7
GIVE ME BACK MY LEGIONS
By Bill Fawcett
Trusting the wrong person can be a fatal mistake.
In AD 9, during the third decade of his reign as the first emperor of Rome, Augustus Caesar thought he had found the right man for a tough job. He needed a governor for the newly formed province of Germania. To the minds of most Romans, Germany had been pacified. Any tribe that revolted had been crushed and it appeared that the Germans were quickly being absorbed into the empire. German mercenaries were now in Roman employ across the empire. Some had fought so well they had been integrated into the legions and even made citizens. What Augustus now felt he needed was a competent governor who could begin turning what had been an expensive military occupation into a profitable province. The Roman Empire, like most governments, always needed more money.
The Emperor Augustus felt he had the right man in the imperial Roman legate—Publius Quinctilius Varus. Varus had already been the governor of Syria, which included many restive areas, including Israel. Along with suppressing a number of revolts, he had been very good at extracting taxes. This was, above all else, the measure of a good governor in the eyes of Rome and those who depended on those taxes to maintain the empire. Varus was also an in-law of the emperor, always an advantage. So the legate Varus was recalled from relatively peaceful and developed Syria, and sent to rule the wild and darkly forested Germania. In the beginning, all seemed to go well for him. With his fifteen thousand crack legionnaires in three legions, at first no one challenged him. But appearances were deceiving. Rome was used to conquering richer lands, such as Greece, Egypt, or even Gaul. The many tribes living in the German forests were relatively poor and had little in the way of gold or coins. This made the taxes Varus imposed a hard burden. Resentment of taxes, Roman arrogance, and being on the wrong side of most deals grew. When Gaul was conquered less than a century before, it had enough trade and industry that it benefited from its inclusion in the Roman Empire. Germany, though, was not in a position to gain much of anything from Rome. Roman rule was becoming universally resented and despised by the German tribesmen, but it appears Varus was unable to understand this. He assumed that Romanizing Germany was something the German tribes would welcome. He ruled just as he had in much different and long-conquered Syria, and expected the same results. It was a fatal misconception.
Perhaps Varus’s real error was trusting one man, a German prince of the influential Cherusci tribe who used the name Arminius. Arminius had served in the Roman army, excelled in his duties, and was made a citizen and knight. He was expected to rise in Roman society and even served as a personal adviser to Varus. It was a prestigious, and often profitable, post. But Arminius had other ambitions.
It was the German’s ambition to become the chief of his tribe and, perhaps, to unite all of the other German tribes under his rule as well. To do this, he had to impress the German warriors, not the Romans, in a dramatic way. Because he had convinced Varus to trust him, he found a way. A way that would give Rome her worst defeat since Hannibal.
It wasn’t that Varus had not been warned. A chieftain friendly to Rome, Segestes, who was a Cheruscan noble of equal rank to that of Arminius’s father, warned Varus not to trust Arminius. Varus rebuffed the warning. So, when it came time for all three legions, their auxiliaries, and thousands of camp followers to march south from their summer camp on the Weser River to their winter camp in southern Germany, he appointed Arminius to command the mounted auxiliaries. These were local horsemen in Roman hire, whose job was to make sure the way was clear. And to put down minor rebellions that could delay the march. Instead of carrying out Varus’s orders, Arminius began immediately to incite the local tribes to revolt. He then reported back to Varus that there was a small uprising, but one too big for him to handle with his horsemen. He assured the governor that that revolt could be quashed if the legions simply marched back past the rebels. This would require only a two-day detour and would end the problem without the expense of a battle. Varus trusted Arminius, and turned off the main roads and into the forests and swamps.
With the traitorous Arminius as guide, the massive column was soon weaving its way through narrow trails and bog-filled paths. A storm occurred, slowing and further disorganizing the Romans. When they were strung out for several miles, with civilians and supply wagons pulled by slow-moving oxen tangled among the centuries, the Germans struck. At first, they simply threw javelins and ran. These legions had beaten them in battle after battle. But as the condition of the Roman army degenerated, the German warriors became bolder. Soon sections of the extended column were attacked by large numbers of German warriors from either side. If the attack went badly, the Germans just fled back into the forest. But too often these ambushes were devastating.
The Roman army’s strength was fighting in formation. In open-field battles, these three legions had slaughtered any tribe that resisted them, often suffering few casualties in the effort. But on narrow trails through swamps and deep forests, there was no way for the army to form up. Instead, the fighting was man to man, with all the advantages to the Germans. When the first German attacks were successful, word spread and previously friendly tribes hurried to join in. In an area called the Great Bog, the only path was just over fifty feet wide and surrounded by swamp or dense forest. Strung out in a line, burdened with civilians, and unable to support one another, century after century was destroyed. The running battle lasted for days, but the result was inevitable. When it became apparent that all was lost, Varus and his top officers chose suicide—quite literally falling on their swords. Eventually, what little remained of three crack legions was broken up, surrounded, and leaderless. The cavalry at the front of the column got within sixty miles of the permanent Roman camp at Haltern, but only a few legionnaires managed to escape and report the defeat.
Rome and Augustus panicked at the loss. There were only twenty-eight legions in the entire empire, and three of the most elite and experienced were gone. Worse yet, their aura of being undefeatable was lost, too. All free Germans were driven out of Rome, and all of Italy waited tensely for an expected horde of Germans to sweep down on them. That never happened. What did result was that, after a few punitive expeditions, Rome never again tried to occupy Germany. The Rhine became a permanent boundary—until two centuries later, when the Germanic Teutons, beginning with the Goths, were pushed by the Huns into Gaul. By the time the Huns followed them, the part of the empire based in Rome was a hollow shell of its former self.
The historian Herbert W. Benario once wrote what might have been, if Varus had not trusted Arminius. “Almost all of modern Germany as well as much of the present-day Czech Republic would have come under Roman rule. All Europe west of the Elbe might well have remained Roman Catholic; Germans would be speaking a Romance language; the Thirty Years’ War might never have occurred, and the long, bitter centuries of conflict between the French and the Germans might never have taken place.
“With a more Romanized Germany united as one country centuries earlier, there would be no World Wars, no Nazis, and no holocaust.”
Just as importantly, Germany would have been a strong buffer, united under Rome against the later invasions of the Goths, Huns, and other barbarians. Western Rome need not have fallen. With the core of the empire, Italy and Gaul, shielded from the barbarian invasions, a significant portion of the social and economic strength of Rome might have remained intact. Society would not have broken down. England would not have lost its legions. There might well never have been any dark age. Five centuries of chaos, illiteracy, and ruin would have been avoided. The scientific life we live today might have evolved as soon as the fifteenth century and we might now be living in a world so advanced it currently only appears in science-fiction novels. One man, Varus, governor of Germania, trusted the wrong person and, if he had not, the world might have been spared immeasurable grief and the march of civilization would not have stumbled.