Legions of Rome (39 page)

Tribunes and first-rank centurions were killed by rebels swarming around the prized legionary eagles. Legion camp-prefects and prefects of auxiliary cohorts were cut off and surrounded. “In this crisis the valor of the Roman soldier claimed for itself a greater share of the glory than it left to the generals.” With their men “shouting encouragement to each other,” the legions mounted a charge and “fell upon the enemy.” The legion charge broke through the rebel line “and wrested a victory from a desperate situation.” [Ibid.]

After their units had patched up their wounded, Caecina and Plautius pushed on to Siscia and joined Tiberius. There were now, in one Roman camp, 10 legions, in excess of 70 auxiliary cohorts, 14 cavalry wings, more than 10,000 Evocati militiamen, and the so-called “volunteers,” the freedmen of Rome. [Ibid.,
CXIII
, 1] With this force, totaling more than 100,000 men, Tiberius should have been able to confront the largely untrained rebel troops on an equal footing. But Tiberius did a strange thing. After giving the five newly arrived legions a few days to recover, he sent them back to the East, escorting them through rebel territory to see them on their way.

Velleius claimed that Tiberius found the force “too large to be managed and was not well adapted to effective control.” [Ibid., 2–3] Reading between the lines, this suggests a falling out between Tiberius and the generals who had come from the East. Yet Tiberius did receive more legion reinforcements during the course of the Pannonian War; Suetonius was to say that before the war was over it would involve “fifteen legions and a correspondingly large force of auxiliaries.” [Suet.,
III
, 16] At the war’s end, the 7th Legion, one of the those from the East, was based permanently in Pannonia.

After a particularly severe winter, in the spring of
AD
7 Tiberius launched offensive operations exclusively in Pannonia, ignoring Dalmatia for the time being. On campaign, Tiberius himself always rode, and always sat at the dining table in camp rather than lounged on a couch as was the habit of the Roman upper class. [Ibid.,
CXIV
, 3] This was a demanding campaign, with the Roman army driving the Pannonians high into the mountains. But Augustus was not satisfied with its progress. Leaving Rome, the emperor traveled up to Arminium, today’s Rimini, on the Adriatic coast, where he based himself in order to be closer to operations.

Now, the Romans had a little luck. The two Batos fell out. Dio writes that the Pannonian Bato had come to suspect the loyalty of his southern allies, and began making surprise visits on the southern Bato’s strongholds, taking hostages from among the Dalmatian leaders’ families. Seeing this as a grab for power, the Dalmatian Bato ambushed his co-commander—the troops of the Pannonian Bato’s bodyguard were killed, and the man himself captured and imprisoned in a Dalmatian fortress. The Dalmatian Bato then had his rival brought before an assembly of his troops, condemned him, and executed him on the spot. [Dio,
LV
, 34]

With the northern Bato out of the way, Velleius considered the Pannonian campaign as good as won. Sure enough, the summer of
AD
8 saw the Pannonians sue for peace. Velleius was present at a riverbank meeting when the Pannonians laid down their arms. Pennes and other Pannonian leaders surrendered to Tiberius, “prostrating themselves one and all before the commander.” [Velle., 4]

As if the war was won, Augustus recalled Tiberius, who left Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, a consul in
AD
6, in charge in Pannonia. With Dalmatia still in rebel hands, the emperor sent young Germanicus there with a strike force which later events indicate included the 20th Legion. In “regions both wild and difficult,” Germanicus overwhelmed the Mazaei tribe and laid siege to a number of Dalmatian towns. [Velle.,
CXVI
, 1]

At one such town, Splonum, which had “a vast number of defenders,” Germanicus tried frontal assaults and siege equipment, but Splonum’s high walls were built of timber, turf and stone, which made them impervious to battering rams. A German cavalryman by the name of Pusio then threw a stone at a section of wall, whereupon—to everyone’s astonishment—the parapet and the rebel soldier leaning on it fell away, and the Dalmatians manning the wall fled in terror. Fearing that Germanicus had secret powers, the town surrendered. [Dio,
LVI
, 11]

At Raetinum, rebels set fire to buildings as Germanicus’ troops poured in through a breach they had made in the town wall. A number of Roman soldiers were trapped in the flames, dying a fiery death. Only those townspeople who hid in caves survived the inferno. Germanicus’ sieges continued unabated. Seretium, a town which Tiberius had previously unsuccessfully besieged, was now stormed by Germanicus and destroyed. “After this some other places were more easily won.” [Ibid., 12] In the opinion of Velleius, who soldiered beside Germanicus, the young prince “gave great proof of his valor.” [Velle.,
CXVI
, 1] Just the same, progress was too slow for some at Rome, and Augustus sent Tiberius back to Dalmatia to conclude the campaign as quickly as possible.

Once he returned to the Balkans in the summer of
AD
9, Tiberius created three task forces. Lepidus was to advance from the northwest, and Marcus Plautius Silvanus, a consul in 2
BC
, from the northeast. Tiberius, with Germanicus as his deputy, would push along the Adriatic coast in pursuit of Bato, who was believed to be near Solonae. The northern advances encountered significant resistance from rebels, who emerged from hilltop strongholds and fought pitched battles; as a consequence, the Perustae tribe and Bato’s Desiadate tribe “were almost entirely exterminated.” [Velle.,
RH
,
CXV
] In the south, Tiberius had less success. Bato, refusing to fight on Roman terms, withdrew ahead of Tiberius’ advance, until he was finally cornered at Andetrium, in the vicinity of today’s Split.

Andetrium was located on a rocky mount surrounded by deep ravines filled with rushing streams; not an easy place to assault. As Tiberius surrounded the hill and settled in for a long siege, Dalmatian guerrillas appeared in his rear and harassed his supply columns, reducing his supplies and at times making the Romans themselves feel under siege. But eventually Bato sent an envoy seeking peace terms. Tiberius responded that Bato would have to convince all rebels still holding out throughout Dalmatia to throw down their arms before he would agree to peace, a guarantee Bato was unable to give.

A number of men who had deserted from the Roman army and gone over to the rebels knew that execution awaited them if they surrendered, so they convinced their Dalmatian hosts not to capitulate. In response, Tiberius broke off negotiations and resumed the assault on Andetrium.

As Tiberius watched operations from a seat on an earth platform, Roman troops in a tightly packed square formation went against the front of the town, struggling
up a rutted slope as Dalmatians rained missiles down on them. Wagons were brought out from the town, loaded with stones, then propelled down the hill at the oncoming troops. Loose wheels and round wooden chests, which were a local specialty, were rolled down the slope at the easy targets. It was like a giant bowling alley for the Dalmatians, with their projectiles skittling Roman troops. All the while, other Roman forces lining the bottom of the hill noisily cheered on their struggling comrades.

Tiberius sent in reinforcements, and also sent a force around behind the town; the latter climbed a rock face unobserved and fell on defenders outside the front wall, cutting them off from the town. Throwing off their armor, these rebels tried to flee down the slopes, with Roman troops gleefully giving chase. Most were captured. After Bato later slipped out of Andetrium, the townspeople sent out envoys to arrange a surrender.

Germanicus, meanwhile, leading one of two columns dispatched by Tiberius to assault towns still holding out along the Dalmatian coast, laid siege to Arduba, which was built on an elevated position on a river bend. Here, the male rebels were keen to give in, but German deserters and Dalmatian women disagreed, and it was not until the rebels had overpowered the deserters that they were able to send to Germanicus to arrange a surrender. In the meantime, the women set fire to part of the city. Then, rather than surrender, and clutching their children to them, the women flung themselves into the flames or hurled themselves from the city walls into the swirling river below. Germanicus accepted the surrender. On hearing of the fall of Arduba, other communities sent envoys to Germanicus seeking surrender terms.

As town after town fell in this way, Bato ran out of hiding places. He sent his son Sceuas to Tiberius with an offer of surrender, on condition that he and his followers receive full pardons. Tiberius agreed. A few days later Bato was discreetly admitted to the Roman camp at night, kept under guard until the morning, then brought before Tiberius. According to Dio, in the discussions that followed, Bato blamed Rome for the war: “We are your flocks, yet you didn’t send shepherds to look after us, you sent wolves.” [Dio,
LVI
, 16]

The Pannonian War, which Suetonius was to characterize as “the most bitterly fought of all foreign wars since Rome defeated Carthage,” was at an end. [Suet.,
III
, 16] Bato was pardoned, and given a house at the Italian naval city of Ravenna. He apparently lived out the rest of his life under house arrest at Ravenna. Tiberius was granted a Triumph and the title of imperator by the Senate for terminating the revolt.
Germanicus was made a praetor, and he and all the other Roman generals involved in the campaign were granted Triumphal Decorations.

But even as young Germanicus was rising from his seat in the Senate to formally announce the end of the Pannonian War, Tiberius was hastening to Germany. Rome would soon find out why, and would again be swept by panic—with the news of the Varus disaster.

AD
9
IX. THE VARUS DISASTER
Annihilation in the Teutoburg

It was September, in the dying days of summer. Strung out for miles, a large Roman military column was moving west toward the River Rhine after spending many months in Germany east of the Rhine. The column was led by the commander of Rome’s two armies of the Upper and Lower Rhine, Publius Quintilius Varus. A member of “a famous rather than a high-born family,” according to Velleius Paterculus, a Roman officer who knew him, Varus was in his sixties. [Velle.,
II, CXVII
]

The general’s father, Sextus Quintilius Varus, had supported the Liberators, Brutus and Cassius, against Octavian, Antony and Lepidus, and had taken his own life following the defeat of the Liberators at Philippi in 42
BC
. No doubt because Varus was related to Augustus by marriage, Augustus had not penalized Varus’ career, enabling him to serve as a consul in 13
BC
and as governor of Syria the following decade. Varus was, in the words of Velleius, “a man of character and of good intentions.” [Ibid.,
CXX
]

In Syria, Varus had acted with alacrity to counter a brief Jewish revolt in Jerusalem following the death of King Herod the Great. But now, a dozen years later, Varus had grown lazy and incautious. According to Velleius, who was at that time fighting the Pannonian War with Tiberius and Germanicus, Varus was no conquering general, but was “a man of mild character and of quiet disposition” who by
AD
9 had become “more accustomed to the leisure of the camp than actual service in war.” [Ibid.,
CXVII
]

Varus had been called out of comfortable retirement in
AD
6 for this posting as overall Roman commander on the Rhine. Tiberius had been conducting a campaign in Bohemia against the Suebi Germans when he was forced to suspend those
operations hurriedly, in order to lead his legions south to put down the major revolt in Pannonia and Dalmatia that became the grueling three-year Pannonian War. Tiberius, who, by
AD
9 was still damping down the last embers of that revolt, had left Varus three legions on the Lower Rhine and another two on the Upper Rhine, where Varus’ nephew Lucius Asprenus was in charge.

This combined force of five legions on the Rhine compared to the twelve to fifteen legions that Tiberius and his brother Drusus had previously commanded here. Tiberius had also taken a large number of auxiliary and allied units away from the Rhine for service in the Pannonian War; Suetonius wrote that 75,000 auxiliaries and allied troops supported the legions fighting in Pannonia and Dalmatia. [Suet.,
III
, 16]

To fill the gaps left by the departure of all these units, the German tribes in alliance with Rome had been expected to provide cohorts of allied German troops to serve under Varus, as their treaties required. Not that a larger force on the Rhine seemed necessary. As a result of the campaigns of Drusus, Tiberius and others, Augustus felt that Germany east of the Rhine was a pacified area. Flourishing Roman trade in eastern Germany seemed to support that belief. Over the three years that Varus had been in charge here, he had led his troops across the Rhine each spring and, after linking up with allied German contingents, had paraded through Germany between the Rhine and the Elbe both to awe and to inspire the locals.

At various German settlements along his route Varus had sat in judgment over local disputes. According to Velleius, Varus “came to look upon himself as a city praetor administering justice in the Forum, and not as a general in command of an army in the heart of Germany.” Varus was convinced that the German tribes were subjected peoples who wanted to embrace Roman ways and Roman justice. Varus’ campaigns in Germany had involved neither fighting nor booty for his legions; instead, according to Velleius, during this past year Varus had “wasted a summer campaign holding court and observing the proper details of legal procedure.” [Velle.,
II, CXVII
]

Throughout that summer, Varus had been accompanied on his concourse through Germany by local kings and princes, including a prince of the Cherusci tribe who, said Velleius, “had been associated with us constantly on previous campaigns.” This young prince, who would be known to future generations of Germans as Hermann, had taken the Roman name of Arminius. [Ibid.,
CXVIII
.]