Book 2, letter 16
Part 1 of 3
To Tacitus: A ghost Story: from Teutoburg to Vietnam
11th C transcript of Tacitus' Annals
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Dear Tacitus,
When I started
reading your book, The Annals, I didn't know much about you,
or the era you write about. I've spent some months reading about the
Roman Republic, learning the stories of senators and consuls and
studying the downfall of the quasi-democratic system that saw Julius
Caesar and Cicero assassinated.
But you, Tacitus,
aren't from that era, you lived about a hundred years after Julius
Caesar, and you wrote about the early Emperors, Octavius (who changed
his name to Augustus) and Tiberius and a lot more, but I've only read books
one and two of your Annals so I don't know the rest of the
story yet, but I thought I would write to you about my impressions so
far.
But first, you
knew Emperor Nero didn't you? His name has echoed through the
centuries to be a synonym for madness and cruelty. “Nero fiddles
while Rome burns” is a common phrase meant to represent the worst
kinds of managerial incompetence. Even those from our era who have
never heard of you, have heard of Nero. But twenty years or so after
Nero came Domitian, and though his name is less recognised, you
remember his tyranny thus:
“Even Nero
turned his eyes away, and did not gaze upon the atrocities which he
ordered; with Domitian it was the chief part of our miseries to see
and to be seen, to know that our sighs were being recorded.”
When Domitian was
assassinated in 96CE, you expressed the relief felt by everyone, but
add that many who still lived were no more than “survivors of
themselves”. You say further that:
“We
witnessed the extreme of servitude when the informer robbed us of the
interchange of speech and hearing. We should have lost memory as
well as voice, had it been as easy to forget as to keep silence.”
I've spent a bit
of time criticising Cicero for loving the Republic, ruled though it was by tyrants and butchers, but you lived through the nightmare
that Cicero worked so hard, and failed to avert, and in reading your
accounts of the despotism of later Emperors, the love that Cicero
held for the old forms of oligarchy suddenly seem so much more
defensible.
But I'm getting
ahead of myself, I wanted to write to you today about the years 9CE
to 19CE
It's a ghost
story, and its petty famous in certain circles.
Imagine tens of
thousands of Roman centurions, wandering in the haunted forests of
Germany, fighting through the trees and
rivers and ravines and all the sorts of places that are very good for
guerilla soldiers, and not so good for Centurions. They were
fighting an enemy who had defeated the Romans many times before, and the
dark forest soil became littered with Roman dead.
But I don't want
to start there, lets back up to the story of Arminius.
Arminius
From what I
understand of his story, it goes like this. Arminius was a German,
of the Cherusci tribe. When he was a boy, the Romans came to his
village and demanded hostages as way to bind a treaty, and to keep
the tribes in servitude to Rome. This taking of hostages was a
common diplomatic practice, and has been for centuries with people
all over the globe. So, Arminius was taken from his family and sent
to Rome to be raised, where he was educated, trained and eventually,
through his displays of both martial prowess and commanding wisdom,
was put into a position of some authority in the Roman army. As a
fully grown man, he was then sent back to Germany to help subdue the
tribes there who were always rebelling and causing trouble. Arminius
made it back to his home village, he even met his father who had
given him up to the Romans, and for a time, it seemed that Arminius
would be the perfect deal maker between the Roman invaders, and the
German tribes.
Arminius though,
betrayed the Romans in spectacular fashion, and in 9CE he covertly
organised a massive German rebellion, eventually destroying utterly, three
Roman legions (about 15,000 men) commanded by a man named Varus.
Luring them into the dark and swampy Teutoburg forest, Arminius
managed to sever the Roman supply lines, ambush the Centurions with
savage efficiency, and eventually forced a battle ending in horrific slaughter and fire. Very few Romans escaped. The commander, Varus,
committed suicide.
Their bones were
left to soak in the mud.
Otto Albert Koch - The Battle of Teutoburg Forest (1909)
You wrote about
those bones, Tacitus, and it's those bones that I wanted to talk
about, but first I have talk about the Roman Commander who was sent
to avenge the dead.
Germanicus Julius
Caesar was the commander sent by Emperor Tiberius to avenge the death
of Varus. He was eventually successful (after a fashion) in
his wars to subdue the Germans, and though he died quite young, as a
result of a mysterious black magic curse, (or so the rumors go), his
achievements are still recorded with great pride by you, Tacitus.
During his campaign against Arminius, Germanicus found in the dark
Teutoburg Forest, the remains of those Roman legions of Varus, and
the two thousand years from then till now do not reduce the grim
sense of haunted terror I find in your descriptions of that day.
Germanicus Julius Caesar
From the Church
& Brodribb translation of
The Annals, published
in 1952.
Book One, section
61 & 62
“In the
centre of the field were the 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 trees. In the adjacent groves were the
barbarous altars on which they had immolated tribunes and first rank
centurions. Some survivors of the disaster who had escaped from the
battle or from captivity, described how this was the spot where the
officers fell, how yonder the eagles were captured, where Varus was
pierced by his first wound, where too by the stroke of his own
ill-starred hand he found for himself death. They pointed out too
the raised ground from which Arminius had harangued his army, the
number of gibbets for the captives, the pits for the living, and how
in his exaltation he insulted the standards and eagles.
And so the
Roman army now on the spot, six years after the disaster, in grief
and anger, began to bury the bones of the three legions, not a
soldier knowing whether he was interring the relics of a relative or
a stranger, but looking on all as kinsfolk and of their own blood,
while their wrath rose higher than ever against the foe. In raising
the barrow, Caesar (Germanicus) laid the first sod, rendering thus a
most welcome honour to the dead, and sharing also in the sorrow of
those present.”
The Suicide of Varus - Martin Disteli
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So
I've gotten to the bones of the story, Tacitus, but from here I'm
going to take you among the wandering ghosts of the Vietnam War.
We
humans are a peculiar species...
