Spartan, and indeed Greek, military supremacy did not last long. Across the Ionian Sea, another superpower soon arose, one that had, according to its foundational myth, sprung from the ruins of Greece’s mortal enemy, Troy. Whether merely poetic or historical, the triumph of the defeated Trojans was born in the ashes of Ilium, whose “topless towers” had fallen to the subterfuge of wily Odysseus and the wooden horse whose pregnant belly had disgorged the Achean troops who rampaged through the city, avenging the wronged honor of the Peloponnesians of Mycenae.
Plus ça change: the Macedonian military genius, Alexander, had transformed the Spartan infantry into an irresistible threshing machine that had chewed its way across Asia Minor and all the way to Afghanistan and India. But Alexander’s vast empire had essentially died with him in Babylon in 323 B.C., to be split among his generals—one (Ptolemy) in Egypt and, eventually, the Byzantines at Constantinople: the expansionist, syncretic Romans quickly enough learned military tactics from their former antagonists, transforming the phalanxes of their enemies into the more flexible and lethal legions who were able to confront the Macedonians at Cynoscephalae in 197 B.C. and defeat them on their home turf, exposing the weakness of the phalanxes on rough terrain by flanking and then enveloping them from the rear.
Still, the Greeks’ lasting influence came at Rome, their bastard offspring and greatest successor. Without the Greeks, there is no Rome—no philosophy, no learning, no drama, no architecture, no sculpture, no literature. Countries—civilizations—are not simply the sum total of their military conquests or their judicial systems (countries can exist without lawyers; lawyers cannot exist without countries), but are, at root, the essence of their people. Rome could not have existed without Greece, from whom it took wholesale its legends and its gods. Without Rome, there is no West. And without the military traditions of both cultures there is only barbarism. Force of arms, and the willingness to use them, is the sword and shield of Western civilization. Arma virumque cano1—“I sing of arms and the man”—are the most potent words in the history of pre-Christian Western civilization, rooting our society squarely in the history of untrammeled masculine bellicosity.
And yet not even the Romans, who forged a civilization out of ruthless willpower in the face of opponents of far greater physical size but less discipline and determination, almost always won. Except when they didn’t. And even then, they did—for reasons that might at first blush seem nonmilitary but were profoundly sexual and cultural.
From the beginning of Rome, from the time of the “rape” (“abduction” is a better word) of the Sabines in the eighth century B.C., in which the Romans exchanged sexual access to the Sabine women for peace with their menfolk, and thus incorporation into the new city, Rome relied on the patriotic fertility of its women to supply the warriors of the future. When the vengeful Sabine men later returned to try and conquer Rome, it was the abducted women—now mothers and wives of Rome—who made the peace. And thus the Sabines became Romans.
This fecundity enabled the Romans to resupply the ranks of their military almost at will; martial sexual potency played as important a role in the creation of “armed men” as did the boudoirs of peacetime. And, at pivotal moments in the history of the Republic, it proved to be decisive—even (or perhaps especially) when the Romans suffered a crushing defeat.
The Battle of Cannae, fought on a hot August day in 216 B.C. on an Apulian plain near the Adriatic coast southeast of Rome, was one of the greatest disasters in military history. Never had Republican Rome fielded an army of such size, nor would it; neither would Imperial Rome. Never again would it suffer such an epic disaster. In all, more than 55,000 (some estimates run as high as 70,000) legionaries went to their deaths in a battle against Hannibal Barca and his invading but numerically inferior army of Carthaginians, Numidians, and Celtiberian and Gallic mercenaries; by the time the slaughter had ended, the cream of Roman society, including consuls, senators, equestrians, and commanders, lay dead, and Rome herself lay open to invasion and conquest.
The engagement was the centerpiece of the Second Punic War, a struggle for supremacy in the Mediterranean basin between the Romans and the Carthaginians, descendants of the seafaring Phoenicians who had moved beyond the eastern Mediterranean to establish colonies in Sicily, North Africa, Spain, and elsewhere. Talk about a clash of civilizations: between Rome and Carthage, there could be only one winner. The Romans, whose armies were largely Roman, worshipped their multiple gods, who derived largely from the Greeks; the Semitic Phoenicians principally worshipped the fertility god, Baal, practiced child sacrifice, and generally preferred that mercenaries under Carthaginian command fight their wars.
Cannae wasn’t just a rout, for a rout might imply that many of the Romans fled and escaped. Rather, it was a slaughter, an abattoir, as the legions, pressing forward as was their wont, were sucked into a trap, attacked on both flanks, and finally surrounded and killed to nearly the last man. Think of Cannae—warfare’s textbook example of a double envelopment—as the panic of a very large crowd that suddenly finds itself hemmed in on all sides and, in its frenzy to escape, begins trampling itself. At the end, the exhausted Romans, penned in and unable to fight or even move, simply consigned their spirits to the gods and went under African swords—or their own. If ever there was a time when the fall of the axe was welcome, Cannae was surely it.
How could this have happened? How could the best-outfitted and best-trained army of the ancient world have come to such a pass? And how and why did Rome recover and not only go on to win the Second Punic War but also to utterly destroy Carthage in the Third?
It may be asked how seventy thousand men could have let themselves be slaughtered, without defense, by thirty-six thousand men less well-armed, when each combatant had but one man before him. For in close combat, and especially in so large an envelopment, the number of combatants immediately engaged was the same on each side. Then there were neither guns nor rifles able to pierce the mass by a converging fire and destroy it by the superiority of this fire over diverging fire. Arrows were exhausted in the first period of the action. It seems that, by their mass, the Romans must have presented an insurmountable resistance and that while permitting the enemy to wear himself out against it, that mass had only to defend itself in order to repeal assailants.
But it was wiped out.
—Col. Ardant du Picq, Battle Studies (1880/1902)
The simplest explanation of what happened on that awful day was that the tactical (but not, as we shall see, strategic) genius, Hannibal, raising hell throughout central Italy after twin victories over the Romans at Trebia in 218 and Lake Trasimene in 217, lured the impatient Romans into the jaws of a trap they all too willingly rushed into. The people of Rome were embarrassed by the Carthaginian’s rampage through Italy and impatient with the long-term strategy of Fabius Maximus, a consul who had been dictator (a temporary, exigent position) precisely in order to deal with Hannibal. But Maximus sought to avoid direct combat with the Barcid, instead relying on time and attrition to bleed the invaders, far from home and living off the land. So a vast army was raised and given over to the two new consuls, Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro who, in the Roman tradition, each commanded in the field on alternate days.
Hannibal’s path to Italy remains one of history’s greatest logistical feats. Taking his forces—which included at least 40,000 men and some 40 North African war elephants—from Spain, through the Pyrenees, across the Rhône, over the snowy Alps, and finally down into Cisalpine Gaul (Northern Italy), Hannibal caught the Romans completely unawares. Along the way, they were harried by Helvetian “mountain men,” lost many troops to the weather and accidents, and had to pull off several major engineering feats as they made their way up and down narrow mountain paths that often hugged the cliffs, with rock on one side and death on the other. In his riveting account of the Punic Wars in The History of Rome, the historian Livy describes Hannibal’s inventiveness when confronted with a seemingly insuperable obstacle2:
They next came to a much narrower passageway on the rock face, where the cliff fell away so steeply that a soldier free of baggage could barely make it down by feeling his way and clinging with his hands to shrubs and roots projecting round about him. The spot had been naturally steep before, but it had now also been sheared off by a recent landslide, which had created a drop of fully one thousand feet.… The slippery path afforded no foothold, and on the incline it made the feet slide all the more quickly.… The men were then taken off to make a road down the cliff, which was the only possible way to go on. Solid rock had to be cut. They felled some massive trees in the area, stripped the branches from them, and made a huge pile of logs. This they set on fire when a strong breeze arose suitable for whipping up a blaze, and as the rocks became hot they made them disintegrate by pouring vinegar on them. After scorching the cliff-face with fires in this way, they opened it up with picks and softened the gradient with short zigzag paths so that even the elephants, not just the pack animals, could be brought down. Four days were spent at the cliff, during which the pack animals almost starved to death.
And so the Romans marched out to meet Hannibal at Cannae, smarting from their string of defeats and determined to put an end to the Barcid interloper once and for all.
Ironically, it was the Roman way of war that got the legions under Varro (who was commanding that day) into such trouble. Each soldier was armed with a pilum (spear), gladius (short sword), and scutum (shield). Troops were deployed in formations that echoed their Greek antecedents, but with greater flexibility so as to be able to adapt to rapidly changing battle conditions. Classical armies preferred to fight on level plains, where the geography of their formations mirrored that of the landscape; hills and valleys meant exposed flanks, and exposed flanks meant casualties and defeats. Major battles were intended to be decisive.
In his magisterial—and still, to the modern reader, sprightly written (despite its vast length)—The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon3 describes the making of a Roman soldier:
On his first entrance into the service, an oath was administered to him, with every circumstance of solemnity. He promised never to desert his standard, to submit his own will to the commands of his leader, and to sacrifice his life for the safety of the emperor and the empire. The attachment of the Roman troops to their standards was inspired by the united influence of religion and of honour. The golden eagle, which glittered in the front of the legion, was the object of their fondest devotion; nor was it esteemed less impious than it was ignominious; to abandon that sacred ensign in the hour of danger … it was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline, that a good soldier should dread his officers far more than the enemy …
The recruits and young soldiers were constantly trained both in the morning and in the evening, nor was age or knowledge allowed to excuse the veterans from the daily repetition of what they had completely learnt.… The soldiers were diligently instructed to march, to run, to leap, to swim, to carry heavy burdens, to handle every species of arms that was used either for offence or for defence, either in distant engagement or in a closer onset; to form a variety of evolutions; and to move to the sound of flutes,4 in the Pyrrhic or martial dance. [It] is prettily remarked by an ancient historian who had fought against them, that the effusion of blood was the only circumstance which distinguished a field of battle from a field of exercise.
Gibbon was writing from the perspective of the Age of the Antonines, at the moral and political apex of the Empire under Marcus Aurelius.5 For a more detailed description of the Roman tactics at the time of the Second Punic War, we must rely on both Livy and Polybius, a Greek historian (c. 208–125 B.C.) taken hostage by the Romans, who wrote forty volumes of Histories, of which five and some fragments survive. Fortunately for us, Polybius’s account6 of the Roman military system in the Republic has been preserved:
The youngest soldiers or Velites are ordered to carry a sword, javelins, and a target (parma). The target is strongly made and sufficiently large to afford protection, being circular and measuring three feet in diameter. They also wear a plain helmet, and sometimes cover it with a wolf’s skin or something similar both to protect and to act as a distinguishing mark by which their officers can recognize them and judge if they fight pluckily or not. The next in seniority called hastati are ordered to wear a complete panoply. The Roman panoply consists firstly of a shield (scutum), the convex surface of which measures two and a half feet in width and four feet in length, the thickness at the rim being a palm’s breadth. Besides the shield they also carry a sword, hanging on the right thigh and called a Spanish sword. In addition they have two pila [spears], a brass helmet, and greaves. Each [pila] is fitted with a barbed iron head of the same length as the haft. This they attach so securely to the haft, carrying the attachment halfway up the latter and fixing it with numerous rivets, that in action the iron will break sooner than become detached …
Finally they wear as an ornament a circle of feathers with three upright purple or black feathers about a cubit in height, the addition of which on the head surmounting their other arms is to make every man look twice his real height, and to give him a fine appearance, such as will strike terror into the enemy. The principes and triarii are armed in the same manner except that instead of the pila the triarii [the most seasoned troops] carry long spears (hastae).
It was a mighty, tripartite military machine—the mightiest the world had ever known. With the cavalry protecting their flanks, the highly trained legions, organized into fluid units called maniples, could group and regroup as conditions necessitated. In the Grecian lands, the Romans time and again defeated the Greeks with their superior version of the Greeks’ contribution to military history. But at Cannae, Hannibal was waiting for them. Not with better arms or braver soldiers. But with, on that day and in that place, superior tactics that turned the Roman strengths into weaknesses and ensured their destruction in one of history’s bloodiest battles, one that would not be rivalled in butchery until the mechanized destruction of the First World War.
The staggering loss of life makes modern readers, especially Westerners, squirm. It’s not just the waste of human capital, as bad as that was. Rather, in an increasingly pacifistic and irreligious age, nothing today seems worth the sacrifice of the Self, which has replaced the gods, or a God, as the highest deity of the household, its very own lares and penates all rolled into one. We abhor the use of violence, even as we live it vicariously in films and literature. Rarely, if ever, are we forced to ask ourselves: Faced with certain, violent death, what would we do? How would we react? Would we cry, break down, beg for mercy—or fight, and sell our lives as dearly as we could, if only for the satisfaction of seeing our enemy’s eyeballs in our palms and his nose in our mouths?
Which was precisely the choice facing the surrounded, doomed, Romans at Cannae.
“Yet it cannot be denied that a fearful and wonderful interest is attached to these scenes of carnage,” writes Creasy from his mid-nineteenth-century vantage point, when England had conquered Bonaparte and had made the world safe for the Congress of Vienna in 1814/15. “There is undeniable greatness in the disciplined courage, and in the love of honour, which make the combatants confront agony and destruction.… Catiline was as brave a soldier as Leonidas, and a much better officer.… We thus learn not to judge of the wisdom of measures too exclusively by the results. We learn to apply the juster standard of seeing what the circumstances and the probabilities were that surrounded a statesman or a general at the time when he decided on his plan: we value him not by his fortune, but by his Πρoαρεσς,7 to adopt the expressive Greek word, for which our language gives no equivalent.”
No matter their generalship, what the legions could not do was fight in quarters so close that their pila were useless and their gladii unable to be drawn from their scabbards. And that was precisely what Hannibal intended to make them do. Placing his valiant but sometimes skittish and unreliable allies, the Iberians and the Gauls, at the center of his line where he could personally command them, he allowed the approaching legions, marching forward in three deep columns, to collide with him head-on. This should have been an easy battle for the Romans, for one on one they were superior to the barbarians in tactics, discipline, and armaments, if not in physical size. But as the battle unfolded, Hannibal led his center troops (who took the brunt of the 5,700 Carthaginian deaths that day) in a controlled retreat, luring the Romans ever forward.
Confronting Hannibal’s army, the Romans might have observed how unlike their own it was. Whereas the legions during the Republic were almost exclusively Italian, the Carthaginian mercenary forces were as polyglot an army as could be imagined. The German military historian Arnold Heeren (1760–1842), described them as follows:
It was an assemblage of the most opposite races of the human species, from the farthest parts of the globe. Hordes of half-naked Gauls were ranged next to companies of white clothed Iberians, and savage Ligurians next to the far-travelled Nasamones and Lotophagi. Carthaginians and Phoenici-Africans formed the centre; while innumerable troops of Numidian horse-men, taken from all the tribes of the Desert, swarmed about on unsaddled horses, and formed the wings; the van was composed of Balearic slingers; and a line of colossal elephants, with their Ethiopian guides, formed, as it were, a chain of moving fortresses before the whole army.
As the Romans, sensing victory over their hated foe, rushed forward, Hannibal unleashed his two cavalry wings on the outnumbered and inferior Roman horsemen. Under Hasdrubal (not to be confused with Hannibal’s brother of the same name) some 10,000 horsemen, including 2,000 Numidian (North African Berber) light cavalry, overwhelmed the undermanned and overmatched Roman cavalry, thus allowing the Carthaginians to assault the legions at their vulnerable flanks and to get behind them and attack from the rear. Unable to move forward and unable to retreat, the legions became a pitiful, helpless giant, ripe for the slaughter that followed.8 Pushing and shoving like a panicked crowd in a burning building, the troops trampled each other in their rush to flee certain death, colliding in their frantic haste to escape the horns of their tactical dilemma9—but had nowhere to go except straight into its Barcid jaws. Ducks in a shooting gallery, fish in a barrel—that was the Roman plight.
The historian Livy—not always accurate, but a magnificent storyteller—writes of the battle in Book 22 of The Second Punic War:
Here and there amidst the slain there started up a gory figure whose wounds had begun to throb with the chill of dawn, and was cut down by his enemies; some were discovered lying there alive, with thighs and tendons slashed, baring their necks and throats and bidding their conquerors drain the remnant of their blood. Others were found with their heads buried in holes dug in the ground. They had apparently made these pits for themselves, and heaping the dirt over their faces to shut off their breath. But what most drew the attention of all beholders was a Numidian who was dragged out alive from under a dead Roman, but with a mutilated nose and ears; for the Roman, unable to hold a weapon in his hands, had expired in a frenzy of rage, while rending the other with his teeth.
By the close of battle, thousands of legionaries lay groaning, bleeding, or already rotting on the field, and thousands of others were taken captive, to be dispersed as slaves across the Mediterranean. The mightiest army Rome would ever field, fighting a battle for the survival of the Republic, was ignominiously destroyed in a defeat so humiliating that the few survivors, mostly reserves—called the legiones Cannenses—were for years shunned as outcasts, not paid their wages, and exiled to Sicily.
For his part, Hannibal followed up his stunning triumph by doing … nothing. To the west, Rome lay prostrate and vulnerable, nearly undefended. To use a contemporary term, it had been decapitated, its leadership class bloating in the sun. Considering the relatively minimal loss of life on the Carthaginian side, the question naturally arises why Hannibal—who as a nine-year-old boy, at the behest of his father, Hamilcar, had sworn a blood oath to the destruction of Rome—did not pursue his advantage and march on the city. Instead of striking at his mortal enemy at her weakest, however, Hannibal turned away.
He had many good reasons for doing so, primarily logistical. His foraging army was deep in hostile territory. He needed horses and pack animals, food for his soldiers; were he to undertake a siege, engines designed for just that purpose would have to be built. Against that, Rome had been living in terror since Hannibal’s daring attack over the Alps upon Cisalpine Gaul in 218. He was seemingly invincible, inflicting three crushing defeats on the Roman army in a row, culminating with the annihilation at Cannae. Indeed, he was regarded as something of a superman and viewed by the ordinary Roman in much the same way that the rampaging Turk10 would be by the Hungarians, Wallachians, Romanians, and Germans of Eastern Europe during the Ottoman-Habsburg Wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
And yet, he did not attack. “In a single day Hannibal had decimated a substantial proportion of Rome’s leadership, a blow that some might well have considered mortal,” wrote Robert L. O’Connell in The Ghosts of Cannae (2010). According to Livy, his cavalry commander, Marhabal, upbraided him: “You know how to win a victory, Hannibal, but you don’t know how to use one.”
In the end, Cannae turned out to be a brilliant tactical victory whose strategic value was close to nil; over the course of the next thirteen years, the Second Punic War devolved into a stalemate, during which Rome won some battles and lost some as Hannibal scurried around southern Italy. Owing to its superior manpower, and the fecund wombs of its women, however, Rome gradually grew in strength. Unlike the Carthaginians, the Romans were able to steadily replenish their armies via population growth; as in the Greek and Phoenician myths (Cadmus and Jason), new soldiers (called the spartoi) continually sprang up from the ground from a slain dragon’s teeth to worry and harass the enemy.
The hesitation to finish Rome eventually proved fatal. Among the patrician survivors of Cannae was the young Publius Cornelius Scipio, still in his early twenties, a scion of one of the noblest families in Rome and the son and nephew of two celebrated military commanders. Upon returning to Rome and hearing that some of the nobility were ready to abandon the city and take up new lives abroad as mercenaries, Scipio is said to have drawn his sword, ordered them arrested, and forced them to swear an oath of allegiance to the Republic.
Hannibal’s dilatory nature gave Scipio, later honored as “Africanus” after Rome’s final revenge, time to mature and afforded him the opportunity he needed to put Cannae behind him and establish Roman superiority over the interloper. In 211 B.C., his father and uncle were killed in Spain while fighting Hannibal’s brother, Hasdrubal, who was organizing his own transalpine crossing in order to reinforce Hannibal from the north. Scipio won stunning victories against the enemy in New Carthage, Spain (today called Cartagena—the name lives on), but in 209 B.C. Hasdrubal elided Scipio’s trap and escaped across the Pyrenees and the Alps and into Northern Italy. The idea was for the two sons of Hamilcar to catch all of Rome in the jaws of a vice—Cannae but on a larger scale—with Hasdrubal coming down from the north and Hannibal up from the south.
It was not to be; in 207 Hasdrubal was confronted and killed at the Battle of the Metaurus, where he was defeated by a Roman army under the consul, Nero (not the later emperor).11 His head was severed, brought south, and chucked into Hannibal’s camp—when Hannibal saw his brother’s head, he is said to have remarked: “Rome would now be the mistress of the world.”
After the Metaurus, Hannibal spent the next four years in Bruttium (Calabria), in the toe of Italy, before being recalled to Carthage to mount a defense of the city against the resurgent Romans. In effect, the Metaurus was the last stand of the Carthaginians against Rome, although it would take years for the outcome to fully play out. In any case, the threat to Rome was over.
Hannibal’s end was ignominious. He was elected to the leadership position of suffete of Carthage in 196 B.C., thus winning a temporary victory in the Barcid family’s struggle for political control of the city against rival aristocrats. Defeated by the Cannae survivor, Scipio Africanus, at Zama in present-day Tunisia and forced by political machinations, partly orchestrated from Rome, to flee, first to Tyre in the eastern Mediterranean (one of the foundational cities of the Phoenician Empire) and then farther east to Bithynia, in present-day Anatolia (Turkey), where he hoped to restore an eastern coalition against Rome, Hannibal was eventually run to ground at Libyssa (Gebze) and forced to commit suicide c. 183–181 B.C. His last words were, “Let us now put an end to the great anxiety of the Romans, who have thought it too long and hard a task to wait for the death of a hated old man.” In 149 B.C., at the conclusion of the Third Punic War, Carthage was utterly destroyed; as Creasy observes, “An entire civilization perished at one blow—vanished, like a falling star.” O tempora! O mores!
Taken in the abstract, the Punic Wars may sometimes seem a dusty bit of ancient history, an exercise in primitive Great Power politics fought over control of the Mediterranean. But as cultural history has shown, it was far more than that.
In the reign of Augustus, the first emperor, the poet Virgil composed his epic poem, the Aeneid, between the years 29–19 B.C. Its hero is the mythical Trojan leader Aeneas, and the poem describes the flight of the defeated Trojans at the hands of the Greeks (the subject of Homer’s Iliad) across the Mediterranean, first to North Africa and thence to Latium, where the Trojans defeat the native Latins and establish the city of Rome. The Aeneid is the essential text of the Empire, but it’s much more, of course. For in its most poignant and affecting Books (there are twelve), it dwells at some length upon the fatal attraction between Aeneas and Dido, the founder and queen of the Phoenician city of Carthage.
This doomed romance itself has had a resonant afterlife, most notably as the subject of Henry Purcell’s baroque opera (c. 1689) Dido and Aeneas. But it is with certain elements of the poem with which we are here concerned. Dido’s fury at her rejection by her lover—who must, according to the gods’ commands, leave her to sail for his rendezvous with destiny in Italy—and her spectacular suicide atop a blazing funeral pyre that limns the vengeful roots of the Punic Wars still resonate as powerfully today as they did when first written:
What could my fortune have afforded more,
Had the false Trojan never touch’d my shore!”
Then kiss’d the couch; and, “Must I die,” she said,
“And unreveng’d? ’T is doubly to be dead!
Yet ev’n this death with pleasure I receive:
On any terms, ’t is better than to live.
These flames, from far, may the false Trojan view;
These boding omens his base flight pursue!”
—translation by John Dryden (1697)
Thus, the origin of the Rome-Carthage rivalry was transformed from a battle for economic supremacy in the Mediterranean into the most primal of human conditions, the angry reaction to a failed love affair, with Dido’s curses echoing down the centuries. And it was in just this historical moment, during the ascension of Augustus, that Rome was to suffer another catastrophic defeat that would change the course of empire and affect the map of Europe for two thousand years to come: in the Teutoburg Forest in the dark barbarian heart of Germany.
Our story begins a few years after it ended, with the defeat and annihilation of three Roman legions—XVII, XVIII, and XIX—under the command of Publius Quinctilus Varus, who led them into battle against the forces of Arminius (Hermann), a Roman knight and naturalized citizen honored today in Germany as the father of German independence. Leading a Roman expeditionary force to the site of the battle, between modern day Osnabrück and Detmold, the great Roman general Germanicus12 was conducting a search for the remains of the unhappy legions. The Roman historian Tacitus relates the tale13:
The scene lived up to its horrible associations. Varus’s extensive first camp with its broad extent and headquarters marked out, testified to the whole army’s labours. Then a half-ruined breastwork and shallow ditch showed where the last pathetic remnant had gathered. On the open ground were whitening bones, scattered where men had fled, heaped up where they had stood and fought back. Fragments of spears and of horses’ limbs lay there—also human heads, fastened to tree-trunks. In groves nearby were the outlandish altars at which the Germans had massacred the Roman colonels and senior company commanders.…
So, six years after the slaughter, a living Roman army had come to bury the dead men’s bones of three whole divisions. No one knew if the remains he was burying belonged to a stranger or a comrade. But in their bitter distress, and rising fury against the enemy, they look on them all as friends and blood-brothers. Germanicus shared in the general grief, and laid the first turf of the funeral mound as a heartfelt tribute to the dead. Thereby he earned Tiberius’s14 disapproval …
Germanicus, the son of Nero Claudius Drusus and the adopted son of his uncle, Tiberius, was not in Germany bent on conquest but rather on retrenchment. For Varus’s defeat at the hands of Arminius halted the Roman expansion across the Rhine and into the territories of the most fearsome and warlike Germanic tribes, among them Arminius’s own Cherusci. The ablest, and perhaps the noblest, Roman of the early Empire, the wildly popular Germanicus (as Tacitus notes above) eventually fell afoul of an increasingly corrupt and decadent Tiberius, who very likely had him assassinated by poisoning in the year 19 A.D. while in the field at Antioch in the Roman province of Syria. And while Germanicus’s appearance in our story is fleeting, it is crucial to the later history of the Empire. For after the death of Tiberius (smothered after a seizure at his imperial retreat on the island of Capri, where he spent his final years in increasing decadence), the throne went not to the rightful heir, Germanicus,15 but to Caligula.
Therefore, the decline of the Roman Empire can well be traced to the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which may be viewed in retrospect as the moment Rome overreached. In the aftermath of this signal defeat of imperial arms, the Roman historian Suetonius16 relates that Augustus “was in such consternation at this event, that he let the hair of his head and beard grow for several months, and sometimes knocked his head against the door-posts, crying out, ‘O, Quinctilius Varus! Give me back my legions!’17 And ever after, he observed the anniversary of this calamity, as a day of sorrow and mourning.” As Gibbon notes in a footnote to the first chapter of Decline and Fall:
Footnote 3: Augustus did not receive the melancholy news with all the temper and firmness that might have been expected from his character.
Although the Empire expanded to its farthest limits under Trajan18 in 117, and was maintained largely intact through the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the failure to conquer Germany in the first decade of the first century19 eventually spelled its doom, as it was the descendants of those same Germans who later sacked and then conquered Rome in the fifth century. Fittingly, the last emperor—a fifteen-year-old boy, who reigned from 475 to 476—was derisively called Romulus Augustulus,20 or “little Augustus.”
The resonance of the Teutoburg Forest echoes to this day. Rome’s failure to bring the Germanic tribes to heel and into the Empire, and to make citizens out of barbarians, not only led to the fall of the Western empire but also gave rise a few centuries later to the Holy Roman Empire, which eventually morphed into a loose alliance of largely German states and principalities in Central Europe and Northern Italy, in contradistinction to the emerging nation-states of France, Spain, and England to the north and west. This linguistic and cultural fault line endured into the Napoleonic era, recurred again in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and reached its awful culmination in the World Wars of 1914–18 and 1939–45. Indeed, the postwar push for a common market was meant to ensnare France and Germany in an economic alliance, one that has persisted and molted into the European Union, a Franco-German superstate with the other, smaller countries bent to their will.
Almost from the time they encountered them, the Romans were fascinated by the Germans, a people so unlike themselves and yet one of their most formidable adversaries. They were impressed by their height, their large frames, their physical strength, their blue eyes. Caesar had encountered them in his battle against the Celtic Gauls but never attempted to conquer them. Until the new Empire began another round of expansion, the west bank of the Rhine and the southern bank of the Danube were the rough borders between the Latin and German worlds, but the fascination of the other continued long after the Roman defeat in the Teutoburg Forest.
Writing in the year 98 A.D. during the second consulship of Trajan, who later became emperor and ruled from 98 to 117, Tacitus undertook a study of the Germans in his monograph, Germania, a taxonomy of the various tribes and customs of the fearsome, bellicose savages who dwelled in the trackless woods north and east of the empire. Their sacred spaces were the groves of the forest; they hanged traitors and deserters but killed cowards and sodomites by burying them alive, face down, in a bog. They sacrificed animals and sometimes people as well. Valor on the battlefield was prized above all else. Some blackened their shields and bodies and attacked at night like a phantom army of ghouls. Yet they married for life, kept their women chaste, and gave them a significant role in their social organization. Generosity and hospitality toward strangers was de rigueur.
The end of the Empire, however, was still far in the future when Varus’s legions, auxiliaries, and camp followers—some 20,000 people in all—left their summer headquarters in Vetera and headed for their winter camp in the interior (Romans generally did not fight in the winter). Although their tortuous path took them through the swamps, marshes, and thick woods of Germany, the cordially loathed Varus did not think he had anything in particular to fear. Rome had already conquered about half the lands of the Germans, and the process of romanizing the tribes west of the Rhine was well underway. The young German nobles who might have given a thought to resistance were bought off with the perquisites of being Roman.
But not Arminius, a product of the romanizing system and one of Varus’s most trusted advisers—and the man who led him into the ambush. Arminius had been taken to Rome as a hostage when still a child, a common Roman practice when dealing with the children of barbarian leaders. Selected from the highest levels of their societies, hostages were proof of a conquered people’s fidelity to Rome, since any abrogation of treaty or revolt would result in their instant deaths; if the chief of a Gallic or German tribe dared to rise up, his children would surely die. Arminius rose to become a commander of one of the auxiliaries, fighting forces attached to the legions and consisting mostly of foreign-born soldiers, and then was seconded to Varus’s staff as Rome prepared the full conquest of Germania east of the Rhine. It was there he would take his long-awaited revenge.
Bent on defeating the restive tribes the way his predecessor, Tiberius,21 had done, Varus—a lawyer by trade, not a military man, and one who owed his position to the happy circumstance of his marrying Augustus’s grand-niece, the felicitously named Claudia Pulchra—was persuaded by Arminius to thread a narrow path through the forest, hemmed in on one side by a large bog and on the other by a hill. Strung out in single file roughly ten miles long, marching in the September rain in unfamiliar terrain, the Romans were attacked on the first day of the battle from all sides, with German spears—many aimed at the Roman horses—raining down on them as they tried to make camp and construct some kind of shelter.
But Arminius knew that this is what the Romans would do. As the Romans attempted to break out from their improvised camp—already having sustained heavy losses—the surrounding Germans struck again against the legionaries, who were unable to get into proper formation; further, the heavy rains had rendered much of Roman equipment, especially their shields, waterlogged and useless. In essence, by falling on the rear of the Roman column first, the Germans had sectioned the Roman centipede, rendering communication among the legions and centurions impossible. That night the Romans attempted to escape in a night march, but this time they were literally caught between a rock (the Kalkriese Hill) and the hard place of a large bog. With nowhere to run, they were doomed. Some of the Roman cavalry attempted a breakout, but they were quickly hunted down and killed or captured for later torture. Rather than be taken alive, the humiliated Varus committed suicide.
For these were not the legions of the old Republic, manned by ethnic Romans with a personal stake in the military outcome; rather, their ranks were filled with slaves and foreigners, whose numbers were already about half the population of the Italian peninsula. The carnage of the civil wars had taken its demographic toll in the field; meanwhile, back home, flattery and courtiership had replaced republican virtues. Outwardly, Rome appeared as strong as ever—but appearances were deceiving.
Teutoburg was in its way as crushing a defeat as Cannae—a last stand that would later find its closest historical analogue in what happened to the Seventh Cavalry under George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876. Savages against the mechanized forces of civilization. Tribes against trained soldiers. A daring and ruthless general, much despised by his opponents, versus natives defending their home turf, with some knowledge of the tactics and weapons of their invaders. Indeed, the way the entire battle played out is more akin to the Indians’ guerrilla tactics against the British and the Americans in the French and Indian War22 than to conventional Roman maneuvers from Caesar on.
The Romans got no mercy, nor did they deserve any. The legions, like the Roman people themselves at the time, viewed mercy as weakness and quarter as cowardice. They dealt with the enemies, however gallant and honorable, in the cruelest possible way: having been defeated by Caesar at the Battle of Alesia in 52 B.C., the Gallic leader Vercingetorix surrendered himself in order to stop the bloodshed. He was rewarded with five years’ imprisonment in Rome, and then, in 46 B.C., he was paraded through the streets of the city in celebration of Caesar’s triumph23 and strangled to death.
So when the Germans fell upon the hapless legionaries in the mud and blood of Teutoburg, the outcome was never in doubt. Like the battlefield tactics, the butchery was also reminiscent of the American Indians’ treatment of wounded soldiers and captives—prolonged torture of the direst nature, dismemberment, mutilations that beggar description. As Arminius knew it would be, the loss of the eagles—the standards that marked each legion—was especially keenly felt back in Rome, perhaps as much as the loss of the legions themselves. Rome could take defeat, but it could not stomach humiliation.
Another advantage the Germans had over their Italian counterparts was their size and strength. Shorn of their armor, weapons, discipline, and superior battlefield tactics, the average Roman soldier (who weighed about 130 pounds) was no match physically for his barbarian counterpart. When the Roman lines broke, their aura of invincibility vanished into the mist and rain. When the legions realized they were trapped and unable to defend themselves, what went through their minds? Fear? Anger? Resignation? Shame?
It’s impossible for us, at this historical remove, to tell. We do know that the Romans, spiritual descendants of Sparta, not Athens, but with Lucullan appetites for the pleasures of the flesh and a pre-Christian lack of guilt about same, regarded life as fleeting, as well as, in the main, nasty and brutish. Death could come to anyone at any time—by disease, by the sword, at the behest of the Senate or the emperor, by your own hand or at another’s, in war, in peace. When condemned, Roman nobles generally met their demises with equanimity—Petronius’s final dinner party, at which he had his surgeons open his veins and those of his mistress in order to fulfill Nero’s command, talking and dying as wittily as possible before his gathered guests, comes to mind—if not actual aplomb. As pagans, their notion of the afterlife was the gloomy confines of the underworld, to which were headed the good and the bad alike, to live eternally in eternal shadows, shades of the past, their earthly powers and glories stripped and gone, and visited only upon occasion by an intrepid traveler such as Aeneas in Book VI of the Aeneid (who encounters both his father, Anchises, and, rather less happily, the late Dido, as he learns of his destiny as the founder of Rome).
But fear, at least as we understand it in the modern sense, probably played little role in the emotions of the warriors. Death became the ancients, which is why our history is written with their bones dipped in their blood and the blood of their enemies. A good death, not eternal salvation, not even la pace de la tomba, was the goal of every man (women didn’t figure into this equation). Gibbon, correctly, ascribed some of the late Empire’s weakness to its Christianization, but this is a partial misreading of Christian bellicosity—in hoc signo vinces was, after all, the battle cry of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, and the Crusaders who wrested Jerusalem from the Muslims in the last year of the eleventh century cried Deus lo vult as they put the Jews and Mohammedans to the sword in the name of the Lord Jesus. By the early Middle Ages, everyone’s God, it seems, was sanguinary.
One suspects, therefore, that there was not a lot of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth as a man’s fate was confronted at the point of a sword, a spear, or battle-axe. As we know from Cannae, many of the soldiers went unresisting to their deaths, dropping their arms and embracing the sweet bloodletting of the sword as it plunged into their entrails, their throats, or at their collarbones with a killing thrust. True, most soldiers went down fighting, selling their lives as dearly as they could, but faced with the inevitable there was no shame in resignation and submission. All men fall: mighty Caesar, the conqueror of Vercingetorix, the greatest man of the ancient world, was struck down by the knives of cowards like Brutus and Cassius, and history since is replete with great men felled by pipsqueaks.
In short, the word the ancients used was honor. In the post–World War II era, “honor” has become risible, an archaic insult, the taunt of the atheist and the weakling against the strong. A hero goes to his death willingly; we moderns call that man a chump. Which is correct?
The contradiction of Eros and Thanatos is that men will die for Eros, but they will seek out Thanatos in its pursuit and embrace it when that is the price to pay for sexual satisfaction. It is impossible to read of Cannae, whether in Polybius or Livy, without a thought for the brave Roman soldiers, ambushed in the columns, who died without being able to deliver so much as a sword thrust or an ear chaw. No real man dies without a fight. No real man deems his death a willing sacrifice without collecting as dear a price as he can.
There is one hero in the Teutoburg Forest, and that is Arminius, or Hermann,24 to give him his proper, unromanized name. Like Hannibal, Arminius is something of a tragic figure, conqueror of Varus but victim of tribal machinations, largely having to do with which leader—to make matters more complex, they were often related by blood—was or was not an ally of Rome in the battle along the German front. After battling Germanicus to a relative standstill and thus permanently keeping the Romans out of Germania Magna, Arminius was assassinated in 21 A.D. by members of his own tribe, who feared his will to power; like Caesar, he went under his own people’s knives.
It is hardly surprising that the Teutoburg Forest does not loom large in Roman history. The defeat at Cannae at the hands of a genius like Hannibal and the perfect execution of the double envelopment25 was one thing. It was also avenged by Scipio Africanus, who brought the Punic Wars to their definitive conclusion. But annihilation at the hands of barbarians in the German forests? For centuries, the misadventure across the Rhine was referred to by the Romans as the clades Variana—the Varian disaster.
For such an epochal struggle, the Teutoburg Forest has not entered the realm of myth and legend in the same way as Thermopylae or the Little Bighorn. In one of the most disastrously expensive sword-and-sandal movies ever made, The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), there is a visual allusion to the battle early on, when the forces of Commodus are set upon in the woods by German barbarians—who, however, are soon routed by the timely arrival of General Livius and his troops. But this film is set at the end of the second century, not the beginning of the first. Indeed, its real story, which essentially was reworked for Ridley Scott’s 2000 epic Gladiator, focused on the struggle for power after the death of Commodus’s father, the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180 A.D.), ending with a fictional duel in the arena between Commodus and Livius. This film, which came on the heels of such similar epics as Cleopatra and El Cid, cost about $20 million to make, grossed less than $5 million, and effectively spelled the end of producer Samuel Bronston’s career.
The battle, however, did resonate culturally in one particular place—Germany. In 1875, four years after German unification under Prussia and in the aftermath of the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War, the new German nation-state commemorated Arminius and his struggle for independence from Rome with a large monument, 53 meters high, near the site of the battlefield. Atop a monopteros stands a large statue of Hermann, holding aloft a sword that bears the inscription “Deutsche Einigkeit: Meine Stärke / Meine Stärke: Deutschlands Macht,” which means: “German Unity is My Strength. My Strength is Germany’s Might.”
Around the same time, the Cologne-born composer Max Bruch began work on his heroic oratorio Arminius, which was premiered in early 1877. Composed for vocal soloists, chorus, and full orchestra, it’s an earnest but strangely uninvolving work—the battle itself comes as an anticlimax in the fourth and last part of the piece—musically, little more than a blending of Brahms and Wagner but without the distinctive genius of either. Even the obligatory choral anthem to German martial glory that closes the piece comes off as more dutiful than inspirational, despite the words: Gross ist der Ruhm der deutschen Söhne / Gross die Ehre der gefallenen Helden!—“Great is the renown of Germany’s sons / Great is the glory of the fallen heroes!”
But the real reason that both Arminius and Arminius have been consigned to the European attic has to do with World War II. With German militarism decisively defeated, and the jingoistic underpinnings of National Socialist Germany in complete disrepute, the world was in no mood for odes to Nietzsche’s all-conquering Blond Beast.
And so Arminius—Hermann of the Cherusci—is largely forgotten today, although the legacy of his admittedly treacherous victory over Varus and Augustus lives on. Is a denatured and clawless Germany preferable to one that, with a proper moral compass, can contribute to the defense of Western civilization? Ferocity has long been a hallmark of the German character. But so has a love—a worship—of nature, which explains the success of its contemporary Green Party. The soldiers of Arminius nailed the heads of the Romans to the trees in order to propitiate their arboreal gods. A chilling thought occurs: What if German militarism is once again wedded to a primitive naturism (the Nazis made significant steps in this direction), with the will and the power to enforce a radical environmentalist agenda? Stranger things have happened, especially in the homeland of Hansel and Gretel, and Faust.
As Tacitus observed, “Assuredly [Arminius] was the deliverer of Germany, one too who had defied Rome, not in her early rise, as other kings and generals, but in the height of her empire’s glory, had fought, indeed, indecisive battles, yet in war remained unconquered. He completed thirty-seven years of life, twelve years of power, and he is still a theme of song among barbarous nations, though to Greek historians, who admire only their own achievements, he is unknown, and to Romans not as famous as he should be, while we extol the past and are indifferent to our own times.”
Today’s West has precisely the opposite problem. We seek to bury our past for having the effrontery for not living up to the moral standards of the present—but what else do we inter with it?
This, needless to say, was not the Roman way. Even in their two most shattering defeats, at Cannae and in the Teutoburg Forest, they took their beating and, in many ways, came back the stronger for it. Hannibal never repeated his triumph at Cannae, and it would not be for another 467 years that the German barbarians would, finally, come through the Roman gates for good. History may not have an arc, but it does have a very long reach.