Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge (12 page)

EPISODE 2

The Lawyer

I
N STIRRING POSE THE STATUE
of Hermann, the German hero called by Roman authors Arminius, stands on the highest hill in a forested region of north-west Germany near the town of Detmold, a hundred miles east of the Rhine and fifty south-west of Hannover. The statue, known as the
Hermannsdenkmal
(Hermann's monument), is a celebrated landmark, commanding wide sweeps of country: westwards toward the Rhine, northwards to the plain and southwards over the tangle of wooded upland which will climax in the distant Alps. The summit on which it stands is called the Grotenburg, southern outlier of the Teutoburg Forest,
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an arc of wooded hills which begins near Osnabrück, sweeping south-eastwards to join other ranges which mark the end of the flat, agricultural lands of Lower Saxony and the beginning of the wild and wooded Hessian hill country.

The statue depicts a youthful warrior, in winged helmet, sword held aloft with Wagnerian panache. On the twenty-one-foot blade is emblazoned in golden letters:
Deutsche Einigkeit meine Stärke, meine Stärke Deutschlands Macht
(German unity my strength, my strength Germany's power). Hermann's foot rests on a Roman eagle and a fallen
fasces.
The monument commemorates the greatest reverse suffered by Roman arms during the first two centuries of our era; an event know as the Varian Disaster, after the defeated commander P. Quintilius Varus.

The statue is 19th-century, its inspiration nationalism rather than exactitude. The battlefield's location was guesswork; its hero's appearance a product of the sculptor's imagination. Unlike Ovid's statue in Constantsa,
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its creator had nothing to go on, except that a large Roman army was destroyed by a youthful German prince of zealous character and striking looks in the ‘Teutoburg Forest'. Even his name is uncertain. Though Hermann is a possible equivalent of the Latinized
Arminius,
it is in fact a modern attempt to link the name with Herimannus, a Germanic god of war. We will compromise, using the name Armin. Finally, the location of the Teutoburg Forest is itself obscure. It appears in one ancient source as the
Teutoburgiensis Saltus,
a name not applied on the ground until the 17th century, when antiquarians based their suppositions on the accounts of four Roman historians who described the battle, none of whom was an eye-witness and only one a contemporary. The location chosen was the former Osning Range,
3
though this was without archaeological proof or even place-name and folkloric support. None of the Roman accounts is compatible with a hilltop. The Grotenburg was simply a striking place to put the monument. It is in fact the site of a hillfort
4
and the name
teuto burg
(Teutonic fort) appears to suggest a connection. On the other hand, Iron Age fortifications are numerous in this part of Germany. To compound the riddle,
saltus
is a word of vague and ambiguous meaning: woodland clearing or glade; pass, defile or valley. However, the translation ‘forest' seemed best to match some Roman descriptions and, as we believe mistakenly, it has been accepted without question for the last 300 years.

Where was the battle fought? The fascination of this question can be imagined, especially for late 19th-century Germans, epitomizing as it did the clash between romantic and classical forces at a time of maximum interest in both: when Wagner was weaving his mighty tapestries of music and myth and Schliemann was unearthing Greek gold at Troy and Mycenae. Hundreds of sites were proposed, including at least thirty serious suggestions. For a time the Hildesheim Treasure was thought to provide a clue. In 1868 soldiers, building a rifle range into a hillside, uncovered a large hoard of Roman silver vessels of exceptional quality, still considered Germany's most important ancient trove.
5
Some speculated that this might have been the table service of Varus, the defeated commander, hidden as the Roman plight worsened; for the army was travelling with full baggage and Varus was a wealthy man. However, a few of the pieces have now been dated to the century following and it seems likely that the treasure was either the stock of a Roman merchant or a diplomatic consignment destined for what has been called the ‘prestige goods zone' of Central Germany. The Teutoburg battlefield retained its secret till the late 1980s, when it was located nearly fifty miles from the statue. However, let us postpone that aspect of the detective story until the circumstances have been fully described.

Though without historical value, the Hermann Monument is of interest in its own right. It is the work of the sculptor Ernst von Bandel (1800–76) who, as a boy of six, on being told the story by his father, resolved to commemorate the Teutoburg battle in a style and on a scale appropriate to the sentiments it evoked in German hearts. It was to occupy his energies for thirty-seven years. The money was partly raised by public subscription, in part it came from his own pocket. The plinth, as high as the statue itself, is of sandstone blocks, some cut from masonry robbed from the dry-stone ramparts of the prehistoric hillfort. This was completed in 1846. There followed a decline in Bandel's fortunes and a sixteen-year hiatus while the statue lay in part-finished sections on the workshop floor. It was decided to sell it as scrap. But in 1871 German unification created a surge of patriotism. Armin was recognized as a powerful national symbol. The Reichstag voted funds. The statue was erected during the period 1873–5, when Bandel, now in his seventies, lived in a hut on the hilltop. By this time he was going blind and frequently bumped into trees.

The figure is eighty-eight feet (twenty-seven metres) to the sword-point. It is made from sections of beaten copper, attached to one another and to a steel framework by means of 31,000 rivets and bolts. The sword weighs 4 cwt. (203kg.). The idiom is 19th-century neo-classical and owes much to David, court painter to Napoleon.
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David's heroic manner would influence other monuments, most notably the Statue of Liberty;
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and Justice, on the Central Criminal Court (Old Bailey), London. Liberty is ten years younger and three-and-a-half times larger, though the higher pedestal and hilltop position of Bandel's statue make it seem almost as big. Both are identical in materials and construction. The Hermann Monument was dedicated in the presence of the Kaiser,
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Wilhelm I, in 1875. It was Bandel's finest hour, though owing to almost total blindness he was unable to see the statue in place: a parallel with Beethoven which did not escape his admirers. He died a year later.

Today Armin's statue still stares eastwards over treetops and hilltops toward his country's interior; urging Germans to a unity they would fail to achieve for 1,862 years after the events of
AD
9 which it commemorates. Following its gaze into Iron Age Germany, it may be possible – from the hints offered by terrain, texts, archaeology and guesswork – to assemble a setting in which to place the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.

The settlement area of the Germanic peoples during the Roman period was far larger than that of modern Germany. It included Scandinavia, Holland, Western Poland and Czechoslovakia. On the other hand, today's England, Austria and Switzerland were all at that time what may loosely be called Celtic. Germany's approximate eastern limit was the Vistula, beyond which were the Balts and the
Veneri.
In German,
Wend
is still used to mean Slav; and we may assume that these were the westernmost Slavs of their day. Southwards, the Germans met the Sarmatians somewhere near the present Slovakian-Hungarian border. The Magyars had not yet arrived on the scene. The Sarmatian tribe nearest to the Germans was the Iazyges, moved north by the Roman army to fill a vacuum in what is now eastern Hungary. The western boundary of Germany was considered to be the Rhine, though this was a less precise dividing line than one might think. But before discussing the relationship between Gauls, Romans and Germans two reminders may be given.

First, neither Germany, Sarmatia nor Celtica resembled anything we might today describe as a country, an empire, or even a confederation. Rather, these were loose groupings of language and culture, within which individual tribes were often in rivalry or at war. Secondly, the main ethnic units (Italians and Greeks no less than Celts, Germans, Sarmatians and Slavs) were all cousins in the same Indo-European family; though 2,000 years of dispersion, wandering and varying arrival times in the West had led to major differences of life and language to the point of mutual incomprehensibility, as with their descendants today. This was especially true of the Sarmatians, whose steppe experience had given them a nomadic character distinct from the others. Thus Tacitus points to the contrast between ‘Germans, having fixed abodes, carrying shields, walking and running quickly; and the Sarmatians, who live in wagons and on horseback'.
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Similarly, of a southern Germanic tribe, the Basternians, he says that, ‘by the sedentariness of their habits and their housebuilding they behave as Germans'.
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In general, ancient sources portray the Germans as more advanced than the Sarmatians but less so than the Celts, who were by now building stone ramparts, minting coins and producing metalwork of finest artistry. Tacitus tells us that the Germans were ‘separated from the Sarmatians by mountains and mutual mistrust; and from the Gauls by the Rhine'.
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On this point he was strongly influenced by Caesar's account.

In 55
BC
, the same remarkable year as his visit to Britain, Caesar crossed the Rhine. Neither of these feats was necessary. Both were propaganda ‘firsts'. Caesar describes the event as follows:

To cross in boats would neither have befitted Caesar's own dignity nor that of Rome; even though building a bridge involved great difficulties because of the river's breadth, depth and current. Ten days after the first felling of timber the bridge was completed and the army marched over. [The Suebians, on the east bank] sent word throughout their tribal areas, telling people to abandon the
oppida,
take the women, children and valuables into the forest; then assemble all fighting men in an appointed place at their territory's centre, where they had decided to make a stand.
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However, Caesar's stay was short. He contented himself with laying waste the villages and crops near the bridgehead and declined a major confrontation.

Then he crossed back into Gaul, slighting the bridge behind him. In total he had spent eighteen days across the river and considered he had done all which honour or interest required.
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In taking an army dryshod over the Rhine, where no Roman soldier had before set foot, Caesar's objectives were not dissimilar to John F. Kennedy's in placing an American on the moon. Both achievements beamed a warning of technical supremacy eastwards and a signal of pride and reassurance westwards. The bridge site, identified by the finding of steel-tipped timber piles in the river mud, is at Urmitz near Neuwied.
14
Caesar considered it important that the Rhine should be seen as a clear geographic and ethnic frontier; and he has been accused of exaggerating its significance to fit this view. Not only must he match the river's importance to the achievement of crossing, but he must also seek to justify intervention in Gaul in the first place. Ostensibly this had been to repel German invaders who could, he argued, have endangered Roman Provence: a nobler-sounding motive than personal ambition. By the same token he had reason to play up the differences between German and Gaul emphasizing the former's bellicosity. The bad press given to those east of the Rhine had begun.

Caesar's knowledge of Germany was in fact limited. Though German auxiliaries had served with him and he was sometimes drawn into Gallo-German politics, his reputation as an authority on German affairs is built on not much more than his Rhine crossings.
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Two generations later Strabo was painting a somewhat different picture: ‘The regions across the Rhine are occupied by the Germans who, though differing from the Celts in being wilder, taller and blonder, are in all ways similar; for in physique, habits and life-styles the two are very much the same.'
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Most ancient authors concur in regarding Gauls and Germans as similar. Indeed the two were often confused, both by writers and the Roman public. This may be surprising to the modern reader who, like Caesar, is keenly aware of the differences between the French and Germans. Archaeology helps explain the confusion by telling us that most of western Germany, between the Rhine and Weser and southwards to the Alps, had formerly been Celtic and strongly related to those successive cultural flowerings called Hallstatt and La Tène. This explains why many Celtic forts (like the one in which the
Hermannsdenkmal
stands) are found as far eastwards as the Weser; and indeed why that river belongs to a large group of Celtic river names.
17

In fact the German heartland appears to have lain in the southern Baltic and north coastal areas of today's Germany. However, in the late 2nd century
BC
the Germans began to move southwards into the Rhineland and Belgium, setting in motion events which would shake Roman confidence and fuel her longstanding fear of the northern peoples. Two tribes migrated from Jutland, ‘driven from their lands by a great flood-tide'.
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One, the
Cimbri,
moved up the Elbe into Bohemia. Turning west through the Alps, they eventually reached the Rhone, where they joined the other tribe, the Teutons, who had arrived by a more direct route. The company included families, ox carts and herds of cattle. Both tribes were seeking land and a chance to settle, but with little notion where their trek might lead.