Arminius
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- For the Protestant theologian, see Jacobus Arminius.
Arminius (also Hermann, Armin, 18 BC/17 BC - 21 AD) was a chieftain of the Cherusci who defeated a Roman army in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. His tribal coalition against the Empire successfully blocked the efforts Iulius Caesarius Claudianus Germanicus, nephew of Emperor Tiberius, to reconquer the Germanic territories east of the Rhine, although there is debate among historians about the outcome of several inconclusive battles (Tacitus, Annals 2.22, Suetonius, Caligula 1.4). And although Arminius was ultimately unsuccessful in forging unity among the Germanic tribes, his upset victory had a far-reaching effect on the subsequent history of both the ancient Germans, of the Roman Empire, and ultimately, of Europe.
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[edit] Biography
Born in 18 or 17 BC as son of the Cheruscan war chief Segimerus, Arminius was trained as a Roman military commander and attained Roman citizenship and the status of equestrian (petty noble) before returning to Germania and driving the Romans out.
Arminius is probably a Latinized variant of the Germanic name Irmin meaning "great" (cf. Herminones). The name "Hermann" (meaning "army man" or "warrior") came into use as the German equivalent of Arminius in the Reformation period, apparently through the efforts of religious reformer Martin Luther who wanted to use an ancient and heroic figure as a symbol of the Germanic peoples' fight against Rome.[citation needed]
[edit] Battle at the Teutoburg Forest
Around the year 4 A.D., Arminius assumed command of a Cheruscan detachment of Roman auxiliary forces, probably fighting in the Pannonian wars on the Balkan peninsula. He returned to northern Germania in the 7/8 A.D., where the Roman Empire had established secure control of the territories just east of the Rhine, along the Lippe and Main rivers, and now sought to extend its hegemony eastward towards the Weser and Elbe rivers, under Publius Quinctilius Varus, a high-ranking administrative official appointed by Augustus as governor. Arminius soon began plotting to unite various German tribes and to thwart Roman efforts to incorporate their territories into the empire.
In the fall of 9, in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, Arminius — then twenty-five years old — and his alliance of Germanic tribes (Cherusci, Marsi, Chatti and Bructeri) ambushed and annihilated a Roman army (comprising the 17th, 18th and 19th legions as well as three cavalry detachments and six cohorts of auxiliaries) totalling around 20,000 men commanded by Varus. Recent archaeological finds suggest that the long-debated precise location of the three-day battle is almost certainly near Kalkriese Hill, about 20 km north of Osnabrück. When defeat was certain, Varus committed suicide by falling upon his sword.
[edit] The Attempted Roman Reconquest
After his victory, Arminius tried for several years to bring about a more permanent union of the northern Germanic tribes so as to resist the inevitable Imperial counter-offensive. After the Teutoburg Forest disaster, other Germanic tribes did become more openly hostile to Rome, although the most powerful Germanic ruler, King Marbod of the Marcomanni, in Bohemia, remained neutral, although Arminius sent him the head of Varus (Velleius II 119,5; he declined the present and sent it on to Rome for burial). Also, most of the coastal tribes were successfully wooed by the Romans. Still, Arminius succeeded in forging a solid block of anti-Roman tribes in what is now west-central Germany and the eastern Netherlands.
Between 11 AD and 13 AD, the Romans under Tiberius, then heir apparent, made initial incursions along the Ruhr, Lahn and Ems rivers, reestablishing some bases. In September 14 AD, Tiberius became emperor and his nephew Germanicus took over the huge army on the Rhine, immediately launching a successful assault. The next spring, he launched a two-pronged invasion up the Ruhr and Lahn, the main success of which was the capture of Arminius's wife, Thusnelda. She was taken to Rome and displayed in Germanicus' victory parade in May, 17; she never saw her homeland again and is not mentioned again by Tacitus, who reported these events. The son she bore Arminius while in captivity, Thumelicus, was trained by the Romans as a gladiator in Ravenna and probably died in the arena.
That was followed by another two-pronged attack with an army of as many as 100,000 troops that cut Arminius's forces in half along the Ems river, and then swept eastward. However, Arminius had launched an emotional appeal to the tribes to fight back against an invader whose only success was, he claimed, in making war on women (i.e., his wife), and had managed to collect such a huge force that he was able to inflict severe defeats on the huge Roman army.
After securing the surrounding territory, Germanicus visited the Teutoburg Forest battlefield and buried the remains of the dead soldiers, building a monumental grave tumulus which indicated that he was in fact planning to hold onto that ground (Tacitus says it was later destroyed by the Germans and that Germanicus decided against rebuilding it -- i.e., he was no longer able to do so). He then launched a swift attack on Arminius, who lured him into a trap and succeeded in ambushing and largely wiping out his cavalry and his auxiliary units. Germanicus beat a hasty retreat northward up the Ems, sending half his army southward to restore a key causeway -- another indication that the Romans planned to reconquer the area and thus wanted to restore its infrastructure. Arminius surrounded this force, led by Caecina, destroyed the repaired causeway, and drove the Romans in confused retreat through a swampy area. But in a nighttime council of the army, Arminius' uncle Inguiomer called for an assault on the Roman camp - and was supported by the warriors, against the urging of Arminius, who wanted to attack them again, when once they tried to escape. The assault failed, with heavy Germanic losses, and the surviving Romans escaped across the Rhine.
In 16 AD, Germanicus again invaded Germany, this time from the north. Three major battles are reported in Tacitus account, the first being the Battle of the Weser River, where Arminius last saw his brother Flavus, who was fighting with the Romans. In a shouting-match across the river, probably around the modern city of Minden, Arminius called on his brother to return to his homeland, and Flavus made an opposite appeal, asking Arminius to make peace with a stern but forgiving Roman Empire, which was, he claimed, treating his captured wife and newborn son well. Neither convinced the other, and in the ensuing battle the Romans were able to cross the river, but with heavy losses.
The next battle took place at Idistaviso, further up the Weser, probably around Rinteln. Both sides suffered heavy casualties. and Arminius himself was wounded, but the Romans were unable to secure a strategic advantage, and had to abandon their plan to drive into the Cheruscan heartland, around Detmold. Arminius escaped by smearing his face with blood, so that he would not be recognised. The final battle took place much further down the Weser, to the north, at the Angrivarian Wall, near Steinhude Lake. Here, again, both sides suffered heavy loss, but Germanicus was unable once again to wipe out the Germanic forces, and his own losses must have been very severe by this time, for, although it was the height of summer, he once again beat a hasty retreat and completely abandoned all conquered territory. And as in the previous year, his withdrawal route up the Ems river resulted in a catastrophe, as a ferocious storm scattered his fleet. Although he ended the year by launching some punitive operations, and also managed to recover 2 of the 3 legionary eagles lost in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, Emperor Tiberius denied his request to launch a futher campaign the following year, realizing that any such effort would only invite further disaster. Instead, he accorded Germanicus the honor of a triumph, a victory march in which captives -- including Thusnelda -- and loot were paraded through Rome, and reassigned him to Syria. This sparked Tacitus' wry remark that the Germans were more often "triumphed" in Rome than defeated in Germany. The third eagle was recovered later under Emperor Claudius (Cassius Dio, Roman History 60.8)
[edit] Inter-Tribal Conflicts and Death
Thereafter, war broke out between Arminius and Marbod, king of the Marcomanni (see above). The war ended with Marbod's retreat, but Arminius did not succeed in breaking into the "natural fortification" that Bohemia is, and the war ended in stalemate. Arminius also faced serious difficulties at home from the family of his wife and other pro-Roman leaders.
In 19 A.D., his formidable opponent Germanicus was murdered by opponents in Rome; Arminius suffered a similar fate two years later, at the hands of opponents within his own tribe and also of the Chatti (Hessians), who felt he was becoming too powerful. Tiberius had purportedly refused an offer from a Chatti nobleman to assassinate Arminius, declaring that Rome did not employ such dishonorable methods. Whether that statement conformed with or was merely a cover for what the Romans in fact did will never be known.
[edit] Legacy
[edit] Rome
In the accounts of his Roman enemies he is highly respected for his military leadership skills and as a defender of the liberty of his people. Based on these records, the story of Arminius was revived in the sixteenth century with the recovery of the histories of Tacitus by German humanists, who wrote in his Annales II, 88:
- Arminius liberator haud dubie Germaniae et qui non primordia populi romani, sicut alii reges ducesque, sed florentissimum imperium lacessieret: proeliis ambiguus, bello non victus. (Arminius, without doubt Germania's liberator, who challenged the Roman people not in its beginnings like other kings and leaders, but in the peak of its empire; in battles with changing success, undefeated in the war.)
Arminius was not the sole reason for Rome's change of policy towards Germania. Augustus sought a secure boundary to protect Gaul, and found this in the Rhine river instead of the Elbe (Cornell and Matthews, Atlas of the Roman World 80). The resources for the conquest of Germany may have been lacking after the great Roman civil wars in the Late Republic and loss of three legions in the Teutoberg Forest, but they were not however lacking later on (Goldsworthy, Roman Warfare 122). That indicates -- and archeological evidence supports this -- that Arminius' achievements together with the influence of Rome, which continued peacefully during the centuries that followed, also sparked a development within the Germanic tribes that made it possible for them to withstand further Roman aggression.
Politics also played a factor; the Emperors could rarely entrust a large army to a potential rival. Augustus could rely upon a plentiful supply of family members to wage his wars; Drusus, Augustus' step son, who himself campaigned successfuly against Germanic tribes, is a good example (Cassius Dio, Roman History 54.32). For a period after the Marian reforms (the professionalization of the legions) German tribesmen were beaten by the legions with almost monotonous regularity: Marius' victory at Aquae Sextiae, Caesar's victory over Ariovistus, and Tiberius' and Drusus' campaigns (Tacitus, Germania 37). Arminius' victories changed all that. Henceforth, Rome would try to maintain security by manipulating German tribal rivalries, which cost money, but was cheaper than the disastrous military campaigns of Varus and Germanicus. The two major Germanic raw-material exports, lead and amber, were, as recent finds indicate, traded peacefully -- which may have been less profitable to Rome than obtaining them through outright enslavement and plunder, but that extra profit was apparently not enough to justify the risk of battle against German Tribes, sometimes in difficult terrain.
[edit] Germanic Sagas
The story of Arminius and his victory may have lived on in Germanic sagas, in the form of the dragon slayer Siegfried of the Nibelungenlied (who is called Sigurd in the Scandinavian tradition). An Icelandic account states that Sigurd "slew the dragon" in the Gnitterheide -- today a suburb of the city of Bad Salzuflen, located at a strategic site on the Werre river which could very well have been the point of departure of Varus's legions on their way to their doom in the Teutoburg Forest.
[edit] Martin Luther
In Germany, he was rechristened "Hermann" by Martin Luther, and he became an emblem of the revival of German patriotism fueled by the wars of Napoleon in the 19th century.
Another theory regarding Arminius' Latin name is that it is based on the Latin word armenium a vivid blue, ultramarine pigment made from a stone. Thus, Arminius would have been called "blue eyes," and his brother Flavus "blondie" -- as references to the stereotype physical features which the Romans assigned to their Germanic neighbors.[1] In that case, the theory goes, "Arminius" does not necessarily have anything to do with the word and God-name "irmin", and his Germanic name could thus have been anything -- Siegfried, for instance. Proponents of that theory argue that his father, too, (Segimerus, the modern form of which is "Siegmar") also bore a name with the stem "sieg," or "victorious".
[edit] Germanic Nationalism
In 1808, Heinrich von Kleist's published but unperformed play Die Hermannsschlacht, unperformable after Napoleon's victory at Wagram, aroused anti-Napoleonic German sentiment and pride among its readers.
The play has been revived repeatedly at moments propitious for raw expressions of National Romanticism and was especially popular during the Third Reich.[2]
In 1839, construction was started on a massive statue of Arminius, known as the "Hermannsdenkmal", on a hill near Detmold in the Teutoburg Forest; it was completed and dedicated during the early years of the Second German Empire in the wake of the German victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. The monument has been a major tourist attraction ever since, as has "Herman the German", a similar statue erected in the United States. The German Bundesliga football-club DSC Arminia Bielefeld is also named after Arminius.
The Order of the Sons of Hermann, named for Hermann the “Cherusker”, had its origins as a mutual protection society for the protection of German immigrants in New York City during the 1840s. The order promoted the love of German language and preservation of German traditions and customs. Also provided for members was low cost insurance. The order flourished in many U.S. communities where German immigrants settled but was in decline by late 20th century probably owing to thorough acculturation of the immigrants’ progeny.
[edit] Modern popular culture
In The Oppermanns by Leon Feuchtwanger, a novel describing the rise of the Nazis to power, a major theme is the struggle between a liberal, half-Jewish pupil and a Nazi teacher - over the student's paper on Arminius which the teacher considers "unpatriotic" and "an insult to German nationalism".
[edit] References
- ^ Arminius: The Original Siegfried. Retrieved on 2006-09-06.
- ^ Reeve, William C. (2004). "Die Hermannsschlacht". The Literary Encyclopedia. The Literary Dictionary Company. Retrieved on 2006-09-06.
[edit] Further reading
- Benario, Herbert W. "Arminius into Hermann: History into Legend", Greece & Rome, Vol. 51, Issue 1 (2004), pp. 83–94.
[edit] External links
- Terry Jones' Barbarians - The Savage Goths (Google Video) - includes a portion on Arminius
