Rising of the Batavian auxiliaries.
But the tone of feeling of the Germanic districts reckoned as belonging to Gaul—in the modern Netherlands—of the Batavi, the Cannenefates, the Frisians, whose distinctive position has already been dwelt on, had a somewhat greater importance; and it happened that, on the one hand, these very tribes had been exasperated to the utmost, and on the other, that their contingents were accidentally to be found in Gaul. The bulk of the Batavian troops, 8000 men, assigned to the 14th legion, had for a considerable time a place along with the latter in the army of the upper Rhine, and had then under Claudius, on occasion of the occupying of Britain, gone to that island, where this corps shortly before had, by its incomparable valour, gained the decisive battle under Paullinus for the Romans; from this day onward it occupied indisputably the first place among all the divisions of the Roman army. When it was recalled on account of this very distinction by Nero, in order to go off with him to the war in the East, the revolution breaking out in Gaul had brought about a quarrel between the legion and its auxiliary troops; the former, faithfully devoted to Nero, hastened to Italy; the Batavi, on the other hand, refused to follow.
Civilis.
Perhaps this was connected with the fact that two of their most noted officers, the brothers Paulus and Civilis, had, without any reason and without respect to many years of faithful service and honourable wounds, been shortly before put on trial as suspected of high treason, and the former executed, the latter placed in captivity. After the downfall of Nero, to which the revolt of the Batavian cohorts had materially contributed, Galba released Civilis and sent the Batavians back to their old headquarters in Britain. While they, on the march thither, were encamped among the Lingones (Langres), the legions of the Rhine revolted from Galba and proclaimed Vitellius emperor. The Batavi, after considerable hesitation, ultimately joined the movement; Vitellius did not forgive them for this hesitation, but did not venture directly to call to account the leader of the powerful corps.
Progress of the movement.
Thus the Batavians had marched with the legions of lower Germany to Italy and had fought with their usual valour in the battle of Betriacum for Vitellius, while their old legionary comrades confronted them in the army of Otho. But the arrogance of the Germans exasperated their Roman comrades in victory, however much these acknowledged their valour in battle; the very generals in command did not trust them, and even made an attempt to divide by detaching them—a course, which, in this war, where the soldiers commanded and the generals obeyed, was not capable of being carried out, and had almost cost the general his life. After the victory they were commissioned to accompany their hostile comrades of the 14th legion to Britain; but when matters came to a skirmish between the two at Turin, the latter alone went to Britain, and the Batavians to Germany. Meanwhile Vespasian had been proclaimed emperor in the East, and, while in consequence of this Vitellius gave to the Batavian cohorts marching orders for Italy as well as ordered new comprehensive levies among the Batavi, commissioners of Vespasian opened communications with the Batavian officers to hinder this departure, and to provoke in Germany itself a rising which should detain the troops there. Civilis entered into the suggestion. He resorted to his home, and gained easily the assent of his own people as well as the neighbouring Cannenefates and Frisians. The insurrection broke out among the former; the camps of the two cohorts in the neighbourhood were surprised and the Roman posts seized; the Roman recruits fought ill; soon Civilis with his cohort—which he had caused to follow, ostensibly to employ it against the insurgents—threw himself openly into the movement, along with the three Germanic cantons renounced allegiance to Vitellius, and summoned the other Batavians and Cannenefates, who just then were breaking up from Mentz for the march to Italy, to join him.
Its character.
All this was more a soldiers’ rising than an insurrection of the province, or even a Germanic war. If at that time the Rhine legions were fighting with those of the Danube, and further with these and the army of the Euphrates, it was but in keeping that the soldiers of the second class, and above all their most distinguished troop, the Batavian, should enter independently into this divisional warfare. Any one who compares this movement among the cohorts of the Batavians and the Germans on the left of the Rhine with the insurrection of those on the right bank of the Rhine under Augustus, may not overlook the fact, that in the later rising the alae and cohorts took up the part of the general levy of the Cherusci; and, if the perfidious officer of Varus released his nation from the Roman rule, the Batavian leader acted in the commission of Vespasian; in fact, perhaps, on the secret directions of the governor of his province privately inclined towards Vespasian, and the rising in the first instance was directed simply against Vitellius. It is true that the position of things was such that this soldiers’ revolt might change itself at any moment into a German war of the most dangerous kind. The same Roman troops who covered the Rhine against the Germans of the right bank were, in consequence of the corps–warfare, placed in an attitude of hostility to the Germans on the left bank; the parts were of such a nature, that it seemed almost easier to exchange them than to carry them out. Civilis himself may possibly have left it to depend on the sequel, whether the movement would end in a change of emperor or in the expulsion of the Romans from Gaul by the Germans.
State of the armies on the Rhine.
The command of the two armies on the Rhine was held at this time, after the governor of lower Germany had been made emperor, by his former colleague in upper Germany, Hordeonius Flaccus, a gouty man advanced in years, without energy and without authority, either, moreover, in fact secretly holding to Vespasian, or at any rate very much suspected of such faithlessness by the legions, who zealously adhered to the emperor of their own making. It is characteristic of him and of his position that, to clear himself of the suspicion of treason, he gave orders that the government despatches on arrival should be sent unopened to the eagle–bearers of the legions, and these should read them in the first instance to the soldiers, before they forwarded them to their address. Of the four legions of the lower army which had primarily to do with the insurgents two, the 5th and the 15th, were stationed under the legate Munius Lupercus in the headquarters at Vetera; the 16th, under Numisius Rufus, in Novaesium (Neuss); the 1st, under Herennius Gallus, in Bonna (Bonn). Of the upper army, which then numbered only three legions,69 one, the 21st, remained in its stated quarters Vindonissa, aloof from these events, if it had not rather been drawn off wholly to Italy; the two others, the 4th Macedonian and the 22d, were stationed at the headquarters Mentz, where Flaccus also was present; and in point of fact, his able legate Dillius Vocula exercised the chief command. The legions had throughout only half of their full complement, and most of the soldiers were half–invalids or recruits.
First conflicts.
Civilis, at the head of a small number of regular troops, but of the collective levy of the Batavi, Cannenefates, and Frisians, advanced from his home to the attack. In the first instance, on the Rhine he met with remnants of the Roman garrisons driven from the northern cantons and a division of the Roman Rhenish fleet; when he attacked them, not merely did the ships’ crews, consisting in great part of Batavians, go over to him, but also a cohort of the Tungri—it was the first revolt of a Gallic division; such Italian soldiers as were present were slain or taken prisoners. This success brought at length the Germans on the right of the Rhine into the movement.