previously. The Rhine remained porous and both people and arms flowed back and forth as they always had.

The fundamental weakness of Roman policy at the time was that until the Lollian disaster, Rome's position towards Germany was reactive. Roman commanders mounted punitive sorties across the Rhine as and when they were needed. With Gaul the number one priority, the Germanic tribes understood that there was never any permanent intention behind these police actions. As there was no chance that the Romans might remain on their side of the Rhine, they could carry on their raids with impunity.

The end of the war in the mountainous and least accessible parts of north-western Spain allowed Augustus to turn his attention more fully to Germany and to implement a much more active policy. No doubt this was given a fillip as the emperor himself was on hand in the west and in Gaul by 16 BC. There was now a swift and deliberate mobilisation of the Rhine frontier. The Lollian affair had proved that it was no longer enough to contain the Germanic tribes across the Rhine; a more dramatic gesture was required. In anticipation of this, several legions had been transferred from Spain in around 19 BC. Legion V 'The Larks' and Legion I Germanica were moved to the Rhine to provide additional manpower to the three legions already in place, presumably Legions XVII, XVIII and XIX.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Rome's Greatest Defeat by Adrian Murdoch. Copyright © 2013 Adrian Murdoch. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Maps,
Family Trees,
Introduction This Savage Forest,
One The Tangled Paths of War,
Two A Wolf or a Shepherd?,
Three Pore Benighted 'Eathen,
Four This Terrible Calamity,
Five Give Me Back My Legions!,
Six Germany's Might,
Seven A Second Troy,
Appendix The Finds,
Notes,
Select Bibliography,

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