Poul Anderson gives us not only time travel paradoxes but also real history:
"...Augustus lost three legions in the Teutoburg Forest..." (4, p. 502)
Janne Floris lived for fifteen years among the Frisii, marrying and bearing sons, because the Patrol:
"'...were concerned about the upheavals among the tribes that followed the murder of Arminius. The consequences were potentially large.'" (6, p. 527)
Googling Arminius, I learned that he commanded the Germanic alliance that destroyed the three legions and that this battle was what the Patrol would call a "nexus."
Follow up every lead in Poul Anderson's texts. They are always instructive.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I did wonder why Arminius didn't try to invade and conquer Gaul after destroying Varus and his three legions. But the article you linked to made it plain that Rome struck back so fiercely
Arminius decided an invasion was not wise.
Ad astra! Sean
The victory at the Teutoberger Wald was a bit of a freak accident -- it required a series of very bad decisions on the part of the Roman governor, and of very good ones by Arminius, and an unusual spell of unity among the western German tribes.
Note that Arminius was killed by Germans not long afterwards.
Absent these, Germany would have been assimilated to the Roman Empire the way Gaul had been, and with unpredictable consequences.
Augustus isn't generally thought of as a conqueror, but he actually incorporated as much new territory into the Empire as Caesar did, ending the 200-year conquest of Spain, rounding out Gaul and giving it an effective land-link to Italy, pushing far north into the Alps, incorporating Pannonia etc.
This was all done as much to shorten and rationalize the Imperial frontiers as anything, and Germany west of the Elbe would have put the capstone on the structure.
A Roman frontier down the Elbe, and then along the Carpathians and the rivers there down to the Black Sea would have been effectively much shorter, without the V-shaped "elbow" along the upper Rhine.
It would also have promoted internal political stability, by pushing the "active" military zone where the bulk of the legions were stationed much further away from the Mediterranean core of the Empire.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And Publius Quinctilius Varus had only three legions because the others had been withdrawn to suppress a rebellion in Pannonia. Varus should have remained on the defensive until those legions had returned from Pannonia.
Well, Arminius was not assassinated by his rivals till twelve years after the Battle of Teutoberg in AD 9.
Yes, Augustus was conquering territory as much for rationalizing the Imperial frontiers as anything else. Annexing Germany east to the Alba/Elbe river was his goal.
Incidentally, some 160 years later, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, Rome made another effort at such rationalization. Emperor Marcus, after driving the Marcomanni from the Empire, took the war to the Marcomannic homeland, in what is now the Czech Republic, with the idea of annexing that territory.
You think Roman rule of Germany east to the Elbe and what is now the Czech Republic would have strengthened political stability for the Empire? Because legions posted much further away from the Mediterranean core would make it less tempting for the legions to meddle in politics?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes, it would have put the militarized zone further from Rome. Note that the legions most often involved in civil wars in Roman history were precisely those closest to the core of the Empire; the ones off in the East or in North Africa were much less frequently involved.
The essential weakness of the Empire was a contradiction between its political -structure- (monarchy, basically) and it's political -culture-, which was -not- monarchic.
Augustus simply seized control of the State by main force, after the Republic had broken down, and Rome (and its Byzantine successor) always remained vulnerable to coups because it had little or no sense of dynastic legitimacy.
This was because the transition to monarchy occurred in "historic" time, not "legendary" time -- during a literate and rationalistic phase of the civilization, which made the accretion of myth very hard.
The best way for that to happen would be a very long spell of peaceful successions.
Rome had a structure of legitimizing myths set in legendary time, but they were all about the -overthrow- of the original monarchy and the substitution of the -Republic-.
So in a cultural/narrative sense, the story ended: "And then the Bad Guys won", once Augustus took power.
That was why he always carefully avoided the -symbolic- trappings of monarchy, and tried to pose as a successful politician rather than a king. He was overwhelmingly powerful in fact, but in the Roman 'story' he was very weak.
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