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To: SunkenCiv
[snip] The Romans did later recover the lost legions’ eagles, one each in 15 AD, 16 AD and 42 AD. [/snip]

Yes but two of these Legions were never rebuilt (XVIII briefly under Nero) and their losses of ~88% (~18k deaths & enslaved) deeply crippled both the actual military might and, more importantly, the 'invincible' reputation of the Roman Legions. Truly, this battle & loss probably marked the high-water of Rome, at least in the North.

The historian Seutonius writes of Augustus beating his head against a wall, crying; "Quintili Vare, legiones redde!" (Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!) George A Custer was, by comparison, equally stupid and overly confident but a piker by comparison!

37 posted on 03/22/2020 11:20:24 AM PDT by SES1066 (Happiness is a depressed Washington, DC housing market!)
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To: SES1066
There's been a resurgence of interest in the Varian disaster perhaps due to the book "The Battle that Stopped Rome" [sic]. Any loss of a legion isn't unlikely to lead to the retirement of the numeric ID, quite likely due to superstition and bad joojoo over their loss. Ultimately it is meaningless. Not only did the Roman Empire continue to settle east of the Rhine, in the past 20 years a Roman cemetery was uncovered by accident (construction, leading to rescue archaeologists being called in to excavate a possible medieval/dark ages burial ground) -- in Copenhagen. The Romans operated in the Danish peninsula and cleared it out completely, apparently to control trade in and out of the Baltic. More discoveries will likely continue to pop up

63 posted on 04/03/2020 6:03:40 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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