The Larger Impact
The effects ofArminius's defeat of the Roman legions in A. D. 9 have been enormous for European and world history. In this final chapter, I highlight some of these. I then close by reflecting on the importance of the distinction between the two fundamentally different ways of knowing about the past that I have explored in this book—history and archaeology. Written sources about events and the material remains of those events offer us two very different ways of understanding the past. The sources that are available to us, and those we choose to follow, determine how we think about that past.
After Tiberius called Germanicus back from Germany in A. D. 17 and ended Roman designs on the lands east of the lower Rhine, the Rhine became a highly fortified frontier of the Empire. The large number of troops stationed in the bases on the west bank of the river had a profound and long-lasting impact on local economies. The tens of thousands of men at Nijmegen, Xanten, Cologne, Bonn, Mainz, and other sites required vast quantities of grain, vegetables, meat, wine, and other foodstuffs. Most of these were produced in the vicinities of the bases by local farmers. Much of the weaponry, equipment, pottery, and personal ornamentation was manufactured in workshops in civilian settlements established near the bases. The Roman demand for goods created a huge surplus production in food and manufactured products, and thus greatly stimulated local economies. During the first and second centuries A. D., new cities were established at the sites of many of the bases, of which Cologne and Mainz became two of the largest and most important. At the time, the Rhineland was one of the most prosperous parts of the Roman Empire.
The Rhine remained the boundary between the Roman world and the unconquered lands to the east throughout the Roman period, into the fifth century A. D. When Christianity spread in parts of late Roman Europe, many of the important early centers were in the Rhineland, such as Bonn, Cologne, and Trier. The Rhineland thus remained a meeting zone of different cultures well into the medieval period, a point emphasized by R. W. Southern in his classic The Making of the Middle Ages (1959). Vestiges of this cultural frontier survive in the modern world. The boundary between countries that speak Romance languages— derived from Latin—and Germanic languages is the Rhineland. Peoples west of the Rhine are traditionally wine drinkers, while those east of the Rhine are traditionally beer drinkers.
I do not want to push this point too far, but one can reasonably argue that in stopping Roman designs on conquest east of the lower Rhine, the native warriors of A. D. 9 established a cultural, and sometimes political, boundary of very long duration.
Why the Romans Lost
Rome lost the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, and three of its legions, because Augustus and his advisers did not understand the peoples of northern Europe or the changes those societies were undergoing.
Up to A. D. 9, Rome had won a long series of stunning military victories in Europe and elsewhere. It had suffered setbacks as well, but the official propaganda emphasized the successes. Indeed, Augustus made a great point of presenting to the people of Rome elaborate monuments, inscriptions, and coin images to glorify the Roman legions' successes. He downplayed the failures. In times before the creation of a free press and before the existence of diverse media not all controlled by the government, it was very difficult for the people of Rome to learn what was really going on. The sculpture and inscriptions with which Augustus adorned Rome glorified the achievements by the army. Augustan writers such as Livy and Virgil helped foster the public sense that Rome was destined to rule the world.
In addition to this general ideology of Rome's superiority over all neighbors, the prevailing attitude toward the peoples of northern Europe was to hold them in low regard. They were certainly not represented as foes capable of withstanding Roman power. From Caesar's first portrayals of the Germans as simple people with much smaller communities than the Gauls, there are no texts to indicate that Romans took them seriously as a military force. With the benefit of hindsight, of course, we can see many signs of their military prowess. Caesar hired German mercenaries precisely because of their effectiveness. In Cassius Dio's accounts of Drusus's campaigns into northern Germany, we read of occasions on which his enemies came close to trapping and severely defeating his army. But it is not clear how extensively this information was disseminated in Rome, or how seriously Augustus and his advisers took it. In the monumental architecture, the inscriptions, and the literature of the Augustan Age, there is no evidence that any officials in Rome were seriously concerned about a military threat in the north, despite the memories of the Gallic attack on Rome in 387 B. C. and the violent migrations of the Cimbri and Teutones.
Even the texts that deal directly with the Varus catastrophe describe the outcome as something other than a military victory for the Germans. The authors blame Varus for his carelessness, Arminius for his treachery, and the untamed environment and bad weather—never the capability of the local fighters relative to that of the Romans legions. Augustus blamed the defeat on Rome's failure to perform adequate rituals to gain favor with the gods. The Romans simply could not believe that their military forces had been outfought by the northern barbarians.
The archaeological evidence shows not only that the native peoples were vastly more capable technologically and organizationally than the Romans believed but also that they changed their military hardware, their attitudes toward the Roman intruders, and their economy during the decades before the battle of A. D. 9. Even Caesar's understanding of the peoples east of the Rhine in the middle of the final century B. C. was flawed. But from the time of Caesar on, the archaeology shows considerable change in increased production of weaponry, better-quality weapons, larger communities, and more highly developed communications between groups throughout the regions that Rome was trying to subdue.
These changes could have been evident to Rome. Large numbers of Roman imports indicate the existence of considerable interaction between the Roman world and the north. Merchants and other travelers could have reported their observations about changes in the Iron Age societies to officials in Rome. But all of the evidence in Rome suggests that Augustus and other Roman officials would not have been receptive to the information in such reports. Dieter Timpe and others have shown that Romans considered the barbarian peoples unchanging and unchangeable. Roman historical tradition emphasized continuity, not change. Indigenous peoples, especially, were regarded as immutable. This was the fatal flaw for the Romans. The world of northern Europe was changing, largely in response to processes set in motion by Rome's own actions in Gaul, but the Romans were largely oblivious to the changes.
Texts and Material Culture: History and Archaeology
In this book, we have considered two quite distinct ways of knowing about the past, in order to try to understand an event of signal importance in European and world history. One is through written texts; the other is through archaeological evidence. The texts were all written by Romans, or by Greeks who represented views closely linked to those of Rome, and they provide us not only with a view of the "facts" as the writers understood them but also with the writers' interpretations of why and how the great battle occurred. We have no texts written by their opponents, because at that time the peoples of northern Europe did not have a system of writing. To understand those peoples, we use the evidence of archaeology—the material remains left from their settlements, their cemeteries, and the objects that they made and used.
There are basic differences between text-based understandings of the past and archaeology-based ones. We belong to literate, text-oriented societies. From our earliest days in school, we are encouraged to read and to use written texts as sources of information. In examining the past, we tend to privilege written over material sources of information, because we have been trained to do so. I am constantly surprised in reading accounts of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, and of the developments leading up to it, to see how many investigators still take the Roman texts at face value, even though they are inconsistent. In most cases, modern writers adopt the version of events supplied by Cassius Dio, probably because his is the most detailed and colorful version, though it was written two centuries after the event and seems to contradict the versions of Tacitus and Florus. As I suggested in chapter 3, none of the accounts is reliable in detail, in the sense that we expect a modern newspaper account to get all the "facts" right. None of the authors was an eyewitness, and none of them explains where the writer got this information. The purpose of Roman historical writing was not to describe events in what we would consider accurate detail, but rather to make events understandable to their Roman readers in terms of their world view. As the contemporary novelist Tim O'Brien has observed about understanding accounts of a war as recent as that in Vietnam, "In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen."
The texts by Velleius Paterculus, Tacitus, Florus, Cassius Dio, and the others provided their Roman readers with accounts that were meant to satisfy their desires for understanding what had happened east of the Rhine, but they were not aimed at our quite different expectations. We are troubled by the inconsistencies between the accounts, but the Roman reader perhaps was not. The important aspects for Roman readers were that the commander on the scene apparently failed miserably, that the Germanic ally whom the Romans had trusted proved treacherous, and that the miserable environment of the north aided the humans who inhabited it. And perhaps the failure to propitiate the gods with the proper rituals played a key role in the disaster.
By examining the archaeology, we can take a fundamentally different view of the developing situation, between 12 B. C., when the Roman campaigns into Germany began under Drusus, up to and including the battle and the events subsequent to it.
New Discoveries and New Perspectives
New texts from the Roman period are rarely discovered. The texts that form the basis of our historical understanding of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest were found, translated, and published during the Renaissance, half a millennium ago (see chapter 2). But archaeological discoveries regularly add new information to what we know about the past. Just in the past couple ofyears, important new finds have come to light in the Lippe River valley. The marching camp at Holsterhausen has been known for some time, but in the course of recent construction work, four more marching camps have been found at the same location. Objects recovered place these sites in the time frame of the events discussed in this book. Among the finds mentioned in the initial reports are a helmet of a type represented at Kalkriese, a coin of a series that occurs there, and a section of a Roman road.
Together with these newly found Roman military camps, at this same site the excavations revealed a native settlement of more than forty buildings. Some contained both Roman-made and native-style objects. More than seventy furnaces for smelting iron show that this community specialized in producing iron, in quantities far beyond local needs. Perhaps this was a settlement like that at Daseburg, representing the economic changes that communities experienced in the years just after the native peoples drove the Roman legions from their lands.
What If the Romans Had Won?
"What if. . . ?" scenarios in history are in a sense pointless, but they can be fun, and they can help us appreciate the significance of an outcome. What would have happened if, as in the earlier situations under Drusus when the German warriors cornered the Roman legions, the Romans had extricated themselves or dealt the Germans a resounding defeat? Would the Romans have marched back to the Rhine bases, secure in the knowledge that they had taught the Germans a lesson and that the Germans would cease invading across the river? While some modern historians argue that this was the Roman goal in the eastern campaigns, the majority now believe that Rome was planning to establish a province between the Rhine and the Elbe. If the
Romans had defeated Arminius, perhaps they would have constructed bases on the west bank of the Elbe, similar to the ones they built along the Rhine. Would they have been content to stop there, or would later emperors have sought their own glory by conquering lands farther to the east? How would European history have been different if the Roman Empire had not been stopped at the Rhine?
World History
