Arminius

Arminius was a Germanic noble who learned his soldiering in the Roman army and then turned that knowledge against Rome. In 9 CE he led an alliance of tribes that trapped and destroyed three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest, a disaster that helped persuade the emperors to abandon the conquest of Germany beyond the Rhine. Centuries later he became, as "Hermann", a hero of German nationalism.

Arminius was born in 18 or 17 BCE, a son of Segimer, a chief of the Cherusci, a people of north-western Germany who were then allied with Rome. His Germanic name is unknown; Arminius is a Latin name, probably given when he became a Roman citizen. With his younger brother Flavus he joined the Roman army, learned Latin and, during service between about 1 and 6 CE, gained citizenship and the rank of eques, the Roman equestrian order. Around 4 CE he was commanding a Cheruscan auxiliary unit, probably in the wars in Pannonia in the Balkans.

He returned home in 7 or 8 CE. Rome then controlled the lands just east of the Rhine and was pushing towards the Weser and the Elbe under the governor Publius Quinctilius Varus, appointed by Augustus. Much of the Roman army had been drawn away to crush a revolt in the Balkans, leaving Varus with three legions. Arminius, trusted as an ally, secretly organised a coalition of the Cherusci and several neighbouring peoples, including the Marsi, Chatti and Bructeri.

In the autumn of 9 CE he told Varus of a rising in the north, persuading him to divert his army, the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth legions with auxiliaries, on its way to winter quarters. Along a narrow forest road the Germans attacked, and over three days they destroyed the column, perhaps more than 20,000 men. Varus killed himself. Finds at Kalkriese, north of present-day Osnabrück, almost certainly mark the site of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Roman posts east of the Rhine were then abandoned, though Roman forces held the river itself.

Around 14 CE Arminius carried off and married Thusnelda, daughter of the pro-Roman Cheruscan noble Segestes, who opposed the match. From 14 to 16 CE the Roman general Germanicus led punishing campaigns into Germany. Tacitus reports a drawn battle at Pontes Longi and two Roman victories, at Idistaviso and the Angrivarian Wall; Arminius's brother Flavus fought on the Roman side. In 15 CE Germanicus captured the pregnant Thusnelda, and the son she bore, Thumelicus, grew up a prisoner in Roman hands. Two of the three lost legionary eagles were recovered, but Emperor Tiberius then halted the campaigns and fixed the frontier on the Rhine.

With the Roman threat gone, Arminius fought Maroboduus, king of the Marcomanni, who fled to Roman protection, though Arminius could not break into his Bohemian homeland. Accused of seeking to make himself king, Arminius was murdered by members of his own tribe in 21 CE. Tacitus called him beyond doubt the liberator of Germany, a man who had challenged Rome at the height of its power.

Tacitus's Annals were rediscovered and printed in the Renaissance, and Arminius became a symbol for German humanists; Martin Luther may have been the first to call him Hermann. During the Napoleonic Wars and the unification of Germany he was celebrated as a champion of German freedom, and the huge Hermannsdenkmal statue near Detmold, begun in 1838, was completed after the victory over France in 1871. After 1945 his image faded in West Germany, and the battle's 2,000th anniversary in 2009 passed with little official celebration.

Our 1 BCE map shows the Rhine frontier of the Roman Empire shortly before his victory, with the Germanic peoples beyond it in present-day Germany.