← Dan Snow's History Hit
Dan Snow's History Hit
Rome's Greatest Humiliation: Roman Empire vs Germanic Tribes
00:57:47
The Roman army is humiliated in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest
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- [00:01]
Dan Snow
Hi, I'm Dan Snow, and if you would like Dan Snow's History Hit ad free, get early access and bonus episodes. Sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:27]
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- [00:57]
Dan Snow
Wow.
- [00:58]
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- [00:59]
Dan Snow
I just bought and financed a car.
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Dan Snow
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Wow.
- [01:15]
Simon Elliot
Mm.
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Dan Snow
Hey, have you checked out that spreadsheet.
- [01:18]
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Dan Snow
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- [02:01]
Dan Snow
It took the Romans six years to return to that terrible spot. They were certainly in no hurry to revisit a place of horror and shame. Tacitus, the historian, describes it as hideous to sight and memory. Plus, it was the heart of bandit country. Always had been, I suppose. That had been the Roman's mistake. It was a place talked about in hushed tones. There was an acceptance among the men that even the mighty Roman army sustained occasional, rare catastrophic defeats every few generations. This, they all knew, was the site of one of those. It was a place which they believed had changed the course of Roman history. They advanced cautiously. They were taking no chances. There were survivors among them who carried the scars from their previous march through this terrain. They shared their stories of the horrors they'd endured in these woods. Perhaps this return healed their wounds. Perhaps it tore them open afresh. The Roman commander on this occasion was Germanicus Julius Caesar, a scion of the imperial family. The Germanicus was an honorific name he'd inherited from his father. It had been given to him for subjugating the German lands. It turned out that that congratulatory epithet might have been a little premature. Germanicus Jr. Had spent these last few years campaigning in Germany with a single purpose revenge. Revenge for what had happened here to the Roman eagles. And perhaps Germanicus and the Romans hoped that retribution soared. Fire could scour away their shame. Germanicus knew that it had been failures in command that had led to that catastrophe. And he would not make the same mistakes now. The forest rang with axes. Trees were cleared. Ravines and swamps were bridged and drained. There would be no ambush this time. So it was slowly, cautiously, that they made their way to the old battlefield. It was obvious when they arrived, they started to see evidence of their forebears. Detritus littered the ground. Broken fragments of weapons and equipment, tools, all the accoutrements of a mass of men, women and children. The mobile Roman town that was an army on the march. All that was left of that now were the pathetic heaps of rotting fabric, broken cart axles, and among that junk, human remains. There were bones, half buried in the mulch of the forest floor. It was like a giant crime scene. The Romans found they could chart the course of what had occurred. There was the fort, built as a desperate refuge. There were the piles of bones where brave groups of legionaries had fought to the last man. There were the earthworks that had entrapped them. There were also, according to Tacitus, human heads prominently nailed to the trunks of trees. The men could see evidence of the altars where senior Roman officers had been tortured to death, where they'd been burned alive. Even years later, they could make out the funeral pyre for these Roman officers. And in a wider sense, they knew that they'd arrived at the site where Roman Germany itself had been immolated. These were the remains of the army, the remains of the men who had died in the Teutoburg forest. The place where Rome's dream of ever expanding empire had been killed in a swirling, nightmarish ambush. It had been a place of lurking, pouncing, invisible enemies. A place where even their gods had abandoned the Romans. The natural world had marched under enemy banners. Hammering rain had turned the ground to mud. Trees, ravines and rocks had taken their place in the enemy line of battle. You are listening to Dan Snow's history, Hit. And this is the story of Possibly Rome's most celebrated or lamented defeat, certainly one of the most consequential ones at defeat that drove the Emperor, the first emperor, the founder of Empire, to the point of madness. This is the story of the defeat in the Teutoburg Forest. I'll be telling that story, but I'll also be asking for some specialist help from Simon Elliot, the history hit super contributor, star of many of these podcasts, but also our YouTube films and more recently our broadcast collaborations with the British Channel 5 television. And if this podcast piques your interest, then we have a wonderful documentary on our own history hit TV channel, presented of course by the Tristorian himself, Tristan Hughes, who's also got a two part series about this battle on his ancient podcast. We've got you covered in the history hit universe for all things Teutoburg, so let's add the final piece to that jigsaw. This is the story of Rome's greatest defeat, the Teutoburg Forest. Enjoy.
- [07:38]
Historical Expert
Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima.
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Dan Snow
God save the King. No black white unity till there is first some black unity.
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Historical Expert
Never to go to war with one another again.
- [07:49]
Ryan Reynolds
And lift off and the shuttle has cleared the tower.
- [07:57]
Dan Snow
It was 50 years before the birth of Jesus and Julius Caesar was on the rampage. He marched his eagles deeper into Western Europe than they'd ever been before. He fought a series of savage campaigns attended by massive destruction, murder, displacement. The Romans conquered much what we now call France and the Low Countries. He took his armies to the shore of the Northern sea and stunningly, he took his armies across them. He landed in Britain. Julius Caesar was responsible for an avalanche of firsts and superlatives that make him almost unique in European history. And they also explain his iron grip on the fever dreams of would be conquerors ever since. And during that period of conquest he came across the Germans. He describes them in his memoirs. The nature of their food, their regular exercise and their freedom of life. For from childhood they are not taught a sense of duty or discipline and they do nothing unless they want to. Facilitates their strength and makes them men of immense bodily stature. Moreover, they have regularly trained themselves to wear nothing even in the coldest places, except skins, the scantiness of which leaves a great part of the body bare and they bathe in the rivers. Julius Caesar obviously rated them. He points out that the Germans are much tougher than the Gauls that he's come up against. They've been softened by Roman luxury that they've been able to import across the border. The Germans, though far more warlike, a very different Story. Now, did the respect that Julius Caesar had for those Germans, did it prevent him from marching into their territory, slashing routes through ancient woodland, laying road, hammering posts into mounds, excavating ditches, planting the eagle, raiding, pillaging? No, it did not. He did not respect them that much. He became the first Roman general to cross the Rhine. He didn't use boats. That was far too demure. As Caesar says himself, don't forget talking about himself as ever in the third person, which is an enormous flex. He deemed it scarcely safe and ruled it unworthy of his own and the Romans dignity to cross in boats. Instead, Caesar built a bridge and I suspect the engineering the Romans deployed. Building that bridge was probably more terrifying to the Germans than an advancing legion. It was the first bridge in the history of the Rhine. Pile driving stakes into the riverbed. It took 10 days. He crossed the bridge, he raided, he burned, and then he returned after just 18 days on German soil. And then he torched the bridge. Not unlike his expedition to Britain. Caesar made a big noise about invading, claimed the job had been done, disappeared, and it would fall to his successors to make these claims a little more permanent. In 16 BC, some German tribesmen, they crossed the Rhine, they fell upon a Roman legion and actually managed to capture its eagle standard. Now this was unacceptable, obviously, and it fell to Julius Caesar's heir to deal with this. His great, great nephew Octavian. The man who'd won the civil war that followed Caesar's assassination, united the empire and became its first emperor, Augustus. Now, he seemed to believe at this point that an ever expanding empire was key to ensuring its economic growth, its dynamism, its martial ability, that the conquest would provide a ready supply of slaves. And importantly they were sort of outlet for warlike aristocrats who might otherwise look inwards. Conquest would increase the glory of Rome, you name it. There are all sorts of reasons why he wanted Rome to go on expanding. And there was also the issue of Germans raiding into the Empire. He couldn't allow that and so he decided that Germany was next on the agenda. The man he chose for the job was Nero Claudius Drusus, his wife's son. So his stepson, this well connected young man crossed the Rhine and began a campaign of conquest. He marched through territory as yet unknown to the Romans. He reached the Elbe, which is the second of three great rivers that roughly run north, south through central Europe. You've got the Rhine, you've got the Elbe, which goes from modern Hamburg down to Magdeburg, Dresden and Prague. And then you've got the Vistula beyond the Elbe. Nero Claudius Drusus did a huge amount to bring this territory, largely between the Rhine and the Elbe, under Roman control. Indeed, he won the title Germanicus for his efforts in Germany. In 9 BC, though, he was returning from the Elbe when he was injured in a fall from his horse. The wounds became infected. Now his beloved brother Tiberius galloped day and night to be with him and he made it to his bedside when he breathed his last. Memorials to Germanicus were built across the empire and while they were being erected, Tiberius, his brother and others finished his work. They conducted a vast and I think largely unremembered war, marching to and fro between the Elbe and the Rhine, crushing, enslaving the Germans, but also trying to settle them, trying to introduce them to Roman law and governance and introduce a little town planning on occasion. They were not above moving entire peoples from one region to another to pacify them. Sometimes it was carrot, sometimes stick. They sought out local allies by giving some tribes special status. Let's hear Simon Elliot describe the process.
- [13:28]
Historical Expert
You've got to bear in mind, Dan, that the Roman military is the most efficient industrial scale killing machine in the ancient world and one of the most effective in history. So when the Romans turn their attention to you with military conquest in mind, they're going to throw absolutely everything at it to succeed. And in actual fact, when Drusus and Tiberius were campaigning earlier north of the Rhine and east of the Rhine, actually the Romans had enormous armies in playing the field. This is the Roman Empire at the very beginning when the legionaries are sort of preeminent, they're dominant and they've got the auxiliaries as well, who are also very good. So therefore very few militaries will stand up to them in the open field. In the open field, that's the key thing. And when you're on the receiving end of that, it's nasty and it's mean and it's brutal.
- [14:17]
Dan Snow
And are they advancing through Germany, forcing local elites to bend the knee and establishing forts obviously, but also cities, colonies, towns, trying to get these Germans to live like Romans.
- [14:30]
Historical Expert
So what happens after a conquest is the Romans encouraged the local elites, so the aristocracy, the nobility, the warring nobility in the Germans case, to take up the Roman ways. So they encouraged them to send their children to Rome to learn Latin, they encouraged them to wear togas when they're carrying out public duties. They encourage them to start funding the building of stone built Mediterranean style urban environments. But that's after the event, the conquest Period is very different. In the conquest period, Dan, it's all about roads. So what you're doing is you're building roads to link up other roads or waterways. So you have the means of transport, of getting particularly the logistics that you need to the legionary spearheads as they're driving into enemy territory. So as the legions advance, they're building roads and they're building roads and they're building roads and they're often alongside river systems as well. If you're follow the cal crazy campaign. It's very interesting because Varus's route was always alongside a river. That's because he had a sort of a riverine fleet alongside him, exactly the same as sort of a British colonial army in the 19th century would, to provide all the logistics to keep his army in the field. So it's all about roads and it's all about rivers.
- [15:43]
Dan Snow
The Roman military had ballooned during the civil War, but there had been a slimming down under Augustus. There were now 30 legions available to the emperor, and something like a third of them, around 10 of them, were fighting in Germany under his stepson Tiberius. As the Romans grew better acquainted with the Germans, they remained fascinated by them. Tacitus, although he's writing later, devotes an entire book to them. They were a people apart, apparently, after all, according to Tacitus, who would relinquish Asia or Africa or Italy to repair to Germany a region hideous and rude under a rigorous climate, dismal to behold or to cultivate, unless the same were his native country. He goes on to say they didn't live in cities or towns, but instead in huts scattered any old howl through the forest. He regarded the Germans as a distinct people. They have never mingled by intermarriage with other nations, but they have remained a people pure and independent, and resemble none but themselves. Hence, among such a mighty multitude of men, the same make and form is found in all eyes, stern and blue, yellow hair, huge bodies, but vigorous only in the first onset of pains and labor. They are not equally patient, nor can they at all endure thrift and heat to bear hunger and cold. They are hardened by their climate and soil. He goes on to talk about a day in the life. Much of their time they pass in indolence, resigned to sleep and repast. All of the most brave, all of the most warlike, apply to nothing at all but to their wives, to the ancient men, and to even the most impotent domestic. They trust the care of their house and all their lands and possessions. They themselves loiter the moment they rise from sleep, which they generally prolong till late in the day. They bathe most frequently in warm water, as in a country where the winter is very long and severe. To continue drinking night and day without intermission is. Is a reproach to no man. Frequent, then are there scuffles, as usual, among men intoxicated with liquor. And such scuffles rarely terminate in angry words, but for the most part, in maimings and slaughter. Tasit describes them practicing a kind of communal decision making. There are meetings, there are some kind of votes or acclamation for leaders and policies. And Tastus says that even women have some say in these meetings. Indeed, some of the northernmost tribes were apparently governed by women. So this is what the Romans thought about the lusty souls that they were trying to pacify and eventually assimilate into Roman life. And yes, violence played a huge part. But there are also subtler ways of bringing the Germans under the Roman yoke. And one of those ways was by taking hostages, young men from the German elite who could be raised as Romans and then one day returned to Germany to advance the cause of their adopted Roman masters over their natural ones. Now, one of these young hostages, these young men taken from Germany, was called Arminius. He was a prince of the Cherusci tribe. He'd been a child when Augustus Gaze had fallen upon his unfortunate people. And his first memories of tribal gatherings would no doubt have been the debates, the fights within them about what to do about the Romans. His father was a convinced collaborator and he seems to have won the power struggle within the tribe. The Cherusci became Rome's greatest allies, and his father was happy to see Arminius, his son, taken by the Romans to be brought up in distant Rome. So off went Arminius with his little brother. They learned Latin, they got an education, they joined the army. And he got a chance to demonstrate his zeal for his adopted imperial masters when Rome was rocked by a big revolt reasonably close to home in 6 A.D. some damned foolish thing in the Balkans set the region ablaze. Arminius got the chance to show his mettle. There was a huge revolt that broke out in Roman Illyria, which is, roughly speaking, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Albania. Neighbourhood. Well, as you can imagine, it was a. It was a tough neighbourhood. Arminius fought there as an auxiliary, and Simon explained to me who these auxiliaries were.
- [20:12]
Historical Expert
It's Augustus who created the auxiliaries. Augustus, when he became Emperor, had already inherited as the last man standing in the late republican civil wars, about 60 legions, no end of allies and a huge Mediterranean fleet. And he couldn't afford it, so he cut the legions down to 30. But he also formalized the role of the allies, who were the secondary troops, rarely who supported the legionaries in the republican armies. So they could be bowman or slingers, or they could be rough terrain troops, or they were cavalry. So Caesar's cavalry were Gauls and Germans as an example. Now what Augustus did was formalize that, so he created the auxilia. The auxilia were then the supporting arm for the legionaries. Probably one for one in terms of the numbers in the Roman military. So if the Roman military establishment was 300,000, 150,000 or more, probably will be auxiliaries. And the auxiliaries did provide line of battle troops less well equipped than legionaries, but they could fight in the line of battle. They also provided the specialist troops like bowman slingers. They also provided, crucially, the cavalry as well. So if you're serving in the auxiliaries, actually it's not that different really from sort of being a junior officer or an officer serving in the legions. And the career path for you actually wasn't that different from. From sort of being a junior officer in the legions either.
- [21:31]
Dan Snow
And the interesting thing is if you're fighting a conventional enemy in the field, so the Macedonians or the Persians, the legionaries are doing the bulk of the work. But it strikes me that in the Illyrian revolt, it's irregular, as you say, it's rough terrain work. It's chasing down guerrillas and bands of armed men. The auxiliaries are going to be busy in that terrain, in that environment.
- [21:52]
Historical Expert
I actually think the auxiliaries are going to be busier than the legionaries. I get the sense. I mean, just imagine how expensive this legionaries and is. He's sort of like loricus segmentata, banded iron armor and his Imperial Gallic helmet and with his huge scutum shield and his beautiful gladius Hispaniensis and his two pillar and his puggio, that's a very expensive piece of kit, you know, and then it's very expensive to train this soldier that's going to be in the field for 25 years if he survives. And there are 5,500 of them in the legion. And these guys are trained to do all the stuff, like build stuff as well. So they're also the people keeping sort of the Roman Empire going in terms of construction work, building roads and things. Given that, that's expensive. I'm coming to the view now, when you look at campaigns like Agricola's campaign in Britain in the AD 80s, that Roman military commanders, if they could get away with not using the legionaries, probably would just use the auxiliaries. And at Mons Grappius, of course, it was only the auxiliaries that were used, probably because it's easier to field battlefield replacements into unit of auxiliaries because they come from one place, Batavia or Thuringia or Illyria or wherever, than the legionaries, because the legionaries have to probably come from the imperial center. So at the end of a campaign, as with Agricola when he was fighting in the far north of Britain in the AD 80s, it was much easier to replace auxiliaries than it was. I think his legions were at half strength, probably, so he didn't want to commit them unless he had to.
- [23:16]
Dan Snow
The Illyrian revolt was a serious emergency for the Roman Empire, and the majority of the legions that had been in Germany were immediately transferred out, eight of them. That meant the job of conquest and assimilation was far from complete. Augustus decided to leave three legions behind in Germany. We don't know what Arminius witnessed in Illyria. It was probably bad massacres, women hurling themselves off battlements to avoid enslavement. Roman style pacification. As Tacitus would write of a different campaign, the Romans make a desert and call it peace. Arminius might have been impressed. He might have been appalled. He also got a chance to see the Roman war machine at work. He got to learn about it from the inside. He saw its awesome strength, but he also learned about its weaknesses. Augustus was understandably focused on the revolt in Illyria, and perhaps that reason he hadn't sent his best to Germany. To keep the annexation of this large new province going, the Emperor had sent one of his friends, Publius Quinctilius Varus, now Varus's father, but on the wrong side of history. He'd backed the assassins of Caesar over those who swore to avenge him, and he'd been forced to commit suicide. His son the next Varus, had seen which way the wind was blowing and quickly hopped across the other side. He'd become friends and comrades with Caesar's adopted son, Octavian, now Emperor Augustus. Augustus employed him. He sent him around the empire to govern, to quell, to pacify. Varus had been to North Africa. He'd been sent to Syria. And during a revolt in Judea, we hear that he crucified 2000 rebels. Augustus seems to have thought they'd broken the back of German resistance. Tiberius, his foremost military commander, his stepson, had been taken from Germany and sent to deal with the Illyrian revolt with all those legions. And so the more political Varus was sent as the first governor of the Roman province of Germania. It now stretched from the Rhine to the Elbe. From Augustus's cosseted perspective in Rome, the job looked done on the ground, though in the tangled woodlands, the vast wetlands, the sort of mist covered, undulating landscape. In those gatherings on the full moons where tribesfolk from 50 separate groups swore to avenge the lives snatched by Roman blades, things felt a teeny bit different. I asked Simon about why Augustus sent Varus.
- [25:50]
Historical Expert
I almost get the sense that actually he came to think that actually the Romans had been more successful than they really had, because when he appoints Varus to be the guy who's going to establish Germania, I think he thought it was already a done deal. So you've gone from not being militaristic to having been a bit, to being a lot, to thinking you'd won, to suddenly you're establishing a new province. And he thought it was done and dusted. If you look at Varus's background, Varus's background actually wasn't as a militaristic military leader. He'd been an administrator in Africa, proconsularis, and he was a relative of Augustus as well. So I think he was the right man for the job Augustus thought he had to do.
- [26:33]
Dan Snow
The historian Cassius Dio is always very colorful, but he's writing about 150 years later and he's known to, well, embellish his subjects. Still, he's one of the few sources we've got, so we've got to go with it. And he says that Germany, well, it presented an uneven picture. There were tracks of pacified ground, but there were definitely areas of hostility. Now, in the former, the Germans were starting to live and eat and dress like Romans. But Cassius Dio warns with, you know, Captain hindsight over here. The Germans had not, however, forgotten their ancestral habits, their native manners, their old life of independence or the power derived from arms. Another historian describes Varus. He says that he was a man of mild character and of quiet disposition, somewhat slow in mind as he was in body, and more accustomed to the leisure of the camp than to actual service in war. This was the man that Augustus had sent into the heart of Germany. He was also quite rapacious. That historian suggests that Varus had stripped Syria of its wealth while he was governor there, and it wasn't uncommon for the Romans to do that. One of the reasons for the Illyrian revolt, apparently, as the Illyrians subsequently claimed, is that the Romans hadn't sent shepherds to look after their flocks, but wolves. And indeed, in Britain, it would be a grasping imperial official who helped to tip the Roman province of Britannia into revolt when the time came and Boudicca marched to war. Cassius Dio also picks up on that theme. He says when Quinctilius Varus became governor of the province of Germany, he strove to change them more rapidly. Besides issuing orders to them as if they were actually slaves of the Romans, he exacted money as he would from subject nations to this they were in no mood to submit, for the leaders longed for their former ascendancy, and the masses preferred their accustomed condition to foreign domination. Varus, though, didn't read the room. He was pretty relaxed. This was consolidation. It was certainly not a conquest. Cassius Dio writes, he entered the heart of Germany as though he were going among a people, enjoying the blessings of peace and sitting on his tribunal. He wasted the time of a summer campaign in holding court and observing the proper details of legal procedure. Consequently, he did not keep his legions together, as was proper in a hostile country, but distributed many of the soldiers to helpless communities which asked for them for the alleged purpose of guarding various points, arresting robbers or escorting provision trains. Varus is clearly not expecting to have to fight a serious enemy. It all seems to be going very nicely. All of his reports were favorable. After all, he had great advisors clustered around him. He had men who understood the people and the land. Among them was Arminius, now back in Germany after service in Illyria. He was a valued ally. He was a counselor, became very close to Varus. He knew the country and its. Its people, its leaders and its beliefs. He was a font of fantastic advice. The two men shared dinners. They became very close. But actually, during that summer, Varus received an unwelcome visitor. Into his presence came a man called Segestes. He was an older, influential German tribesman. He warned Varus that there were plots afoot to rebel. And most shockingly of all, he told him that the chief organizer of these plots was Arminius Varus friend. His advisor, Sergestes was denouncing him as a conspirator. Varus ignored him. The one obvious flaw with Sergestes testimony is that Sergestes was known to absolutely hate Arminius because Arminius had run off with his daughter. Tacitus tells us that Segestes begged Varus to arrest Arminius and all the other chiefs, assuring him that people would attempt nothing if the leading men were removed, and he would then have the opportunity of sifting accusations and distinguishing the innocent. Varus was having none of it. Cassius Dio says that Varus actually rebuked him for being needlessly excited and slandering his friends. Segestes was sent packing. Arminius remained in the inner circle. The summer days began to shorten and as the leaves reddened, messengers brought some bad news. There was a revolt, but it wasn't a big one. It was just some local trouble and it needed a brisk slap down before the winter. Happily, Arminius had a solution. He knew an ideal route that would allow Varus to march through friendly territory to nip the revolt in the bud and make it back to winter quarters on the Rhine before it got too cold and miserable to campaign. And so, off Varus set. Cassius Dyer reports that Arminius escorted him as he set out and then begged to be excused from further attendance in order to assemble Allied forces, after which they would come to his aid. What a useful chap. So Arminius spurs ahead to raise local forces and secure the route. He even provided scouts to Varus to show him the way. Bear in mind, there are no paved roads before the Romans arrive in Germany. And roads are super important for empires. They aren't just for getting from A to B. They are arteries of empire. They allow speedy movement. There's a wonderful expression in military history you've heard me mention before. It's a military maxim. To win battles, you simply have to get there first with the most. You show up in greater strength than is expected before you're expected, ready to fight. Harold Godwinson does it at Stamford Bridge. Henry IV does it at the Battle of Shrewsbury. Napoleon does it every day. Rommel does it. All the best generals do it. And to do that you need roads. And plus, roads can be quite secure because you've cleared the edges. There are way stations, fortified strong points along them. This is the architecture of pacification. But Germany doesn't have a good road network yet, and particularly, of course, not in this shortcut, this, this route that Arminius has suggested. This route takes the Roman legions through hilly, forested, marshy country. The legions found it hard going. Now, here's Simon talking to me about a legion on the move.
- [32:59]
Historical Expert
Normally, when the Romans are going to operate sort of in a campaign of conquest in open territory, we use Britain as an example. They probably are bouncing on a 30 kilometer wide front, okay, where maybe two or three, four legionary spearheads in the centre, allure of auxiliary cavalries on the flanks. And when they come to a centre of native resistance, they may stop if it's important. If they choose not to leave an opponent in their rear, they'll stop and take it out and carry on. But it's on a very broad front. I mean I'm researching at the moment the route the Romans took from Leicester to Lincoln late AD 40s and that's probably on that 30 kilometer wide front. But here they can't. I mean this is where varuses because you don't have this 30 kilometer front. You're being funneled through a forest log road that you're building. You may have one flank secured ish on a river system, but the other flank's not secure no matter what you do. And you can't have allure of cavalry 10km out hunting down ambushes, etc. Because they're not going to be visible to you.
- [33:59]
Dan Snow
You're listening to Dan Snow's history Hit this is the destruction of the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest. More coming up.
- [34:11]
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- [36:22]
Dan Snow
So as Simon says, big conventional armies love open space, flat planes. Don't forget they've got artillery, they've got catapults and ballista and those things need proper positioning. They need hard ground, they need a nice open field of fire. You've got to see what you're shooting at at longer ranges. And once in position, these weapons can create a beaten zone, a killing field out in the open ground in front of your own troops. And those troops would be drawn up shoulder to shoulder, a wall of steel with razor sharp tips and edges. That's how the Romans liked to fight. And when they did fight like that, they were nearly impossible to beat. Simon took me through what kit the Romans were equipped with and how it was all designed around this operational concept.
- [37:11]
Historical Expert
So his helmet's going to be an early version of the Imperial Gallic helmet. So the Gallic helmet was originally a Gallic bowl design and then the Romanization of it included putting a brow protector on it and putting a neck protector on it and then putting ear protectors on as well. So it's like a really, really good piece of protection for the head. The shield is the scutum shield, which is a sort of a rectangular body shield, which is absolutely spectacularly successful in open face on face heavy infantry battles. We've all seen pictures of Testudos, the tortoise they can form and that kind of thing. His body armor is either going to be lorica hamata chainmail or lorica segmentata banded iron armour. But either of those provide superb torso protection. The senior troops and officers are going to have leg greaves on the lower legs. The weapons of choice would be the gladius Hispaniensis stabbing sword and then two pillar lead weighted throwing javelins and then finally a puggy oh knife and basically his way of fighting is using a fencing technique in formation with his colleagues. But it's a fencing technique where they lose. They loose off the lighter pillar, lead weighted javelin at longer range, then the heavy one, almost point blank range to bring their opponent's front line down. Then the gladius is drawn and then they take the blow of the enemy on the shield, which exposes the upper or lower thorax, and then the gladius goes in and guts them or takes out the upper thorax. So it's a highly efficient industrial scale killing machine if they fight on their own terms. But here they're not.
- [38:45]
Dan Snow
Here the Romans were in challenging terrain. Varus and his men had entered the vast Teutoburg forest, and shortly after that the trouble began. The ancient woodland pressed closely in on either side. On a smooth road, you can assume that everyone can move roughly at a set pace, but once you're staggering along a rough hewn road, a primitive road that you're hacking out of the forest as you march, well, then that all changes. You're walking along hastily felled logs laid end to end. It's uneven, it's slippery, you haven't got the gradients sorted, you're splashing across riverbeds, you're skirting bogs. Units were starting to move at different speeds. Wagons are falling behind. And don't forget thousands of humans. Just moving through a landscape like this utterly destroys the ground, tears it up. If you've ever been to a festival, an outdoor festival, you will have hauled your little trolley with your kids in it, or your tent, or your sleeping bag, your fireball, you'll have hauled that to and from the car park. And mud and ruts appear after no time at all. Even in seemingly the driest of northern European summers, the ground tears under trudging feet and wheels, so the going is slow and hard. Cassius Dio paints us a picture. The mountains had an uneven surface broken by ravines, and the trees grew close together and very high. Hence the Romans, even before the enemy assailed them, were having a hard time of it. Felling trees, building roads and bridging places that required it. They had with them many wagons and many beasts of burden. As in time of peace, moreover, not a few women and children and a large retinue of servants were following them. One more reason for their advancing in scattered groups. Meanwhile, a violent rain and wind came up that separated them still further. While the ground that had become slippery around the roots and logs made walking very treacherous for them. And the tops of trees kept breaking off and falling down, causing much confusion. You get a sense from that that the march was hell. And that was before guttural German howls announced the start of something much, much worse. We don't know how it began. I imagine ranged weapons, so slings, bows, stones, arrows, a hail of rocks and iron, missiles hurled from the thick forest, War cries, insults, challenges, incantations of priests echoing around the hills. The Germans knew that the surest way to crush a legion was to extinguish its fighting spirit. Scare the men, break them, discourage them, and their bodies are yours anyway. Cassius Dio writes, while the Romans were in such difficulties, the barbarians suddenly surrounded them on all sides at once, coming through the densest thickets as they were acquainted with the paths. At first they held volleys from a distance. Then, as no one defended himself and many were wounded, they approached closer. For the Romans were not proceeding in any regular order, but were mixed in helter skelter with the wagons and the unarmed. And so, being unable to form readily anywhere in a body, and being fewer at every point than their assailants, they suffered greatly and could offer no resistance at all. It was at that moment, Dio says, the very moment of revealing themselves as enemies instead of subjects. And they wrought great and dire havoc. The Roman column was confused. The men, the women, the children were knackered. They were beset by insects. Their kit was soaking. They had no dry kindling to coax a fire to heat their rations. The water also had an even worse effect. It soaked their bowstrings so archers were unable to shoot back. They were slipping and sliding on temporary roads. They were bewildered. We can assume that they rapidly lost confidence in their leadership. But the Romans hadn't built Rome by giving up. And they did what Romans had always done. They dug in, they built, they erected a fort, a place of refuge. Cassius Dio writes that they camped on the spot after securing a suitable place, so far as that was possible, on a wooded mountain. And afterwards they either burned or abandoned most of their wagons and everything else that was not absolutely necessary to them. They hunkered down this fort overnight and perhaps slightly rested and reorganized, they made the decision to press on and try and get through the woods. I've never quite understood personally why they didn't just stay in that fort. But I suppose they would have run out of food, and the days were only shortening, the weather only getting worse, and perhaps German numbers were growing all the time. Dio describes. The next day, they advanced in a little better order. Upon setting out from there, they plunged into the woods again, where they defended themselves from their assailants. But they suffered their heaviest losses while doing so. At some stage in those first two days, it must have become clear this was not a few opportunistic locals. This was a giant revolt. It was a pre planned, masterfully executed crushing blow. And there was plenty of evidence for a controlling hand of someone who'd thought carefully about exactly how to neutralize Roman advantages, how to beat the unbeatable. Someone who'd not only set the trap, but had coaxed the Romans straight into it. At some stage, the Romans realized that the author of this purgatory was Arminius. The man who'd enjoyed all the blessings of a Roman upbringing, who'd seen the light, who'd looked upon the glories of the imperial capital. He'd lain on couches and tast Roman wine. The man who'd fought alongside them. He'd been a trusted counselor. That man, Arminius the Auxiliary, was in fact Arminius the traitor, the rebel leader. And he and his men were fighting in this forest to liberate Germany. You'll listen to Dantono's history. This is the destruction of the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest. More coming up.
- [45:22]
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- [46:16]
Dan Snow
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- [46:32]
Dan Snow
The desperate column of Romans had no choice. They had to keep marching on. Cassius Dio says that they were still advancing when the fourth day dawned. And again, a heavy downpour and violent Wind assailed them, preventing them from going forward and even from standing securely, and moreover depriving them of using their weapons, for they could not handle their bows or javelins with any success, nor for that matter, their shields, which were thoroughly soaked. Their opponents, on the other hand, being for the most part lightly equipped and able to approach and retire freely, suffered less from the storm. Furthermore, the enemy's force had greatly increased as many of those who had at first wavered joined them largely in the hope of plunder, and thus they could more easily encircle and strike down the Romans, whose ranks were now thinned, many having perished in the earlier fighting. Nothing breeds success like success. Now, there was a wonderful amateur archaeologist called Tony Clun. He was actually a British army officer. He was in the Royal Tank Regiment and he was posted to Germany, to this part of Germany. He started metal detecting at the end of the last century around Calcrese, which is about 12 miles or so north of what is now Osnabruck, and that used to be the Teutoburg Forest. Today that ancient woodland has gone. Sadly, it's more fields and plantations of pine. The great bogs were drained in the 19th century, but that's where Tony Klond did his metal detecting. He began to find evidence of battle. From the coins, it's very clear the dates matched up. He found not a Roman coin from after 9 AD. Tony said in an interview that I found there was every indication that a large contingent of people had splayed out, fleeing from an unknown horror. Well, if we go all the way back to Tacitus, I think he gives us a little glimpse of that horror. He actually describes a battle that took place in Germany a few years later. But I think much of it would have been familiar to Varus. Desperate men. Everything was the disadvantage of the Romans. The ground deep in slime and ooze, too unstable for standing fast and too slippery for advancing. The weight of armor on their backs, their inability amid the water to balance the javelin for a throw. Cheruski, on the other hand, were habituated to marsh fighting. Long of limb, armed with huge lances to wound from a distance. Success had made the Germans indefatigable. Even now they took no rest. Even though that's describing a later battle, I think it could easily be applied to the slaughter in the Teutoburg forest of September of 9 AD. Four days in, while it was impossible to know how many Romans were slander Varus command. I'm sure some units had splintered off. I'm sure orders weren't Getting through to all the disparate elements of the column, we think that the largest coherent group made a night march to escape. Now, this, I think, smacks of desperation. I'm sure, sure that'll work. You're surrounded in impenetrable woodland by the locals who've curated an arena of nightmares for you, so why not try wandering about at night? And sure enough, it was disaster. They marched into a trap within the trap, and we think this presumably must have been masterminded by Arminius. There was a sort of open track which the Romans were following, squeezed between a hill and a great bog. But across that track, funneling the Romans into an ever narrower passageway, there were earthworks and a trench and an embankment behind which the Germans could shelter and rain down projectiles on the hopeless fleeing Romans. Now, archaeologists recently have found evidence of a 4 foot high wall, 12 foot thick. It's built of sand, it's reinforced by bits of soil. And they found plenty of artifacts, Roman artifacts, in front of that wall, but very few behind it. Romans with their weapons, armour, their jewelry, their clasps. It seems like they got to that wall but they got no further. You can imagine that the Romans fought like men possessed, men who know their only way to survive an ambush is to hack their way through it. They must have hurled themselves at that wall, sandaled feet on the shoulders of comrades, to boost them up to contest the rampart. The Germans atop it fighting equally ferociously. I think everyone knowing that this was the moment of decision, this was the moment when the Roman force would be utterly annihilated, or if it was allowed to escape, the vengeance it would bring down would be truly genocidal. They could not be allowed to leave this forest. Men sliding, slipping, stabbing, clubbing. Blood of friend and foe mingling to run in rivulets, down, soaking skin. The rain washing away tears, mud and sludge, making it impossible to find a footing. An army that was used to working in machine like unison now engaged in a drunken brawl. A force used to receiving orders and acting upon them being decapitated. The machine misfiring the Roman legion only worked when the people at the bottom subordinate themselves to the guiding intelligence, their commanders, when they played their part unquestioningly in the operational scheme of men who they respected and trusted to deliver victory. Now, when men fear that machine is broken, they start to look to their own protection. Well, then you're just a mob of scared individuals. You're no more than the rabble of barbarians that they delighted in despising. Roman soldiers suddenly thinking, no, I will not man this barricade in expectation of relief and reinforcement. No, I will not carry this message to a superior. I will look after my own skin. And they didn't need to look any further than their own leaders. We hear about Gaius Pneumonia's valet. He's a key lieutenant of Varus, we think he's the cavalry commander. And he's described by one historian as, in the rest of his life, an inoffensive and honorable man. Yet he set a fearful example. At some stage, valor must have looked around him and believed the situation to be so hopeless that he did the thing that would almost certainly have condemned him in the eyes of Roman authorities. He entirely abandoned his commanding officer and the infantry. He just galloped off with his cavalry in a desperate attempt to escape. And when you see your cavalry gallop past in full flight, I think you consider your oath of obedience broken. You look to your own survival. The mission is forgotten. And then, sadly for those Roman infantrymen, that's exactly what condemned them. It was starting to act like individuals that I think ensured their destruction. Death waited for them on that battlefield, but death also surely stalked them as they tried to flee from it. Interestingly, death certainly stalked Valar. His cowardice was punished, the historian says, but fortune avenged his act, for he did not survive those whom he had abandoned and died in the act of deserting them. It all reminds me a little bit of Dien Bien Phu, the French catastrophe in Indochina. The French commanders sat there in their hq and they heard news of their outposts falling one by one to an enemy they had mocked as unsophisticated. And finally they reached the point where the enemy are swarming around those headquarters quarters, and death is now a certainty. The only final sliver of comfort is that you can end it yourself with your own blade, or you submit to the torture of an enemy who live only to inflict on you the pain they hold in their hearts from brutal years of conquest. Cassius Dio tells us which decision the Roman commander made. Varus, therefore, and all the more prominent officers, fearing that they should either be captured alive or killed by their bitterest foes, for they had already been wounded, made bold to do a thing that was terrible yet unavoidable. They took their own lives when news of this had spread. None of the rest, even if he had any strength left, defended himself any longer. Some imitated their leader, and others, casting aside their arms, allowed anybody who pleased to slay them. For to flee was impossible, however much one might desire to do so. Every man, therefore, and every horse was cut down without fear of resistance. There's another historian, Velleius Petellicus. He says the general had more courage to die than to fight. For following the example of his father and grandfather, he ran himself through with his sword. Another, Varus, had found himself on the wrong side of the fortune of war. Some men surrendered. I am certain they regretted it. After the battle, men were tortured and murdered. Tacitus said that survivors spoke of the tribunal from which Arminius made his harangue. All the gibbets and torture pits for the prisoners and the arrogance with which he insulted the standards and eagles. Another historian, Licinius Aeneas Florus, says that they put out the eyes of some of them and cut the hands off others. They sewed up the mouth of one of them after first cutting out his tongue, exclaiming, at last, you viper, you have ceased to hiss. The body too of the consul himself, which the dutiful affection of the soldiers had buried, was disinterred. As for the standards and eagles the barbarians possess too, to this day. The third eagle was wrenched from its pole before it could fall into the hands of the enemy by the standard bearer, who, carrying it concealed in the folds around his belt, secreted himself in the blood stained marsh. The archaeology on the battlefield today has been fascinating. They found poignant objects. They found remnants of a Roman officer's scabbard. They found a Roman standard bearer's magnificent silver face mask. You wonder if it's the man who threw off his helmet as he grabbed the eagle and hid it on his way into the marsh. They've also uncovered coins with the letters VAR on them for Varus, presumably coins which the commander had paid his men. Something like 5,000 objects they've recovered so far. They've got human bones, some showing hideous killing blows. They've got bits of weapons and nails, but also a wine strainer, medical instruments. Three entire legions were destroyed in those woods, including auxiliaries. That's thought to be up to 20,000 men. It ranks in the top tier of Roman military disasters. And it looked like it would get worse. Arminius fell upon any and all Roman forts east of the Rhine. He smashed them. He expunged Romanitas from German soil. And actually it took everything the Romans could scrape together to protect that frontier with Gaul. And perhaps aided by some uncharacteristic German reticence, they did manage to stop the Germans crossing the Rhine and pressing their advantage into the heart of the Roman world. Back in the very heart of Rome. Emperor Augustus was given the news, the historian Suetonius tells us, when the news of this came, he ordered that watch be kept by night throughout the city to prevent outbreak and prolong the terms of the governors of the provinces that the Allies might be held to their allegiance by experienced men with whom they were acquainted. He was so greatly affected that for several months in succession he cut neither his beard nor his hair. And sometimes he would dash his head against a door, crying, quintilius Varus, give me back my legions. And he observed the day of the disaster each year as one of sorrow and mourning. Varus's catastrophic defeat in the Teutoburg Forest was the end of decades of huge imperial growth. In the words of Tacitus, they were the end of the Roman project to settle Germany. Tacitus says that Arminius was the man who beat Rome at the height of Rome's power and won Germans their freedom. The Romans would return to Germany, but not for settlement, no, no, just for revenge. Tacitus tells us how young Germanicus launched punitive campaign after punitive campaign in Germany. He slaughtered anyone with a connection to the defeat, and many more besides. And finally, after years of campaigning, he arrived at the site of the battle itself. Six years after, a Roman army present on the ground buried the bones of the three legions, and no man knew whether he consigned to the earth the remains of a stranger or a kinsman. But all thought of all as friends and members of one family, and with anger rising against the enemy, mourned at once and hated. Perhaps Germanicus campaign healed Roman pride, but either way, it didn't really reverse the damage that had been done. The Romans believed the Varian disaster marked a turning point. Tacitus is clear that was the moment Germany had gained its freedom. The historian Florus says the result of this disaster was that the empire, which had not stopped on the shores of the ocean, was checked on the banks of the Rhine. So some historians today are less certain than that. And they point to the fact there were the, you know, Germanicus launched expeditions across the Rhine, there were other expeditions. They also talk about how, although Germany was never incorporated back into formal empire, there was a network of client states that were sort of established on and across that frontier. They also point out the Roman Empire didn't stop growing. Future emperors were happy to extend the empire when they felt able to. Claudius added Britain, Trajan conquered Dacia and Mesopotamia, and Severus tried to tame Scotland. And these historians point out that it's actually the timing of the Teutoburg Forest that's. That's particularly responsible for its impact. It came right at the end of Augustus's reign. He died just five years later. And Rome was becoming obsessed with the fragile transition of the imperial crown from a man who had no natural sons. If Augustus had gone on to rule for decades, then perhaps they would have gone back. If Tiberius, his successor, had been braver, he might have let Germanicus not only punish, but try and conquer. But they didn't. And we cannot dwell too much on those what ifs. I finished up by asking Simon this question, and it does seem to me that he sides more with Tacitus. What was the impact of this defeat on the course of Roman history?
- [61:03]
Historical Expert
Huge. It's absolutely huge. So when I'm writing about any subsequent Roman military campaign all the way through to the end of the Empire in the west and even into the Byzantine period, I think the Varian disaster hung heavily over many, if not all, Roman military leaders. We call it the Varian Disaster. You know, he's one of these individuals from history whose very name is associated with a disaster, right? That's the way he's remembered. He's cursed. And that's certainly the way the Romans would have seen it. So every Roman military leader afterwards, Agricola, anybody would have had this in the back of their mind thinking, I'm not doing that again. So when Tiberius goes back for the punitive expeditions, he plays it absolutely safe, okay? He hits the whole front with tens of thousands of men, far more men than Varus had, and he makes sure he's scouting properly and not even remotely putting his troops in position to be ambushed. So the Romans did learn from it, but it hung really heavily over them. I think it actually changed the way the Roman military campaign from that point. And, of course, secondly, the Romans never really bothered going back to create Germania again. I mean, they sort of settle down on the frontier of the Rhine and Danube, don't they? Now, from a Roman perspective, they'd argue, well, it's not really economically worthwhile, but actually it's exactly the same as the far north of Scotland. It just proves a far too tough nut to crack, I think.
- [62:30]
Dan Snow
Well, thank you very much to Simon Elliott for coming on the podcast. And thank you everyone for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History. Remember, if you want to go and watch the documentary by Tristan Hughes, please head over to History Hit tv. It's one of hundreds of documentaries we make every year. Thanks to our wonderful subscribers. If you haven't subscribed yet, please go and do that. Thanks as ever for listening to this podcast. I'll see you next time.
- [63:02]
Tristan Hughes
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- [64:03]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [64:14]
Dan Snow
Hey, mom, you seen my toothbrush?
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Ryan Reynolds
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- [64:27]
Dan Snow
Tails.