‘THIS FRIGHTFUL CATASTROPHE’

September ad 9. Some 18,000 Roman legionairies and their supporting cohorts are slogging through a dank German forest on their way to suppress an uprising by a handful of Teutonic tribes. The sky—what little of it can be glimpsed through the tops of the tall trees—threatens rain that could slow their progress even more. As they move along a narrow defile beside the Kalkriese Hill in northern Germany, the three legions are thinned into a slender, sluggish column, just a few men abreast and stretched out precariously over several miles.

Gaul and the Germanic lands east of the Rhine River have been peaceful for some time, but the legionaries are marching in territory to the east of the Rhine, a sweeping, forested wilderness extending from present-day Poland to the Netherlands and peopled by fierce tribes. Three years before, Roman armies had been poised to make ambitious eastward advances, hoping to incorporate all of the lands between the Rhine and Elbe Rivers into the empire, but then a titanic revolt in Pannonia had diverted the attention and manpower of the Roman military. Yet even during the Pannonia crisis, five legions had continued to guard the imperial provinces of Germania Inferior (Lower Germany) and Germany Superior (Upper Germany), and the friendly tribes on the west side of the Rhine had continued their gradual Romanization. It had been a leader from one of those allied tribes, Arminius, who had warned of the uprising that the legionairies are now marching to suppress. A 25-year-old prince