I’ve been watching “I, Claudius” over the past few days, so seeing this article brought Augustus to mind, raging over the loss of three Legions in the Teutoburgewald due to the treachery of Arminius the Cheruscan….
“Quintillius Varys, bring back my Legions!!!”
Apparently the Cheruscans put the Roman captives in wooden cages and burned them alive.
There’s even a t-shirt!
Germanicus led the hunt and eventually Arminius (clearly believing he was a master tactician) met him somewhere else in the woods, so close they could talk trash to one another.
Inside of an hour the Roman method broke the barbis and Arminius had to flee for his life. He wasn’t a popular guy after that mess, and much of his own family may have been killed in battle and whatnot, but managed to find refuge, living with distant kinsmen.
The Romans found out where, and paid the kinsmen to bump him off. Long, long reach, those Romans. :^)
This whole Varian episode didn’t survive in folklore, mainly because the subsequent wave of ethnic groups wiped out everyone who’d been there before. Some anachronistic interest got revived in “Herman” in the mid-19th century. A kinda homely monument was built to him, a dozens of miles from where (it turns out) the battle was actually fought. :^D
Looks like something from a pretentious cemetery:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermannsdenkmal
During the reign of Napoleon III the site of the Roman vs Gauls battle of Alesia was located and excavated with great fanfare. The fact that the French ancestors, the Franks, were zero relation to Vercingetorix and company didn’t trouble Nappy at all. Still not certain he picked the right place to dig:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alesia#Identification_of_the_site
Analogously, Queen Vicky of 19th-early 20th century Britain revived Boudica as a symbol, despite the fact that the Iceni were probably erased by the Romans, and the rest of the Iron Age tribes were absorbed and/or erased by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes — nothing to do with Victoria at all. What a nutjob.
I’ve got a Boudica topic on deck, probably going up this week.
During Plantagenet times, the King Arthur legend as it’s sort of known today :^) got revived, revised, and invented, and again, same problem — the post-Roman Britons lost the whole works to the A-S-J. And anything that may have been left finally succumbed to the Vikings.
My father had read a lot about this battle, but he never mentioned the horror of burning alive in cages. Just to prove we modern humans have not grown more civilized than those Germans, Jordan pilots were recently burned alive by some rebel group a few years ago. I don’t remember the details, but it was horrific.