As soon as Caesar begins to answer, an officer reports to him that enemy horsemen are approaching and hurling stones and arrows into the Roman legions. Caesar breaks off and rides back. But when the Teuton’s speech spreads through the camp, the Roman soldiers grow angry. Two days later Ariovistus proposes another meeting, adding menacingly to his requests for peace that he has irrevocably set this as the last day for reaching an agreement. Caesar sends two younger officers, one of whom once enjoyed Ariovistus’ hospitality. They barely arrive when they are taken and put in irons as spies.
Caesar prepares for battle, and the Teuton is disastrously beaten. According to Plutarch, 80,000 Teutons are supposed to have perished. To save himself, Ariovistus allowed his two wives and his sister to fall into enemy hands. He himself escaped across the Rhine in a boat and literally disappeared into obscurity. No one knows how the Teuton leader, who for twenty years had enjoyed the greatest fame among his people, ended his days.
This first document to show us a Teuton leader in speech and in action contains all the elements characterizing the type—protestations of innocence, threats, tactlessness and treachery. Caesar too spoke as a diplomat and turned things to his own account; but he dealt straightforwardly, offering terms not stones. By way of contrast, what did the Teuton say? Out of pure kindness, to help the weak, had he made the sacrifice of invading Gaul; he had mobilized only to keep from being encircled by his evil neighbors; foreign lands had been voluntarily ceded to him, but, on the other hand, his were the rights of a conqueror. Were he to kill Caesar, the most powerful Romans would be grateful to him—indeed, they had expressly requested him, the so-called barbarian, to do so. And during his speech he had his army move up, for it was he who had given orders to shoot. When the bluff did not work he grew conciliatory, but when the intermediaries arrived, he had them put in chains.
Done in the year 58 B.C. . . . Tomorrow it will be exactly two thousand years ago. Nothing has changed since then.
* Caesar: Bellum Gallicum, Book 1, Chapter 43.
2
FIFTY YEARS earlier Marius, Caesar’s uncle, had saved Rome from the Teutons. At that time all Italy had been seized with panic. These Romans, who had conquered the plains of the Po and who felt secure behind the snowcapped ramparts of the Alps, had been frightened out of their power-engendered security when reports suddenly reached them in the year 113 of a huge army of northern barbarians massed north of the Alps. Half-naked giants with the “hair of aged men”; hundreds of thousands of them, but not merely an army: they had crude tent wagons and trappings and harnessed horses—and all their womenfolk and children with them. They carried clubs and long swords; their shields were the height of a man; their front line was tied together with ropes, and when they broke loose they set up a fearsome howl, artificially reinforced by holding their shields close to their lips. And all the while the women from the massed wagon train would shout encouragement to them not to yield. They slaughtered all prisoners, and the old women—priestesses in gray linen—stabbed the garlanded victims, catching their blood in vessels and foretelling the future from their entrails.
These were the Cimbri and Teutones—the Roman equivalent of Cimbri, incidentally, was “Robbers”—who had left their homes in the North and East of Germany, roaming the country between the Vistula, the Oder and the Elbe, and finally advancing against the more civilized Celts. This was the “Cimbric Terror,” and centuries later, when other Teutonic tribes laid Italy waste, the term remained the expression of the fear in which slowly aging Rome held the wild tribes from the North.
Why did they come and why did they always move on again—to the Rhône, the Seine, the Po, the Ebro? Was it land they lacked in the North? Had not their forefathers lived happily there in their fashion? They came from the arid steppes of northern Germany, from the primeval forests of Thuringia—always from the Northern regions. It was not land they sought; it was better land—and who is to blame them! It was cold where they lived with their animal pelts, their oatmeal, their skimmed-milk cheese and their bitter beer. And when they heard the legends of lands beyond the mountains that were bathed in everlasting sunshine, where the flour was white and the wine sweet—was it not natural that they should feel impelled to wander southward? To live a better life they had to conquer; and in order to conquer, they trained themselves to be warriors. Perhaps it was their cold and barren country that originally made the Teutons the strongest of the warrior peoples; at any rate, it kept their warlike spirit at high pitch. Always there was the same urge for more fertile and sunny regions, and the farther the tribes advanced—all the way to North Africa—the happier they grew, the more dissolute, the weaker. The same urge that drew their forerunners and successors to Italy, and Gaul, attracted their descendants, the Prussians and other semi-Slavs, to France for two thousand years; for there, before them, lay the garden, and behind them, at home, lay the steppe and the forest.
A century after the Teutons were annihilated by the Romans in Italy, the Romans were annihilated by the Teutons in Germany. This battle of the Teutoburg Forest (9 A.D.) was an event in itself. Its circumstances reveal the German character at its earliest period to be precisely what it is today.
Augustus, inclined in all things to copy and complete the work of Caesar, had set himself the conquest of Germany. Step by step he sought to fortify the Roman Empire from Lake Geneva to the Black Sea. At the same time he drew to his court a number of youthful half-savages from the trackless northern forests, somewhat as Queen Victoria on occasion adorned herself with a Hindu maharajah. One of these princes, Hermann, or Arminius in the Latin version, belonged to the rulers of the Cheruscan tribe whose abode was west of the Elbe. In Rome he endeavored to learn what he could from his hosts, and when he later saw them again in his own homeland, he paid court to the Roman general and with the aid of his title as a Roman knight spied upon the enemy legions. Another Teuton prince, his own cousin Segestus, likewise a guest of the Romans, sought to betray him. This was the first clash between two Teuton spies who trusted each other less than the enemy.
In the end Arminius the Teuton, by means of wily treachery, lured the Romans into the forest primeval, where he had them led around in circles, only to annihilate them. But his cousin betrayed the liberator to the Romans. Thereupon one Teuton in revenge abducted the other’s daughter. Her father, in turn, kidnaped her from her husband, giving her to the Romans as a hostage. Arminius was embroiled in family strife and in the end murdered by his own kin. Segestus, the other Teuton prince, inveigled himself into the good graces of the Romans, as certain conquered leaders today truckle to their conquerors. During the triumphal procession in Rome he was permitted on the tribune as a guest, while down below his daughter was led by in chains, holding by the hand the German liberator’s son, born in prison. In the course of history we shall see this dual treachery oft repeated. The tribal leaders were forever locked in struggle. Throughout the later ages German princes were in the habit of betraying their rivals to the enemy abroad; indeed, it was only thereby that the victories of the Bourbon kings over Germany became possible. For the most part the Germans have won their wars by valor and lost them by treachery.
Like all the peoples of their time they kept slaves and were accustomed to vent their love of power upon their bondsmen. Lacking the true instinct of rulership, they lapsed into brutality toward those beneath them and submissiveness to those above them. Even in the forest primeval, the pyramid, today once more the model for their ideal State, formed the symbol of their society, though there was as yet no Party and no bureaucracy to insure so artful a structure as today. At first their leader was the mightiest warrior or the boldest huntsman—later his son or grandson. Even before they called him a King or a Duke, they swore solemn fealty to him, to the accompaniment of sacrifices offered under their ancient rustling oaks. These oaths had a fearful binding force. They were at the heart of their religion, for the leader at the same time represented the gods and destiny.
For this reason obedience to the leader was blind, excluding all independent thought and expressly requiring even treachery if the leader so ordered. Disgrace consisted