It is one of the most chilling passages in Roman literature. Germanicus, the emperor Tiberius’s nephew, is leading reprisals in the deeply forested areas east of the Rhine, when he decides to visit the scene of the catastrophic defeat, six years before, of his fellow Roman, Quinctilius Varus. The historian Tacitus describes what Germanicus finds: the ghastly human wreckage of a supposedly unbeatable army, deep in the Teutoburg Forest. “On the open ground,” he writes, “were 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 trunks of trees.”
Survivors pointed out the spot where Varus had killed himself, and the place where the military standards had been flaunted by the victors. “A living Roman army,” writes Tacitus of Germanicus’s visit, “had come to bury the dead men’s bones. No one knew if the remains he was burying belonged to a stranger or a comrade.” Three whole legions, perhaps 15,000 men, had been slaughtered – as well as the slaves, women and children who would probably have been with them.
