What happened in the Teutoburg Forest?

Rome’s province in the making

For two decades Augustus’s stepsons, Drusus and then Tiberius, had campaigned between the Rhine and the Elbe. By AD 9 Rome treated the land as a province in the making. Archaeologists have found one of its new towns at Waldgirmes, in Hesse, laid out with a forum and once graced by a gilded bronze statue of a horseman, probably Augustus himself. The governor, Varus, had come from Syria. Velleius Paterculus, who had served in Germany, says Varus went to rich Syria a poor man and came away rich, leaving Syria poor, and that he ran the Germans like a peaceful people, with law courts and taxes.

The trap

Varus trusted Arminius. The young prince of the Cherusci had led German troops in Rome’s service, held Roman citizenship and the rank of a knight, and dined at the governor’s table. Another Cherusci chief, Segestes, warned Varus at a banquet, Tacitus says, and urged him to put Arminius in chains. Varus did not listen. In September, by the usual reckoning, he set out with three legions, the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth, three cavalry units and six auxiliary cohorts, along with wagons, women, children and servants. Arminius had fed him news of a distant revolt, and the column turned aside to deal with it.

Cassius Dio describes what followed. Rain and wind, slippery mud, soldiers felling trees to open a road, a column strung out for miles in thick forest. The Germans struck from the woods, pulled back and struck again, for three or four days. At last, cornered, Varus and his senior officers killed themselves rather than be taken alive. Modern estimates put the soldiers lost at 15,000 to 20,000. Captured tribunes and centurions, Tacitus says, were sacrificed at German altars.

What Kalkriese found

For centuries nobody knew where it happened. Tacitus names the place saltus Teutoburgiensis, the Teutoburg pass or forest, and in 1616 a geographer gave the name to a range of hills near Detmold. Then in 1987 a British army officer, Tony Clunn, went prospecting with a metal detector at Kalkriese, north of Osnabrück, and turned up Roman silver coins, then lead sling shot. Digs since then have uncovered thousands of pieces of Roman kit along a narrow strip between a hill and a great bog, and the remains of a long turf wall along the hillside, usually read as a German rampart for the ambush. The coins stop around the time of Varus. Among the finds is an iron face mask from a cavalryman’s helmet, once covered in silver, now in the museum on the site. Most scholars accept Kalkriese as at least one stage of the battle.

What Rome did next

Suetonius says Augustus let his hair and beard grow for months, beat his head against a door crying “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”, and kept the day each year as one of mourning. The three legion numbers were never used again. Arminius sent Varus’s head to another German king, Maroboduus, who passed it on to Rome for burial.

Rome hit back. From AD 14 to 16 Germanicus, Tiberius’s nephew and adopted son, led big armies across the Rhine. In AD 15 his men reached the battlefield, Tacitus writes, found whitened bones and skulls fixed to tree trunks, and buried the dead. Two of the three lost eagles came back in those campaigns, the third in AD 41. Then Tiberius called Germanicus home. Augustus had left advice to keep the empire within its limits, and the Rhine stayed the frontier.

Arminius was murdered by his own relatives around AD 21. Tacitus calls him, without doubt, the liberator of Germany. In 1875 Germans finished a giant copper statue of him, the Hermannsdenkmal, on a hilltop near Detmold, where the battle was then thought to have been.