It is one of the most chilling passages in Roman literature. Germanicus, the emperor Tiberius’s nephew, is leading reprisals in the deeply forested areas east of the Rhine, when he decides to visit the scene of the catastrophic defeat, six years before, of his fellow Roman, Quinctilius Varus. The historian Tacitus describes what Germanicus finds: the ghastly human wreckage of a supposedly unbeatable army, deep in the Teutoburg Forest. “On the open ground,” he writes, “were whitening bones of men, as they had fled, or stood their ground, strewn everywhere or piled in heaps. Near lay fragments of weapons and limbs of horses, and also human heads, prominently nailed to trunks of trees.”
Survivors pointed out the spot where Varus had killed himself, and the place where the military standards had been flaunted by the victors. “A living Roman army,” writes Tacitus of Germanicus’s visit, “had come to bury the dead men’s bones. No one knew if the remains he was burying belonged to a stranger or a comrade.” Three whole legions, perhaps 15,000 men, had been slaughtered – as well as the slaves, women and children who would probably have been with them.
Varus’s defeat in AD9 resonated in the later Roman imaginarium as a moment of unparalleled horror and humiliation. On terrain of their own choosing, the Roman military – professional, numerous, disciplined, well-equipped – had proved unbeatable for centuries. But, like many supposedly superior fighting forces since, from the Americans and their allies in Afghanistan to the Russians trundling south towards Kyiv, they were vulnerable when tricked, ambushed, trapped in a bottleneck and cut off from reinforcements.
The Varian disaster, as the Romans called it, did not mean that the empire ceased expanding. But it did mean that Rome’s borders never extended east of the Rhine. It had other consequences, too. Much later, during early stirrings of national self-consciousness in the 19th century, the victorious rebel leader Arminius began to be seen as the founding figure of German nationhood. His story was troublingly appropriated by the Nazis – and is being used again today by the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). One of its most prominent figures, Björn Höcke, has even been called a new Hermann (the modernised name for Arminius). Ancient history, perverted into myth, still vibrates in the present.
The site of the battle was almost certainly at Kalkriese in today’s Lower Saxony where, in 2002, a museum and battlefield park were opened. There is little to see in this wide field ringed by traces of what was once dense forest – but it is nevertheless a sobering spot. “It was killing fields as far as the eye can see,” says Stefan Burmeister, the museum’s director, describing the aftermath of the ambush. Bones and bodies may have decayed, but the soil is full of phosphates, the chemical traces of the dead, and if you strike the ground with a shovel, he says, there is “a fountain of finds”.
Rising above the museum is a viewing tower, from which the terrain becomes easier to read: the Romans were probably hemmed into a narrow strip of land between swamps to the north and ravines that cut through the chalk hills to the south. The place is deliberately free of any attempted reconstruction; the museum itself is a plain, minimalist building clad in oxidised metal, recalling the rusting iron of weaponry that would have been strewn across a battlefield. A pathway of metal slabs, some inscribed with fragments of Latin, runs across the site.
“It’s a difficult question, how to deal with such a dark historical place,” says Burmeister. “There was so much violence, so much brutality here, thousands of people killed. We don’t want to make it too positive.” By contrast, 100km to the south-east, stands the Hermannsdenkmal – a towering statue of Arminius/Hermann completed in 1875, in a spot once thought to be the battle site. Rising to a height of 53m, the monument radiates “shrill aggression”, to borrow a phrase from Neil MacGregor’s book Germany: Memories of a Nation. Raised in the era of the Franco-Prussian war, the statue waves his sword in the general direction of France. These days, AfD members sometimes gather there.
One of the paradoxes of the Kalkriese killing fields, says Burmeister, is that most of the archaeological finds, though numerous, are tiny, fragmentary. The theory, he says, is that the dead were “systematically stripped of their possessions – we have only the leftovers. Each of these Roman soldiers was a walking resource deposit.” But there are exceptions, among them a striking visor from a cavalry helmet in the shape of a man’s delicate-lipped face. And there is something even more remarkable, an extraordinary survivor that is about to go on display in Legion, a major new exhibition at the British Museum in London: namely, a complete Roman cuirass, uniquely well-preserved.
The cuirass, or body armour, was discovered right outside the museum in 2018. It was towards the end of an excavation, and entirely a surprise, when a metal detector beeped, indicating that something substantial was buried deep in the soil. A huge block of earth was extracted and 3D X-rayed, a process that took two days. After that, it was clear what they had – crushed and fragmentary, but spectacular. (The only very distant equivalent is pieces of armour found in Corbridge, Northumberland, though there is a promising brand-new find from Vienne in France, yet to be studied.)
The work of digging up the 403 fragments, of identifying how they belonged together, and of gently removing the corrosion from the surface, was a labour of love that took two years. “On a good day,” says Burmeister, “we would clean one square centimetre.” Why did it survive? Why was it not taken from the battlefield like everything else? “My interpretation is that this Roman legionary survived the battle and was paraded as a trophy,” he says. Shackles were found nearby. It is a grim notion.
Not far away from Kalkriese, in the delightful small Roman Museum in Haltern am See, it is good to be reminded that serving as a Roman soldier was a career choice and a life – albeit a career that brought with it enormous risks for the soldiers themselves, given the often violent exploitation of the people and lands that came under their occupation. Here, on the site of what is thought to have been the Roman military base of Aliso, are pots and pans, wine strainers and glass perfume bottles, keys and table legs, veiny ceramic phalluses (scholars disagree on their purpose, though the prevailing suggestion is they were for good luck) and even the lid of a medicine jar stating its contents as “the British root”. This is thought to be sorrel, rich in vitamins and iron.
This sense of ordinariness – that a soldier’s career might be mundane, and involve family life as well as violence – is a point strongly made in the British Museum exhibition, which takes as its spine the professional lives of two real soldiers from Egypt, Apion and Terentianus, whose letters on papyrus, recounting everything from career anxieties to requests for boots and socks, were preserved in the dry African sand. As in the modern Russian Federation, enlistment into the legions for less well-off citizens was a way out of poverty, the benefits worth even the dire risks. For non-citizens, serving as an auxiliary ended with the significant retirement benefit of enfranchisement – if it did not end in death.
These men ate and drank, lived and loved. One of the most moving objects in the exhibition comes from cold, windy Britain: a monument raised to a woman called Regina, one of the Catuvellauni tribe, who lived in south-east England. It’s clear from the inscription – dedicated by her husband, Barates – that she was first his slave, then his freedwoman and wife. He was a Syrian, from Palmyra, at the opposite end of the empire, and the words are in two languages, Latin and Palmyrene.
Regina and Barates ended up together on the north-west frontier of the Roman empire, at the fort of Arbeia at what is now South Shields on Tyneside. She is shown sitting in a wicker chair, queenly like her name, wearing a necklace and bracelet, cradling a spindle in her lap and with a box of wool at her feet. She died aged 30. Carved in stone after her death, Regina gives us a gentle, fleeting glimpse of her life.
Legion: Life in the Roman Army is at the British Museum, London, from 1 February-23 June.
