you to the rare honor of an official friend of the Roman people. Know, however, that the Aedui too are old allies of the Romans. Wage not war against the Aedui nor against their allies, but return to them their hostages, and if you cannot persuade your Teutons to retire beyond the Rhine, see to it at least that no more of them enter Gaul.”*
Sitting astride his horse, Ariovistus responded to the Roman’s condescending speech with an agitation that had evidently been well prepared, for Caesar says that he spoke “little about these demands but much about his own virtues,” as follows:—
“Not from my own impulse have I crossed the Rhine; it was the Gauls who implored me for aid! For their sake have I left my home and my clan! It was not I who began to wage war against the Gauls, but they against me! They cannot refuse me the tribute they have heretofore paid me of their own free will! All honor to the friendship of the Roman people—but if such friendship cost me my rights, then I must renounce it! True, I have led many Teutons to Gaul, but without the least purpose of disturbing the country, since it was not I who attacked them—I merely defended myself! In short, if you will, therefore, leave me in undisputed possession of my rights, I shall at my own expense help you to win all the wars that you may propose. If, on the other hand, you remain here on my own land, I shall henceforth regard you as my enemy! Then, when I have vanquished and killed you in battle, many powerful and highly-placed Romans will rejoice—they have so confided to me through special couriers and have offered me their friendship after Caesar’s death. Now you know it, Caesar, and now choose!”
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,
