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The Historians' History of the World 06 [The Early Roman Empire]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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Roman Emperor in the Dress of a General
(After De Montfaucon)
The Illyrian revolt was put down by Drusus, the emperor’s son. To expiate the crimes they had committed the German legions demanded to be led against the enemy; they believed that there was no way of appeasing the spirits of their murdered brothers in arms but by covering their own guilty breasts with honourable wounds. And Germanicus willingly gratified their lust of battle by a campaign in the regions beyond the Rhine.
Germanicus was one of the last heroic figures of decadent Rome. He was in the prime of life and combined all physical and mental excellencies with the virtues of a valiant warrior. Noble in figure and bearing, versed in the highest Greek culture of the age, famed as an orator and as a poet, and endowed with admirable qualities of mind and heart, he was the darling of the legions and the people. They honoured in him the son of Drusus, whose noble likeness he was; the husband of the admirable Agrippina, granddaughter of Augustus, who had borne him a number of blooming children; the descendant of the triumvir Antony, whose daughter his mother Octavia had been. And if his achievements in Pannonia and Dalmatia had gained him the confidence and devotion of his comrades at arms, the kindliness of his nature and an address in which affability was mingled with dignity and majesty won him the hearts of all men. When he went in disguise, as Tacitus tells, through the lines of the camp to spy out the temper of the army, he heard enthusiastic praise of himself from every tent, and when he came to the city he was always surrounded by a throng of friends and dependents of all ranks. Tiberius had adopted him in deference to the wishes of Augustus, but the talents and excellencies of the youthful hero inspired the gloomy soul of the emperor with envy and suspicion. [So at least Tacitus assures us. But possibly that writer’s tendency to invent, or make partisan use of evil motives, may have falsified the facts. Some historians believe that Tiberius trusted Germanicus to the end.]
The people had expected that Drusus would restore political liberty, and they cherished similar hopes of his son. The revolt of the Ubii had its deepest root in the belief of the legions that Germanicus would not tolerate the rule of another, and no matter how many proofs of loyalty and devotion the latter might give, they were not enough to exorcise the phantoms in his uncle’s distrustful soul. He seemed perpetually to hear the address of the legions to their beloved generaclass="underline" “If Germanicus desired supreme power, they were at his disposal”; and in his nephew’s kindly and liberal nature he could see nothing but an intention to smooth his path to sovereignty.
Germanicus undertook his campaign against the country beyond the Rhine under favourable circumstances. After their victory over Varus the Germans had abandoned themselves to careless security, their tribal confederacy grew lax, their chieftains quarrelled. Segestes, full of rancour and envy against Arminius of old, was even more wroth with the Cheruscan prince now that the latter had abducted his daughter Thusnelda and had taken the willing girl to wife.
Victories of Germanicus
The first campaign, which Germanicus with his legions and auxiliaries began in the autumn of the same year, was consequently crowned with success. On a star-lit night he attacked the Marsi as they were celebrating a religious solemnity with joyous banquets, and having craftily surrounded them massacred them without pity, destroyed a sanctuary which they held in high reverence, and wasted their territory for ten miles with fire and sword. Enraged at this treacherous attack, the Bructeri, Tubantes, and Usipetes flew to arms and vigorously attacked the retreating Romans. But thanks to admirable leading and wary valour they reached their winter quarters on the Rhine without serious loss. Next year Germanicus invaded the land of the Chatti from Mogontiacum, burned Mattium their capital, and wasted the country. He then rescued Segestes, who, being besieged by Arminius, had appealed to the Romans for succour, carried Thusnelda (whom her perfidious father had snatched away from her husband and delivered over to the enemy) into captivity, and sent the son of Segestes, Segimund by name—who, though a priest of the Ubii, had once torn the sacred fillet and fought for freedom at his country’s call in the Teutoburg forest—under a strong escort to Gaul. Thusnelda, inspired by the spirit of her husband rather than of her father, followed the victor, not humbled to tears, not with entreaties, but with a proud look, her hands folded on her breast, thinking of the son she bore beneath her heart and who should be born to servitude.
[15 A.D.]
Full of rage and fury at this domestic disgrace, Arminius flew through the territory of the Cherusci and summoned all the people to revenge upon the Romans, who were not ashamed to wage war by treachery and against helpless women. He succeeded in combining the Cherusci and several neighbouring tribes into a great armed confederacy, and induced his uncle Inguiomer, who ruled over the region near the Teutoburg forest, to join the league. Germanicus met this new danger with courage and discretion. While he himself with four legions went down the dyke of Drusus and the Flevo Lacus by ship as his father Drusus had once done, and sailed along the coast, his legate Cæcina marched through the country of the Bructeri, and Pedo, leader of the cavalry, through that of the Frisians. The three divisions of the army reunited on the banks of the Ems and, reinforced by the conquered Chauci, marched, bearing hideous devastation with them, towards the Luppia, where they visited the battle-field in the Teutoburg forest and paid the last honours to the bones of the fallen.
Gruesome Relics in Teutoburg Forest
When the army came into the vicinity of the Teutoburg forest, says Tacitus, a longing came over Cæsar to pay the last duties to the fallen warriors and their general; the whole army, mindful of their friends and kindred, of the disasters of war and the lot of mankind, was seized with tenderness and compassion. After Cæcina had been sent forward to spy out the ravines of the forest and to lay bridges and causeways across the swampy bogland and treacherous fields, the whole army entered the place of mourning, terrible alike to sight and memory.
The camps of Varus were still standing; by the contracted wall of circumvallation it could be seen that they had sheltered but the remnant of the army. The bones of the fallen were bleaching on the battle-field, here in heaps, there scattered, according as an attempt had been made at flight or resistance; among the human bodies lay broken weapons and the skeletons of horses; hollow skulls stared down from the tree trunks; and in the groves close at hand could be seen the altars at which the tribunes and centurions had been slaughtered to the gods. Some who had escaped from the fight or from captivity pointed out the places where the legates had fallen, where Varus had received his first wound and where he had thrust the sword into his breast; where Arminius had addressed the multitude, where the prisoners had been strung up, where the eagles had been taken and flouted.
The army, filled with mingled grief and wrath, buried the bones of the three legions six years after their defeat, and no man knew whose remains he was covering with earth, whether those of a brother or a stranger. Cæsar himself laid the first sod of a tumulus, the last gift to the departed, a witness of sympathetic grief to those present. Tiberius, however, disapproved of the interment of the bodies, either thinking that the soldiers would be cast down and discouraged by the terrible sight, or suspecting that in this act the general was courting the favour of the army and of the people.
The Return March
After a skirmish with Arminius, in which the Roman cavalry suffered great loss in the swampy bottom of the wood, Germanicus set out on his return march. While he himself with his legions sailed from the mouth of the Amisia along the coast the way he had come, accompanied by the crippled cavalry on land, Cæcina, an experienced warrior who had seen forty campaigns, marched with the bulk of the army on the left of the Luppia towards the Rhine over the long causeway which Domitius had once laid across the bog land.