Battle of Teutoburg Forest 2009

There is going to huge amount of ink spilt this year about the Battle of Teutoburg Forest given that 2009 is the 2,000th anniversary of the encounter between Arminius and Varus. The autumn will see most of the coverage, but it has already started.

All of the articles so far have been in the German press. The best pieces have been in Die Zeit and at Dradio.de. In the former Stefan Rebenich looks at the myth of the battle and what it has meant for Germany. The latter is a good summary for those who want to get up to speed.

There is a slightly off kilter piece in Die Welt about where the battle of Teutoburg Forest took place and Wolfgang Lippek’s theory that the site still has to be discovered.

And a short DDP piece where Joseph Rottmann, head of Varusschlacht im Osnabrücker Land GmbH, talks about the "iron curtain" that didn't exist between Germany and Rome after AD9.

Comments

[Bill H]

Hi, Adrian. Thanks so much for this post. Please forgive an amateur's curiosity, and I hope this isn't a trivial question, but I've been wondering about this for a couple of years.

Has there been any serious consideration given by Battle of Teutoburg scholars to the idea that Varus' destroyed Legions were below full strength from having sent detachments to the Illyrian War?

I'm thinking of Suetonius 3.16.1 and Velleius 2.113 - where Suetonius' extra five Legions make sense if his records showed that five of Germany's seven Legions were represented in name by one to three cohorts each (of the 70 cohorts that Velleius mentioned).

Thanks in advance for your reply. More than that, thanks for blogging. And Happy New Year.

[adrianmurdoch]

Thanks for the post. It is unlikely that the legions from Germany would have been below strength because of the Illyrian War. The three involved in Teutoburg had been stationed there for years.

[Gabriele]

Well, after the overly popularisitic articles on the Kalefeld find in Die Welt, I'm not surprised to see they do the same thing with the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.

I'll keep a lookout for FAZ articles; I hope they will do a better job.

[Bill H]

Thanks so much, Adrian. I'm sure you're probably right, and I don't mean to belabor the question, but I'm curious for another reason. What I want to know is, has my suggestion been made at all, in the scholarship? Or am I clear to understand that actually no one has ever tried to use Suetonius, even for a paragraph's consideration, to give another possible factor explaining Varus' defeat? (I'll tip my hand if you peak over here.)

Thanks again for your patience and grace with my inquiry.

[adrianmurdoch]

Suetonius is famously not always the most reliable source. To explain in more detail, the three legions had been posted to Germany to do a specific job in the front line. It is incredibly unlikely that they would have been moved elsewhere. There is no literary or archaeological evidence to suggest that they were anywhere other than Germany.

There is a broader question to be asked about what do you mean about "full strength".

Velleius Paterculus states that “three legions, the same number of divisions of cavalry and six cohorts” were involved in Teutoburg. At face value that would give a figure of around 18,000 legionaries, around 900 cavalry and a further 3,600 allied auxiliaries. That would account for the figure of 22,500 men which is commonly bandied about.

But it is extremely unlikely that all, if any, of the battalions were fighting at full strength. The disparity between the paper strength and the actual strength of a unit was huge. Only around 35% of a legion were on active service.

[Bill H]

Thanks so much for that fascinating extra info, Adrian. If the disparity was really that high, it certainly makes a much more substantial apology for Varus than my stretching to cite one reinterpreted figure of [especially] Suetonius. So the more appealing solution, I take it, may be what explains the complete absence (at least, to your knowledge?) of considerations about Suet.3.16.1.

The bigger curiosity to me, comparing Velleius to Velleius, is why three German Legions have six cohorts while ten Illyrian Legions had 70? An argument could be made for my suggestion even without the Suetonius. But I'm just wondering now, and still honestly glad to know it's not necessary.

Again, thank you ever so much for responding so thoroughly to my thoughts. It's been a pleasure.