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$Title{Germans Under Arminius Revolt Against Rome
Part II.}
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$Author{Creasy, Sir Edward Shepherd}
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Title:       Germans Under Arminius Revolt Against Rome
Author:      Creasy, Sir Edward Shepherd

Part II.

     The duties of the engineer were familiar to all who served in the Roman
armies.  But the crowd and confusion of the columns embarrassed the working
parties of the soldiery, and in the midst of their toil and disorder the word
was suddenly passed through their ranks that the rear-guard was attacked by
the barbarians.  Varus resolved on pressing forward; but a heavy discharge of
missiles from the woods on either flank taught him how serious was the peril,
and he saw his best men falling round him without the opportunity of
retaliation; for his light-armed auxiliaries, who were principally of Germanic
race, now rapidly deserted, and it was impossible to deploy the legionaries on
such broken ground for a charge against the enemy.

     Choosing one of the most open and firm spots which they could force their
way to, the Romans halted for the night; and, faithful to their national
discipline and tactics, formed their camp amid the harassing attacks of the
rapidly thronging foes with the elaborate toil and systematic skill the traces
of which are impressed permanently on the soil of so many European countries,
attesting the presence in the olden time of the imperial eagles.

     On the morrow the Romans renewed their march, the veteran officers who
served under Varus now probably directing the operations and hoping to find
the Germans drawn up to meet them, in which case they relied on their own
superior discipline and tactics for such a victory as should reassure the
supremacy of Rome.  But Arminius was far too sage a commander to lead on his
followers, with their unwidely broadswords and inefficient defensive armor,
against the Roman legionaries, fully armed with helmet, cuirass, greaves, and
shield, who were skilled to commence the conflict with a murderous volley of
heavy javelins hurled upon the foe when a few yards distant, and then, with
their short cut-and-thrust swords, to hew their way through all opposition,
preserving the utmost steadiness and coolness, and obeying each word of
command in the midst of strife and slaughter with the same precision and
alertness as if upon parade.  Arminius suffered the Romans to march out from
their camp, to form first in line for action and then in column for marching,
without the show of opposition.

     For some distance Varus was allowed to move on, only harassed by slight
skirmishes, but struggling with difficulty through the broken ground, the toil
and distress of his men being aggravated by heavy torrents of rain, which
burst upon the devoted legions, as if the angry gods of Germany were pouring
out the vials of their wrath upon the invaders.  After some little time their
van approached a ridge of high wooded ground, which is one of the offshoots of
the great Hercynian forest, and is situated between the modern villages of
Driburg and Bielefeld.  Arminius had caused barricades of hewn trees to be
formed here, so as to add to the natural difficulties of the passage.  Fatigue
and discouragement now began to betray themselves in the Roman ranks.  Their
line became less steady; baggage wagons were abandoned from the impossibility
of forcing them along; and, as this happened, many soldiers left their ranks
and crowded round the wagons to secure the most valuable portions of their
property; each was busy about his own affairs, and purposely slow in hearing
the word of command from his officers.

     Arminius now gave the signal for a general attack.  The fierce shouts of
the Germans pealed through the gloom of the forests, and in thronging
multitudes they assailed the flanks of the invaders, pouring in clouds of
darts on the encumbered legionaries as they struggled up the glens or
floundered in the morasses, and watching every opportunity of charging through
the intervals of the disjointed column, and so cutting off the communication
between its several brigades.  Arminius, with a chosen band of personal
retainers round him, cheered on his countrymen by voice and example. He and
his men aimed their weapons particularly at the horses of the Roman cavalry.
The wounded animals, slipping about in the mire and their own blood, threw
their riders and plunged among the ranks of the legions, disordering all round
them.  Varus now ordered the troops to be countermarched, in the hope of
reaching the nearest Roman garrison on the Lippe.

     But retreat now was as impracticable as advance; and the falling back of
the Romans only augmented the courage of their assailants and caused fiercer
and more frequent charges on the flanks of the disheartened army.  The Roman
officer who commanded the cavalry, Numonius Vala, rode off with his squadrons
in the vain hope of escaping by thus abandoning his comrades.  Unable to keep
together or force their way across the woods and swamps, the horsemen were
overpowered in detail and slaughtered to the last man.  The Roman infantry
still held together and resisted, but more through the instinct of discipline
and bravery than from any hope of success or escape.

     Varus, after being severely wounded in a charge of the Germans against
his part of the column, committed suicide to avoid falling into the hands of
those whom he had exasperated by his oppressions.  One of the
lieutenants-general of the army fell fighting; the other surrendered to the
enemy.  But mercy to a fallen foe had never been a Roman virtue, and those
among her legions who now laid down their arms in hope of quarter, drank deep
of the cup of suffering, which Rome had held to the lips of many a brave but
unfortunate enemy.  The infuriated Germans slaughtered their oppressors with
deliberate ferocity, and those prisoners who were not hewn to pieces on the
spot were only preserved to perish by a more cruel death in cold blood.

     The bulk of the Roman army fought steadily and stubbornly, frequently
repelling the masses of assailants, but gradually losing the compactness of
their array and becoming weaker and weaker beneath the incessant shower of
darts and the reiterated assaults of the vigorous and unencumbered Germans. At
last, in a series of desperate attacks, the column was pierced through and
through, two of the eagles captured, and the Roman host, which on the morning
before had marched forth in such pride and might - now broken up into confused
fragments - either fell fighting beneath the overpowering numbers of the enemy
or perished in the swamps and woods in unavailing efforts at flight.  Few,
very few, ever saw again the left bank of the Rhine.  One body of brave
veterans, arraying themselves in a ring on a little mound, beat off every
charge of the Germans, and prolonged their honorable resistance to the close
of that dreadful day.  The traces of a feeble attempt at forming a ditch and
mound attested in after-years the spot where the last of the Romans passed
their night of suffering and despair.  But on the morrow this remnant also,
worn out with hunger, wounds, and toil, was charged by the victorious Germans,
and either massacred on the spot or offered up in fearful rites on the altars
of the deities of the old mythology of the North.

     A gorge in the mountain ridge, through which runs the modern road between
Paderborn and Pyrmont, leads from the spot where the heat of the battle raged
to the Extersteine - a cluster of bold and grotesque rocks of sandstone - near
which is a small sheet of water, overshadowed by a grove of aged trees.
According to local tradition, this was one of the sacred groves of the ancient
Germans, and it was here that the Roman captives were slain in sacrifice by
the victorious warriors of Arminius.

     Never was victory more decisive; never was the liberation of an oppressed
people more instantaneous and complete.  Throughout Germany the Roman
garrisons were assailed and cut off; and within a few weeks after Varus had
fallen, the German soil was freed from the foot of an invader.

     At Rome the tidings of the battle were received with an agony of terror,
the reports of which we would deem exaggerated did they not come from Roman
historians themselves.  They not only tell emphatically how great was the awe
which the Romans felt of the prowess of the Germans if their various tribes
could be brought to unite for a common purpose, ^1 but they also reveal how
weakened and debased the population of Italy had become.  Dion Cassius says:
"Then Augustus, when he heard the calamity of Varus, rent his garment, and was
in great affliction for the troops he had lost, and for terror respecting the
Germans and the Gauls.  And his chief alarm was that he expected them to push
on against Italy and Rome; and there remained no Roman youth fit for military
duty that were worth speaking of, and the allied populations, that were at all
serviceable, had been wasted away.  Yet he prepared for the emergency as well
as his means allowed; and when none of the citizens of military age were
willing to enlist, he made them cast lots, and punished, by confiscation of
goods and disfranchisement, every fifth man among those under thirty-five and
every tenth man of those above that age.  At last, when he found that not even
thus could he make many come forward, he put some of them to death.  So he
made a conscription of discharged veterans and of emancipated slaves, and,
collecting as large a force as he could, sent it, under Tiberius, with all
speed into Germany."

[Footnote 1: It is clear that the Romans followed the policy of fomenting
dissensions and wars of the Germans among themselves.]

     Dion mentions, also, a number of terrific portents that were believed to
have occurred at the time, and the narration of which is not immaterial, as it
shows the state of the public mind when such things were so believed in and so
interpreted.  The summits of the Alps were said to have fallen, and three
columns of fire to have blazed up from them.  In the Campus Martius, the
temple of the war-god, from whom the founder of Rome had sprung, was struck by
a thunderbolt.  The nightly heavens glowed several times as if on fire.  Many
comets blazed forth together; and fiery meteors, shaped like spears, had shot
from the northern quarter of the sky down into the Roman camps.  It was said,
too, that a statue of Victory, which had stood at a place on the frontier,
pointing the way toward Germany, had of its own accord turned round, and now
pointed to Italy.  These and other prodigies were believed by the multitude to
accompany the slaughter of Varus' legions and to manifest the anger of the
gods against Rome.

     Augustus himself was not free from superstition; but on this occasion no
supernatural terrors were needed to increase the alarm and grief that he felt,
and which made him, even months after the news of the battle had arrived,
often beat his head against the wall and exclaim, "Quintilius Varus, give me
back my legions." We learn this from his biographer Suetonius; and, indeed,
every ancient writer who alludes to the overthrow of Varus attests the
importance of the blow against the Roman power, and the bitterness with which
it was felt.

     The Germans did not pursue their victory beyond their own territory; but
that victory secured at once and forever the independence of the Teutonic
race.  Rome sent, indeed, her legions again into Germany, to parade a
temporary superiority, but all hopes of permanent conquests were abandoned by
Augustus and his successors.

     The blow which Arminius had struck never was forgotten.  Roman fear
disguised itself under the specious title of moderation, and the Rhine became
the acknowledged boundary of the two nations until the fifth century of our
era, when the Germans became the assailants, and carved with their conquering
swords the provinces of imperial Rome into the kingdoms of modern Europe.

Arminius

     I have said above that the great Cheruscan is more truly one of our
national heroes than Caractacus is.  It may be added that an Englishman is
entitled to claim a closer degree of relationship with Arminius than can be
claimed by any German of modern Germany.  The proof of this depends on the
proof of four facts: First, that the Cheruscans were Old Saxons, or Saxons of
the interior of Germany; secondly, that the Anglo-Saxons, or Saxons of the
coast of Germany, were more closely akin than other German tribes were to the
Cheruscan Saxons; thirdly, that the Old Saxons were almost exterminated by
Charlemagne; fourthly, that the Anglo-Saxons are our immediate ancestors. The
last of these may be assumed as an axiom in English history.  The proofs of
the other three are partly philological and partly historical.  It may be,
however, here remarked that the present Saxons of Germany are of the High
Germanic division of the German race, whereas both the Anglo-Saxon and Old
Saxon were of the Low Germanic.

     Being thus the nearest heirs of the glory of Arminius, we may fairly
devote more attention to his career than, in such a work as the present, could
be allowed to any individual leader; and it is interesting to trace how far
his fame survived during the Middle Ages, both among the Germans of the
Continent and among ourselves.

     It seems probable that the jealousy with which Maroboduus, the king of
the Suevi and Marcomanni, regarded Arminius, and which ultimately broke out
into open hostilities between those German tribes and the Cherusci, prevented
Arminius from leading the confederate Germans to attack Italy after his first
victory.  Perhaps he may have had the rare moderation of being content with
the liberation of his country, without seeking to retaliate on her former
oppressors.  When Tiberius marched into Germany in the year 10, Arminius was
too cautious to attack him on ground favorable to the legions, and Tiberius
was too skilful to entangle his troops in the difficult parts of the country.
His march and countermarch were as unresisted as they were unproductive.  A
few years later, when a dangerous revolt of the Roman legions near the
frontier caused their generals to find them active employment by leading them
into the interior of Germany, we find Arminius again active in his country's
defence.  The old quarrel between him and his father-in-law, Segestes had
broken out afresh.

     Segestes now called in the aid of the Roman general, Germanicus, to whom
he surrendered himself; and by his contrivance, his daughter, Thusnelda, the
wife of Arminius, also came into the hands of the Romans, she being far
advanced in pregnancy.  She showed, as Tacitus relates, more of the spirit of
her husband than of her father, a spirit that could not be subdued into tears
or supplications.  She was sent to Ravenna, and there gave birth to a son,
whose life we know, from an allusion in Tacitus, to have been eventful and
unhappy; but the part of the great historian's work which narrated his fate
has perished, and we only know from another quarter that the son of Arminius
was, at the age of four years, led captive in a triumphal pageant along the
streets of Rome.

     The high spirit of Arminius was goaded almost into frenzy by these
bereavements.  The fate of his wife, thus torn from him, and of his babe
doomed to bondage even before its birth, inflamed the eloquent invectives with
which he roused his countrymen against the home-traitors, and against their
invaders, who thus made war upon women and children.  Germanicus had marched
his army to the place where Varus had perished, and had there paid funeral
honors to the ghastly relics of his predecessor's legions that he found heaped
around him. ^1 Arminius lured him to advance a little farther into the
country, and then assailed him, and fought a battle, which, by the Roman
accounts, was a drawn one.

[Footnote 1: In the Museum of Rhenish Antiquities at Bonn there is a Roman
sepulchral monument the inscription on which records that it was erected to
the memory of M. Coelius, who fell "Bello Variano."]

     The effect of it was to make Germanicus resolve on retreating to the
Rhine.  He himself, with part of his troops, embarked in some vessels on the
Ems, and returned by that river, and then by sea; but part of his forces were
infrusted to a Roman general named Caecina, to lead them back by land to the
Rhine.  Arminius followed this division on its march, and fought several
battles with it, in which he inflicted heavy loss on the Romans, captured the
greater part of their baggage, and would have destroyed them completely had
not his skilful system of operations been finally thwarted by the haste of
Inguiomerus, a confederate German chief, who insisted on assaulting the Romans
in their camp, instead of waiting till they were entangled in the difficulties
of the country, and assailing their columns on the march.

     In the following year the Romans were inactive, but in the year afterward
Germanicus led a fresh invasion.  He placed his army on shipboard and sailed
to the mouth of the Ems, where he disembarked and marched to the Weser, there
encamping, probably in the neighborhood of Minden.  Arminius had collected his
army on the other side of the river; and a scene occurred, which is powerfully
told by Tacitus, and which is the subject of a beautiful poem by Praed.  It
has been already mentioned that the brother of Arminius, like himself, had
been trained up while young to serve in the Roman armies; but, unlike
Arminius, he not only refused to quit the Roman service for that of his
country, but fought against his country with the legions of Germanicus.  He
had assumed the Roman name of Flavius, and had gained considerable distinction
in the Roman service, in which he had lost an eye from a wound in battle.
When the Roman outposts approached the river Weser, Arminius called out to
them from the opposite bank and expressed a wish to see his brother.  Flavius
stepped forward, and Arminius ordered his own followers to retire, and
requested that the archers should be removed from the Roman bank of the river.
This was done; and the brothers, who apparently had not seen each other for
some years, began a conversation from the opposite sides of the stream, in
which Arminius questioned his brother respecting the loss of his eye, and what
battle it had been lost in, and what reward he had received for his wound.
Flavius told him how the eye was lost, and mentioned the increased pay that he
had on account of its loss, and showed the collar and other military
decorations that had been given him. Arminius mocked at these as badges of
slavery; and then each began to try to win the other over - Flavius boasting
the power of Rome and her generosity to the submissive; Arminius appealing to
him in the name of their country's gods, of the mother that had borne them,
and by the holy names of fatherland and freedom, not to prefer being the
betrayer to being the champion of his country.  They soon proceeded to mutual
taunts and menaces, and Flavius called aloud for his horse and his arms, that
he might dash across the river and attack his brother; nor would he have been
checked from doing so had not the Roman general Stertinius run up to him and
forcibly detained him. Arminius stood on the other bank, threatening the
renegade, and defying him to battle.

     I shall not be thought to need apology for quoting here the stanzas in
which Praed has described this scene - a scene among the most affecting, as
well as the most striking, that history supplies.  It makes us reflect on the
desolate position of Arminius, with his wife and child captives in the enemy's
hands, and with his brother a renegade in arms against him.  The great
liberator of our German race was there, with every source of human happiness
denied him except the consciousness of doing his duty to his country.

     "Back, back! he fears not foaming flood
          Who fears not steel-clad line:
     No warrior thou of German blood,
          No brother thou of mine.
     Go, earn Rome's chain to load thy neck,
          Her gems to deck thy hilt;
     And blazon honor's hapless wreck
          With all the gauds of guilt.

     "But wouldst thou have me share the prey?
          By all that I have done,
     The Varian bones that day by day
          Lie whitening in the sun,
     The legion's trampled panoply,
          The eagle's shatter'd wing - I
     would not be for earth or sky
          So scorn'd and mean a thing.

     "Ho, call me here the wizard, boy,
          Of dark and subtle skill,
     To agonize but not destroy,
          To torture, not to kill.
     When swords are out and shriek and shout
          Leave little room for prayer,
     No fetter on man's arm or heart
          Hangs half so heavy there.

     "I curse him by the gifts the land
          Hath won from him and Rome,
     The riving axe, the wasting brand,
          Rent forest, blazing home.
     I curse him by our country's gods,
          The terrible, the dark,
     The breakers of the Roman rods,
          The smiters of the bark.

     "Oh, misery that such a ban
          On such a brow should be!
     Why comes he not in battle's van
          His country's chief to be?
     To stand a comrade by my side,
          The sharer of my fame,
     And worthy of a brother's pride
          And of a brother's name?

     "But it is past! where heroes press
          And cowards bend the knee,
     Arminius is not brotherless,
          His brethren are the free.
     They come around: one hour, and light
          Will fade from turf and tide,
     Then onward, onward to the fight,
          With darkness for our guide.

     "To-night, to-night, when we shall meet
          In combat face to face,
     Then only would Arminius greet
          The renegade's embrace.
     The canker of Rome's guilt shall be
          Upon his dying name;
     And as he lived in slavery,
          So shall he fall in shame."

     On the day after the Romans had reached the Weser, Germanicus led his
army across that river, and a partial encounter took place, in which Arminius
was successful.  But on the succeeding day a general action was fought, in
which Arminius was severely wounded and the German infantry routed with heavy
loss.  The horsemen of the two armies encountered without either party gaining
the advantage.  But the Roman army remained master of the ground and claimed a
complete victory.  Germanicus erected a trophy in the field, with a vaunting
inscription that the nations between the Rhine and the Elbe had been
thoroughly conquered by his army.  But that army speedily made a final retreat
to the left bank of the Rhine; nor was the effect of their campaign more
durable than their trophy.  The sarcasm with which Tacitus speaks of certain
other triumphs of Roman generals over Germans may apply to the pageant which
Germanicus celebrated on his return to Rome from his command of the Roman army
of the Rhine.  The Germans were "triumphati potius quam victi."

     After the Romans had abandoned their attempts on Germany, we find
Arminius engaged in hostilities with Maroboduus, king of the Suevi and
Marcomanni, who was endeavoring to bring the other German tribes into a state
of dependency on him.  Arminius was at the head of the Germans who took up
arms against this home invader of their liberties.  After some minor
engagements a pitched battle was fought between the two confederacies (A.D.
19) in which the loss on each side was equal, but Maroboduus confessed the
ascendency of his antagonist by avoiding a renewal of the engagement and by
imploring the intervention of the Romans in his defence.  The younger Drusus
then commanded the Roman legions in the province of Illyricum, and by his
mediation a peace was concluded between Arminius and Maroboduus, by the terms
of which it is evident that the latter must have renounced his ambitious
schemes against the freedom of the other German tribes.

     Arminius did not long survive this second war of independence, which he
successfully waged for his country.  He was assassinated in the thirty-seventh
year of his age by some of his own kinsmen, who conspired against him.
Tacitus says that this happened while he was engaged in a civil war, which had
been caused by his attempts to make himself king over his countrymen.  It is
far more probable, as one of the best biographers ^1 has observed, that
Tacitus misunderstood an attempt of Arminius to extend his influence as
elective war chieftain of the Cherusci and othe tribes, for an attempt to
obtain the royal dignity.

[Footnote 1: Dr. Plate, in Biographical Dictionary.]

     When we remember that his father-in-law and his brother were renegades,
we can well understand that a party among his kinsmen may have been bitterly
hostile to him, and have opposed his authority with the tribe by open
violence, and, when that seemed ineffectual, by secret assassination.

     Arminius left a name which the historians of the nation against which he
combated so long and so gloriously have delighted to honor.  It is from the
most indisputable source, from the lips of enemies, that we know his exploits.
^2 His countrymen made history, but did not write it.  But his memory lived
among them in the days of their bards, who recorded

[Footnote 2: Tacitus: Annales.]

     "The deeds he did, the fields he won,
     The freedom he restored."

Tacitus, writing years after the death of Arminius, says of him, "Canitur
adhuc barbaras apud gentes." As time passed on, the gratitude of ancient
Germany to her great deliverer grew into adoration, and divine honors were
paid for centuries to Arminius by every tribe of the Low Germanic division of
the Teutonic races.  The Irmin-sul, or the column of Herman, near Eresburgh
(the modern Stadtberg), was the chosen object of worship to the descendants of
the Cherusci (the Old Saxons), and in defence of which they fought most
desperately against Charlemagne and his Christianized Franks.  "Irmin, in the
cloudy Olympus of Teutonic belief, appears as a king and a warrior; and the
pillar, the Irmin-sul,' bearing the statue, and considered as the symbol of
the deity, was the Palladium of the Saxon nation until the temple of Eresburgh
was destroyed by Charlemagne, and the column itself transferred to the
monastery of Corbey, where perhaps a portion of the rude rock idol yet
remains, covered by the ornaments of the Gothic era." ^1 Traces of the worship
of Arminius are to be found among our Anglo-Saxon ancestors after their
settlement in this island.  One of the four great highways was held to be
under the protection of the deity, and was called the "Irmin street." The name
Arminius is, of course, the mere Latinized form of Herman, the name by which
the hero and the deity were known by every man of Low German blood on either
side of the German Sea.  It means, etymologically, the War-man, the man of
hosts.  No other explanation of the worship of the Irmin-sul, and of the name
of the Irmin street, is so satisfactory as that which connects them with the
deified Arminius.  We know for certain of the existence of other columns of an
analogous character.  Thus there was the Roland-seule in North Germany; there
was a Thor-seule in Sweden, and (what is more important) there was an
Athelstan-seule in Saxon England. ^2

[Footnote 1: Palgrave: English Commonwealth.]

[Footnote 2: Lappenburg: Anglo-Saxons.]