“Varus was a very good administrator, but he was not a soldier,” says Benario. Like his patrons in Rome, Varus thought occupying Germany would be easy. To Augustus, he must have seemed just the man to bring Roman civilization to the barbarous” tribes of Germany. Varus, 55, was linked by marriage to the imperial family and had served as Emperor Augustus’ representative in the province of Syria (which included modern Lebanon and Israel), where he had quelled ethnic disturbances. They were planning to investigate reports of an uprising among local tribes. He led an estimated 15,000 seasoned legionnaires from their summer quarters on the WeserRiver, in what is now northwestern Germany, west toward permanent bases near the Rhine. There are many reasons, according to ancient historians, that the imperial Roman legate Publius Quinctilius Varus set out so confidently that September in a.d. They would pay dearly for their ignorance. The Romans knew little of this densely forested territory governed by fiercely independent chieftains. Various Teutonic tribes lay scattered across a vast wilderness that reached from present-day Holland to Poland. “Germania” (the name referred originally to a particular tribe along the Rhine), meanwhile, did not exist as a nation at all. The imperial navy had turned the Mediterranean into a Roman lake, and everywhere around the rim of the empire, Rome’s defeated enemies feared her legions-or so it seemed to optimistic Romans. By the beginning of the Christian Era, Rome’s sway extended from Spain to Asia Minor, and from the North Sea to the Sahara. But within a few hundred years, Rome had conquered much of the Italian peninsula, and by 146 b.c., had leapt into the ranks of major powers by defeating Carthage, which controlled much of the western Mediterranean. All Europe west of the Elbe might well have remained Roman Catholic Germans would be speaking a Romance language the Thirty Years’ War might never have occurred, and the long, bitter conflict between the French and the Germans might never have taken place.”įounded (at least according to legend) in 753 b.c., Rome spent its formative decades as little more than an overgrown village. “Almost all of modern Germany as well as much of the present-day CzechRepublic would have come under Roman rule. Benario, emeritus professor of classics at EmoryUniversity, a very different Europe would have emerged. The battle led to the creation of a militarized frontier in the middle of Europe that endured for 400 years, and it created a boundary between Germanic and Latin cultures that lasted 2,000 years.” Had Rome not been defeated, says historian Herbert W. “It was one of the most devastating defeats ever suffered by the Roman Army, and its consequences were the most far-reaching. Wells, a specialist in Iron Age European archaeology at the University of Minnesota and the author of The Battle That Stopped Rome. “This was a battle that changed the course of history,” says Peter S. It was a defeat so catastrophic that it threatened the survival of Rome itself and halted the empire’s conquest of Germany. Ongoing finds-ranging from simple nails to fragments of armor and the remains of fortifications-have verified the innovative guerrilla tactics that according to accounts from the period, neutralized the Romans’ superior weaponry and discipline.
NAVAL ACTION MAP WIPE CRACK
9, three crack legions of Rome’s army were caught in an ambush and annihilated. But it was further proof that one of the pivotal events in European history took place here: in A.D. The sandal nail was a minor discovery, extracted from the soil beneath an overgrown pasture at the base of Kalkriese (the word may derive from Old High German for limestone), a 350-foot-high hill in an area where uplands slope down to the north German plain.
Inch by inch, several young archaeologists under her direction are bringing to light a battlefield that was lost for almost 2,000 years, until an off-duty British Army officer stumbled across it in 1987. Atrim, short-haired woman, Wilbers-Rost has worked at the site, which is ten miles north of the manufacturing city of Osnabrück, Germany, since 1990. “You’re holding a nail from a Roman soldier’s sandal,” she said. Wilbers-Rost, a specialist in early German archaeology, peered through wire-rimmed glasses, brushed away some earth, and handed an object to me. “This is the soil of 2,000 years ago, where we are standing now,” Susanne Wilbers-Rost was saying as a young volunteer pried a small, dark clod out of it.
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