Oh, Gaul had had towns before the Roman conquest. But they hadn’t been towns with civilized amenities. No theaters for plays. No amphitheaters for spectacles, gladiators, and beast shows. No public baths. No proper law courts. No colonnaded and porticoed public squares. And, of course, the barbarians had gabbled away at one another in their own incomprehensible language, not in Latin - to say nothing of Greek.
More than half a century of Roman rule had brought some changes. A few of the locals had forsaken tunic and trousers for the toga. Here and there, a proper Roman building- -stone with a tile roof- -sprouted amidst timber and wattle-and-daub and thatch. But it would be a long time before this country grew civilized, if it ever did.
Vetera, on the west bank of the Rhine, had more than enough Romans to make a good-sized town. It was the headquarters of Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX. But legionaries, however necessary they were in the grand scheme of things, weren’t . . . interesting people.
Varus had been used to gossip about matters of state, gossip about Augustus’ family (his own family, thanks to the marriage connection - not that Claudia Pulchra was daft enough to come up to the edge of the world, though she’d gone with him to Syria), and gossip about the other great and powerful men - and women - of Rome.
In Vetera, he got gossip about an ambitious military tribune jockeying for promotion, gossip about a centurion’s drunken German mistress, gossip about what happened when a prefect’s Gallic mistress found out about his German mistress, gossip about the outrageous way a wine merchant overcharged for the swill he swore was Falernian (no, some things didn’t change from Rome to Vetera, not even a little bit).
Power. Sex. Money. What else was there to gossip about? But when the power was minuscule, when the sex was with women whose fair tresses reminded Varus that whores in Rome were required by law to wear blond wigs, when the money was chicken feed, how were you supposed to get excited about any of it?
People in Vetera did. Varus imagined that people in any provincial town had their tiny squabbles and feuds and scandals and triumphs. The trouble was, the Roman officers in Vetera expected Varus to be interested in theirs. And so he had to be, or at least to pretend to be. Hypocrisy wasn’t the least important art a high-ranking Roman needed to cultivate.
In Syria, soldiers always worried about Parthia. If Rome had a real rival, the successor to the Persian Empire was it. Roman armies had come to grief against Parthia. Back around the time Varus was born, Crassus got his force annihilated at Carrhae, and even lost legionary eagles - what greater and more humiliating disgrace was possible? And the Parthian Kings of Kings weren’t afraid to invade the Roman East when they thought they could get away with it.
In Vetera, soldiers - and no one else there mattered - worried about Germany instead. Varus did not find that an improvement. Parthia was a more or less cultured country. The King of Kings and his nobles spoke Greek as a matter of course. They had elegant manners they’d learned from Alexander the Great’s successors while they were beating them. (If the Macedonians had learned their manners from the Persians while they were beating them, Varus didn’t dwell on that.)
Hearing that two German tribes were threatening to go to war with each other over some stolen pigs was not edifying. Neither was the news that some petty German noble - as if there were any other kind! - was raising a row in his tribe by giving a girl previously promised to one suitor to another instead. And that was the kind of thing Varus had to listen to day after day.
He didn’t take long to tire of it. He summoned a meeting of the leading soldiers in Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX and spoke without preamble: “You already know Augustus sent me here to bring Germany all the way into the Empire. I aim to do that as fast as I can.” Then I’ll go back to Rome and let somebody else take charge of the miserable place.
The assembled officers nodded. Vala Numonius, the cavalry commander, said, “It shouldn’t be too hard, sir. By what I’ve heard since I got here, we’ve softened up the Germans a lot. They’re getting used to our ways. Plenty of their nobles already see lining up with us is the smart way to go. All they need is a show of force, and they’ll roll onto their backs and show their bellies like whipped dogs.”
“Does anyone disagree?” Varus put the question for form’s sake. He’d said what he intended to do, and one of his principal subordinates had declared that the assembled legions could do it. What more did anyone want?
But, to his surprise, an officer named Lucius Eggius said, “I do, sir. The Germans just aren’t that easy. Whenever we cross the Rhine, we own the land where we march and the land where we camp. The rest still belongs to the barbarians.”
“It’s not so bad as that,” Numonius said.
Lucius Eggius set his chin. Even when Varus said, “I should hope not,” Eggius still looked discontented. Varus wondered if the soldier found himself in this gods-forsaken spot because of an unfortunate habit of speaking his mind regardless of whether anybody else wanted to listen to him.
“I think you’re right, sir,” said yet another officer, a prefect named Ceionius. Unlike Lucius Eggius, he knew the words a governor liked to hear. Better yet, he came up with good reasons why Varus was right: “Quite a few of the Germans are learning Latin - “
“The better to spy on us,” Eggius broke in.
“Oh, nonsense,” Ceionius said. “They’re using our coins, too. They buy wine and pottery and jewelry with them, and they spend them among themselves. Little by little, they’re turning into provincials. Once we finish the occupation, give them twenty years and you won’t be able to tell them from Gauls.”
Eggius sent Varus what the governor supposed was meant to be a look of appeal. Somehow, it only made the man seem more stubborn than ever. “Don’t listen to him, sir,” Eggius said earnestly. “If these savages were going to lay down for us - “
“Lie down, you mean.” Now Ceionius interrupted, to point out the other soldier’s bad grammar. Varus, of course, had noticed it on his own. If an officer couldn’t express himself correctly, how were his superiors supposed to take seriously anything he said?
“If they were going to lay down for us,” Lucius Eggius repeated, his chin jutting forward even farther than before, “they would have done it twenty years ago. They’re rough customers - that’s all there is to it. And there are swarms of them in those little villages. Sometimes we beat ‘em when we fight. Sometimes they lick us. If they didn’t, the country on the far side of the Rhine would’ve made a proper province a long time ago.
Several officers drew away from him, as if he carried something catching. And so he did: tactlessness could kill off even a promising career. Varus almost dismissed him from the council. At the last instant, though, he held back, remembering how Augustus had voiced some of the same worries.
“Anyone can do an easy job,” Varus said. “You need uncommon men to handle a harder one. Augustus has decided that we are the men he needs for this particular job. To my way of thinking, that’s a compliment to every one of us and to every single soldier in Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX. Will anyone tell me I’m wrong there?”
He waited. No one said a word, not even the obstinate Lucius Eggius. Varus had expected nothing different. A bold man could quarrel with a provincial governor. No one had quarreled with Augustus in any serious way for more than thirty years. If you quarreled with Augustus, you lost. Rome had learned that lesson well.
“Since Augustus gave us this job, we’ll find a way to do it,” Varus continued. Nobody disagreed with that, either.
The track wound through the woods. Arminius’ boots squelched in the mud. He slipped and almost fell. He’d traded his Roman caligae - his hobnailed marching sandals - to a farmer for the boots and a meal and a bed. The caligae didn’t fit the farmer very well, but the iron hobnails made them valuable.