Chapter II: “Varus, Give Me Back My Legions”: Cannae (216 B.C.) and the Teutoburg Forest (9 A.D.)

0.     The opening lines of Virgil’s Aeneid.

0.     See Extract 2.

0.     See Extract 3.

0.     Music has long played an important part in military exercises, from trumpets and drums to regimental bands. It kept the march rhythms, sounded triumphs and alarms, and acted as a signalling device for combat orders.

0.     Whose Meditations were forged from Stoic philosophy and also contain many elements we would recognize as Christian today, even though the Empire did not formally become Christian until Constantine a century and a half later.

0.     See Extract 4.

0.     Prohairesis, roughly meaning “a principled moral choice,” found in the Stoic philosophy of Epictetus and in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

0.     The Roman position was somewhat analogous to that of the Persians on the first two days at Thermopylae, who were similarly unable to bring the brunt of their army to bear on the limited front the Greeks controlled. Once surrounded, however, they more resembled the Greeks.

0.     For a similar conundrum, but with a vastly smaller defensive force, see Chapter XI to learn how the British at Rorke’s Drift solved it versus the Zulu warriors. Flexibility, superior armaments, steadfast, unwavering courage, and cool-headed leadership turned out to be the solution.

0.   Reflecting and addressing the fears for the Christian West, Martin Luther published his pamphlet On the War Against the Turks in 1529. He regarded Muslim depredations as God’s punishment on errant Christianity. He regarded Islam, however, with extreme distaste: “Ego usque ad mortem luctor adversus Turcas et Turcarum Deum,” he wrote. “I will always struggle to the death against the Turks and the god of the Turks.”

0.   “The infamy of the one has eclipsed the glory of the other,” wrote Byron. “When the name of Nero is heard, who thinks of the consul? But such are human things.”

0.   Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, translated by Michael Grant.

0.   See Extract 5.

0.   Tiberius, the second of the five Julio-Claudian emperors, had succeeded Augustus upon the latter’s death in 14 A.D.

0.   How different the history of Rome might have been had Germanicus lived. The “great man” theory of history was never more apposite.

0.   In The Twelve Caesars (121 A.D.).

0.   Of the three destroyed legions, only one—the XVIII—was ever reconstituted (under the Emperor Nero). It was disbanded under Vespasian, who ruled from 69 to 79.

0.   Although erected centuries later, Trajan’s Column in Rome vividly depicts how the legions looked and fought during the Empire period.

0.   See Extract 6.

0.   Romulus after the mythical founder of Rome, and for whom the city was named. The last emperor’s very name summed up the life of the Republic, and adumbrated its destruction.

0.   Who succeeded Augustus on the throne in 14 A.D. As a commander, Tiberius had been the scourge of the Germans.

0.   The Battle of the Monongahela in 1755, in which a British and colonial regiment (which included George Washington, then a lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia) under Gen. Edward Braddock was soundly defeated by a combined French-Canadian-Indian force. Braddock was killed, and Washington organized the retreat, thus beginning his rise to national fame.

0.   A Triumphus was the highest Roman civic and military honor, a public declaration and celebration of a signal Roman foreign victory, declared by the Senate. The general so feted rode through the streets in a quadriga, leading his army, his captives, and followed by the spoils of war. According to tradition, a slave stood behind the general, holding a laurel wreath over his head and whispering in his ear, “Remember, thou art only a man.”

0.   The city of Hermann, Missouri, originally a German settlement, is named after him.

0.   Emulated, however coincidentally, by the Zulus with their “horns of the bison” strategy against the British garrison at Rorke’s Drift in 1879. But not successfully, as we shall see in Chapter XI.