How the eagles were tamed

In AD 9 the Roman general Varus at the head of three legions was surprised by German forces in the Teutoburg forest, and utterly defeated. It was one of the greatest disasters ever suffered by a Roman army, even if not on a scale comparable to Cannae. This defeat marked the end of any serious attempt by Rome to conquer Germany as Julius Caesar had conquered Gaul and incorporated it into the empire. How serious that attempt had been is a matter of dispute. Nevertheless subsequently that frontier of the empire was fixed on the Rhine. In northern Europe the god’s promise to Aeneas of ‘empire without limits’, recorded by Virgil, proved false.

More than 1,500 years later the German commander Arminius became a national hero at a time of reviving national consciousness associated with Martin Luther’s defiance of Rome’s claim to spiritual primacy. Professor Wells tells us that ‘between 1676 and 1910 no fewer than 76 operas about Hermann’ — as Arminius was now called — ‘were written and performed’. (Are any still staged?)

Two months after the establishment of the German empire in 1871, the distinguished Roman historian Theodor Mommsen made an explicit connection between Arminius’s fight for freedom against Roman domination and the unification of Germany in his own time. Mommsen referred to the Battle of the Teutoburg forest as a turning-point in world history.

Even then almost all that was known about the battle came from Roman sources. It couldn’t be otherwise, the Germans being illiterate. Of the Roman historians who described it, only Velleius Paterculus was a contemporary. Tacitus, who as a Republican detesting the empire made Arminius a hero, wrote 100 years later. Other Romans took a harsher view of Arminius, reasonably enough. He had served in their army and been honoured. He posed as their ally, and Varus relied on information given him by Arminius in planning his march.