'Give me back my legions!'
Rome's most humiliating defeat -- and a lesson for America
IN THE LATE summer of 9 AD, during the 36th year of the reign of the emperor Augustus, a Roman commander by the name of Publius Quinctilius Varus led three Roman legions through the forests of Germany on what he believed would be little more than a routine expedition. In truth, he was heading toward what would come to be called the battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
By steady accretion the power of Rome had advanced to the Rhine and the Danube, and the next logical step was to incorporate the lands that lay beyond: that is, "free Germany," what is today the German heartland, all the way east to the Elbe. Roman advance encampments had already been planted. Roads had been cut. Relations with some of the German tribes appeared to be stable. Varus was chosen by Augustus to be Germania's first governor.
No one had suggested to Varus that he would, in effect, be greeted with flowers, but he shared the conviction that the Germans were manageable and that the Roman occupation of this prospective new province was, in effect, a done deal. The moment for nation-building was at hand.
"The Germans," writes Velleius Paterculus, a contemporary historian, "a race combining maximum ferocity with supreme guile (and being born liars besides), fawned upon Varus, making much of their lawsuits, marveling at his jurisprudence and flattering him regarding his civilizing mission."
As for Varus himself, Velleius tells us, "When given the German command, he went out with the quaint preconception that here was a subhuman people which would somehow prove responsive to Roman law....He therefore breezed in -- right into the heart of Germany -- as if on a picnic."
What followed was a lesson in what today would be called asymmetric warfare -- and an event that would haunt the Roman mind for generations.
On its mental map Rome pictured itself as all-important, all-knowing, all-powerful. The inevitable corollary to this perspective was a view of outsiders as lesser beings: often unfathomable, certainly inferior, and in any event rarely worth the bother of trying to understand. Such an outlook is typical of empires. And for Rome, much of the time, an oblivious frame of mind did not really matter: Roman power was overwhelming, and the fear it instilled could prove as effective as actual force.
Comparisons of America and Rome have become a commonplace of the Bush-Cheney years, and in at least one regard -- America's view of its power relative to that of any foe -- the analogy appears to be apt. America has been criticized for being oblivious to the rest of the world, and as was the case with Rome, sometimes obliviousness doesn't matter. But mostly -- and increasingly -- it matters a great deal.
Not that we seem to care. Survey after survey reveals rudimentary geographic knowledge on the part of American students. Four years into the Iraq war, we still don't have anything close to the number of Arabic translators we should have had when the president decided to invade. Newspapers are pulling reporters from overseas, and not just from Timor and Timbuktu: this summer, the last permanent US newspaper bureau in Canada will be shut down.
And yet, the ways people beyond our borders think and behave, and respond to America's thinking and behavior, are variables that have to be taken into account -- and now more than ever. They are as important as "objective" factors like the strength of an economy or the size of an army. Smugness and indifference can prove catastrophic.
They certainly did for Varus, in the course of four terrible days 2,000 years ago.
P. Quinctilius Varus was a man typical of his class and his time. He was a lawyer, connected by marriage to the imperial family, and he had served as governor of the provinces of Africa and Syria, where he seems to have ably used his office to enrich himself. He was not of a temperament to deal patiently with those he regarded as troublemakers or inferiors. Once, in Syria, he ordered the crucifixion of 2,000 insurgents to quell an outbreak of unrest. (It worked.) Assessments of his competence are mixed. Velleius Paterculus, who knew and disliked him, described Varus as "somewhat ponderous both in mind and body."
But when he was appointed to be the governor of Germania, no one anticipated that disaster lay ahead. Instead, as the summer of 9 AD neared its end, Varus led his force -- some 15,000 legionaries, and an equal number of camp followers -- from the north of Germany toward winter bases on the Rhine, secure in a presumption of total military superiority.
There was just one small matter to attend to. Varus had been told by Arminius, a prince of the Cherusci, about an uprising among one of the German tribes, and he resolved to make a detour and put it down. Another German chieftain warned Varus not to trust Arminius. Varus paid no heed. Had not Arminius served bravely with Rome? Even been made a citizen and given honors?
At the time, much of Germany was densely covered with woodland, and clearings were as likely to be sodden bog as dry land. The opening scene of "Gladiator," with its muddy fortifications and gnarly trees, vividly captures this unfriendly environment -- so different from the open countryside and broad vistas that the Romans knew from the Mediterranean.
Arminius led Varus deep into unknown territory. "The Romans were having a hard time of it, felling trees, building roads, and bridging places that required it," the historian Cassius Dio writes. "They had with them many wagons and many beasts of burden as if in a time of peace; moreover, not a few women and children and a large retinue of servants were following them."
Military planners today speak of a "teeth-to-tail" ratio -- the ratio of fighting personnel to ancillary support personnel. The American military has a very long tail, and the Roman military did too -- a significant encumbrance in a guerrilla war or an insurgency.
The Roman lines thinned out along the narrow trackways, stretching for miles and miles. Fate proved unkind: violent rains set in, turning fields into marsh and marsh into swamp. "While the Romans were in such difficulties," Cassius Dio goes on, "the barbarians suddenly surrounded them on all sides."
For three days Varus and his legions held out, defending themselves against the barbarian attacks while trying to retreat toward the nearest Roman base, more than 50 miles away.
There is a computer game called "Rome: Total War," in which a player can theoretically play the role of Varus and win. The real Varus could not. On the fourth day, the Romans were finally overrun. Those who were not killed immediately were killed eventually, after torture. Some 30,000 people died in all. Before the end, P. Quinctilius Varus fell on his sword, as would have been expected of any noble Roman in the face of such dishonor.
It took weeks for news of the Teutoburg disaster to reach Rome. The impact is hard to overstate. Imagine a combination of Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and Little Bighorn. In a single battle three entire legions -- the XVII, the XVIII, and the XIX, representing some 10 percent of Rome's invincible military -- had been wiped out. The Romans could never bring themselves to use those legionary numbers again.
It was all the worse for coming at a moment saturated with emotions of omnipotence: Rome had been about to hold a formal triumph to celebrate a series of military victories in the northern Balkans by Tiberius, the adopted son and presumptive heir of Augustus. It was a Mission Accomplished moment. Instead came word of the slaughter in Germany. Before long Augustus would also receive the head of Varus, severed by the Germans and forwarded through an intermediary for delivery into his hands.
Fear spread through Rome. Were the Germans on the march? Would the defeat embolden other enemies? Was the capital itself unsafe? Public paranoia was inflamed by ominous omens -- the red and orange "threat level" warnings of their time. The Temple of Mars had been struck by lightning! Locusts had flown into Rome and been devoured by swallows! For decades German auxiliaries had served as loyal soldiers in Rome's armies. Now, suddenly, they were viewed with suspicion. Augustus sent troops into neighborhoods of Rome where German immigrants lived. He gave emergency powers to governors in far-flung provinces. He compelled free citizens to join a new armed force, which he sent north to the Rhine.
What conclusions did the Romans draw from their defeat? It's a hoary truism that people don't learn the lessons they most urgently ought to. Some Romans blamed sheer incompetence, some the bad weather, some a supernatural judgment. No one at the time hinted at the true explanation, the strategic premise of the disaster, which was simply this: The Roman disinclination either to understand the mind or credit the capabilities of people unlike themselves.
"Underestimation of space was matched by the under-rating of people," one historian concludes. Another writes, "The Romans simply could not believe that their military forces had been outfought by the northern barbarians." Even if evidence had been presented, in advance, of barbarian precocity, he goes on, "Augustus and other Roman officials would not have been receptive."
According to Suetonius, after receiving news of the battle Augustus could be heard hitting his head against a door and lamenting aloud, "Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!"
Those words -- "give me back my legions" -- have echoed hauntingly down the centuries. They have particular force today as America breaks its army in Iraq, a predicament brought on in part by habits of mind with long antecedents -- an Augustan pedigree.
When American forces captured Iraq's capital, in April of 2003, they established their headquarters within a heavily fortified precinct of central Baghdad that came to be called the Green Zone. The US administration took up its work under the blue dome of Saddam Hussein's former Republican Palace. L. Paul Bremer, an American diplomat, was brought in to administer "free Iraq" from inside this Praetorium, and whatever his official title ("administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority") he was routinely referred to in the press as the American "proconsul," a term that harked back to ancient Rome.
The premise of the Green Zone seemed to be that Iraq was a tabula rasa on which Washington's operating procedures -- its "civilizing mission," as Velleius Paterculus might have put it -- could easily be inscribed. Behind the Green Zone's walls the degree of isolation from Iraq was felt by everyone but gave pause to few. Virtually no one spoke any Arabic. Oblivious of culture or history, bureaucrats and civilian experts were brought in to create a homunculus version of American governance for the Iraqis to adopt as their own. One official devoted his tour of duty in the Republican Palace to implementing a new traffic code for the entire nation of Iraq, taking as his model the traffic code of the state of Maryland.
"What struck me most about the palace was the completely self-referential character of it," one American diplomat later recalled. "It was all about us, not about them. People would walk around the palace with a mixture of venal and idealistic motives. None of them knew Iraq."
All about us, not about them: the great imperial cliche. "Spartacus" may not be a historically fastidious movie, to put it mildly, but in one respect it does accurately capture the ancient Roman state of mind. Right after the campy bath scene, in which Laurence Olivier's Crassus is washed by the slave boy Tony Curtis, Olivier takes Curtis out to the balcony and shows him the legions passing by.
"There, boy, is Rome," Crassus intones. "There is the might, the majesty, the terror of Rome. There is the power that bestrides the world like a colossus. No man can withstand Rome, no nation can withstand her -- how much less a boy?" The historical Crassus would one day lose an army in the desert sands.
Coming upon those words from the movie not long ago, it was hard not to recall a remark made by a Bush administration official to the reporter Ron Suskind: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Cullen Murphy is the editor at large of Vanity Fair, and for many years was the managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His essay here is adapted from "Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America" (Houghton Mifflin). 