Claudius the God (22 page)

These remarks of Galba’s. were later reported to me by one of his staff,; and I sent him a personal letter of thanks for his good opinion of me. I told him that he could count on me to give my generals a free hand in such campaigns as I ordered or authorized them to undertake. I would merely decide whether the expedition was to be one of conquest or whether it would have merely a punitive character. In the former case vigour was to be tempered with humanity as little damage as possible was to be done to captured villages and towns and to standing crops; the local Gods were not to be humiliated, and no butchery must be allowed once the enemy was broken in, battle. In the case, however, of a punitive expedition no mercy whatsoever need be shown: as much damage as possible must be done to crops, villages, towns, and temples, and such, of the inhabitants as were not worth taking home as slaves were to be massacred. I would also indicate the maximum number of reserves that could be called upon and the maximum number of Roman casualties that would be permitted. I would decide beforehand, in consultation with the general himself, the precise objectives of attack and ask him to state how many days or months he would need for taking them. I would leave all strategical and tactical dispositions to him, and only exercise my right of taking personal. command of the campaign, bringing with me such further reinforcements as I thought necessary, should the objectives not be reached within the agreed time, or should the Roman casualties rise beyond the, stipulated figure.

For I had a campaign in mind for Galba to make against the Chattians. It was to be a punitive expedition. I did not propose to enlarge the Empire beyond the natural and obvious frontier of the Rhine, but when the Chattians and the Northern tribesmen, the Istaevonians, failed to respect that frontier, a vigorous assertion of Roman dignity had to be made. My brother Germanicus always used to say that the only way to win the respect of Germans was to treat them with brutality; and that they were the only nation in the world of whom he would say this. The Spaniards, for example, could be impressed, by the courtesy of a conqueror, the French by his riches, the Greeks by his respect for the arts, the Jews by his moral integrity, the Africans by his calm authoritative bearing. But the German, who is impressed by none of these things, must always be struck to the dust, and. struck down again as he rises, and struck again, as he lies groaning. ‘While his wounds still pain him he will respect the hand that dealt them.’ At the same time as Galba was advancing, another punitive expedition was to be made against the Istaevonian raiders, by Gambinius, the General commanding the four regiments on the Lower Rhine. Gabinius’s expedition interested me far more than Galba’s, for its object was not merely punitive. Before ordering it I sacrificed in Augustus’s Temple and privately informed the God that I was bent on completing a task that my brother Germanicus had been prevented from completing, and which was, I knew, one in which He was Himself much interested: it was the rescue of the third and last of the lost Eagles of Varus, still in German hands after more than thirty years. My brother Germanicus, I reminded Him, had recaptured one Eagle in the year following His Deification and another in the campaigning season after that; but Tiberius had recalled him before he could avenge Varus in a last crushing battle and win back the Eagle that was still missing. I therefore begged the God to favour my arms and restore the honour of Rome. As the smoke of the sacrifice rose, the hands of Augustus’s statue seemed to move in a blessing and his head to nod. It may only have been a trick of the smoke, but I took it for a favourable omen: The fact was, I was now confident that I knew exactly where in Germany the Eagle was hidden, and proud of myself for the way I had discovered this secret. My predecessors could have done what I did if they had only thought of it; but they never did. It was always a pleasure to prove to myself that I was by no means the fool that they had all thought me, and that indeed I could manage some things better than they. It occurred to me that in my Household Battalion, composed of captured tribesmen from almost every district in Germany, there must be a half a dozen men at least who knew where the Eagle was hidden; yet when the question had once been put to them on parade by Caligula, with an offer of freedom and a large sum of money in return for the information, every face had immediately gone blank: it seemed that nobody knew. I tried a very different method of persuasion. I ordered them all out on parade one day and addressed them very kindly. I told them that as a reward for their faithful, services I was going to do them an unprecedented kindness: I was going to send back to Germany the dear, dear Fatherland about which they nightly sang such melancholy and tuneful songs - all members of the battalion who had completed twenty-five years’ service with it I said that I should have liked to send them home with gifts of gold, weapons, horses, and the like, but unfortunately I was unable to do this or even to allow them to take back across the Rhine any possessions that they had acquired during their captivity. The obstacle was the still missing Eagle. Until this sacred emblem was returned, Roman honour was still in pawn, and it would create a: bad impression in the City if I were to reward with anything beyond, their bare freedom men who had in their youth taken part in the massacre of Varus’s army. However, to true patriots liberty was better than gold and they would, I felt sure, accept the gift in the spirit that it was made in. I did not ask them, I said; to reveal to me the whereabouts of the Eagle, because no doubt this was a, secret which they had been bound by oaths to their Gods not to reveal: and I would not ask any man to perjure himself for the sake of a bribe, as my predecessor had done. In two days’ time, I promised, all the twenty-five-year veterans would be sent back across the Rhine under safe conduct.

I then dismissed the parade. The sequel was as I had foreseen. These veterans were even less anxious to return to Germany than the Romans captured by the Parthians at Carrhae were to return to Rome when, thirty years later, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa bargained with the King for their exchange. Those Romans in Parthia had settled down, married, raised families, grown rich, and quite forgotten their past. And these Germans at Rome, though technically, slaves, lived: a most easy and enjoyable life; and their regret for home was not at all a sincere emotion; merely an excuse for tears when they were maudlin drunk. They came to me in a body and begged for permission to remain in my service. Many of them were fathers, and even grandfathers, by slave-women attached, to the Palace, and they were all comfortably off: Caligula had given them handsome presents from time to time. I pretended to be angry, called them ungrateful and base to refuse so priceless a gift as liberty and said that I had no further use for their services. They asked pardon and permission at. least to take their families with them. I refused this plea, mentioning the Eagle again. One of them, a Cheruscan, cried out: ‘It’s all the fault of those cursed Chaucians that we have to go like this. Because they have sworn to keep the secret, we other innocent Germans are made to suffer.’

This was what I wanted. I dismissed from my, presence all but the representatives of the Greater and Lesser Chaucian tribes. (The Chaucians lived on. the North German coast between the Dutch Lakes and the Elbe; they had been confederates of Hermann’s.) Then I said to these: ‘I have no intention of asking you Chaucians where the Eagle is, but if any of you have not sworn an oath about it, please tell me so at once.’ The Greater Chaucians, the western half of the nation, all declared that they had not sworn any such oath. I believed them, because the second Eagle that my brother Germanicus won back had been found in a temple of theirs. It was unlikely that one tribe would have been awarded two Eagles in the distribution of spoils that followed Hermann’s victory. I then addressed the chief man of the Lesser Chaucians: ‘I do not ask you to tell me where the Eagle is, or to what God you swore the oath. But perhaps you will tell me in what town or village you took that oath. If you tell me this I shall suspend my order for your repatriation.

‘Even to say as much as that would be a violation of my oath, Caesar.’

But I used an old trick on him that I had read about in my historical studies: once, when a certain Phoenician judge visiting a village on his assizes wished to find out where a man had hidden a gold cup that he had stolen, he told the man that he did not believe him capable of theft and would discharge him. ‘Come, sir, let us go for a friendly walk instead and you will perhaps show me your interesting village.’ The man guided him down every street but one. The judge found by inquiry that one of the houses in this street was occupied by the man’s sweetheart; and the cup was discovered hidden in the thatch of her roof. So in the same way I said: ‘Very well, I shall not press you further.’ I then turned to another member of the tribe who also seemed, by his sullen, uncomfortable looks, to be in the secret, and asked conversationally: ‘Tell me: in what towns or villages in your territory are these temples raised to your German Hercules’ It was probable that the Eagles had been dedicated to this God. He gave me a list of seven names, which I noted down. ‘Is that all?’ I asked.

‘I cannot recall any more,’ he answered.

I appealed to the Great Chaucians. ‘Surely there must be more than seven temples in so important a territory as Lesser Chaucia between the great rivers of Weser and Elbe?’

‘Oh, yes, Caesar,’ they replied. ‘He has not mentioned the famous temple at Bremen on the eastern bank of the Weser.’

That is how I was able to write to Gabinius: ‘You will, I think find the Eagle somewhere hidden in the temple of the German Hercules at Bremen on the eastern bank of the Weser. Don’t spend too much time at first in punishing the Istaevonians, march in close formation straight through their territory and that of the Ansibarians, rescue the Eagle and do the burning, killing, and pillaging on your return.’

Before I forget it, there is another story that I want to tell about a stolen gold cup, and it may as well go in here as anywhere. Once I invited a number of provincial knights to supper - and would you believe it, one of the rogues, a Marseilles man, went off with the gold, wine-cup that had been put before him. I didn’t say a word to him, but invited him to supper again the next day, and this time gave him only a stone cup. This apparently frightened him, for the next morning the gold cup was returned with a fulsomely apologetic note explaining that he had taken the liberty of borrowing the cup for two days in order to get the engravings on it, which he much admired, copied by a goldsmith: he wished to, perpetuate the memory of the enormous honour that I had done him, by drinking from a similarly chased gold cup every day for the rest of his life. In answer I sent him the stone cup, asking, in exchange, for the reproduction of the gold one as a memento of the charming incident.

I arranged a date in May for both Galba’s and Gabinius’s expeditions to start, increased their forces by levies in France and Italy to six regiments apiece leaving two regiments to hold the Upper Rhine, and two to hold the Lower - allowed them each a maximum of 2,000 casualties, and gave them until July the First to conclude their operations and be on the way home. Galba’s objective was a line of three Chattian towns originally built when the country was under Roman rule Nuaesium, Gravionarium, and Melocavus - which lie parallel with the Rhine about 100 miles inland from Mainz.

I shall content myself by recording that both campaigns were a complete success. Galba burned 150 stockaded villages, destroyed thousands of acres of crops, killed great numbers of Germans, armed and unarmed, and had sacked the three towns indicated by the middle of June. He took about 2,000 prisoners of both sexes, including men and women of rank to hold, as hostages for the Chattians good behaviour. He lost 1,200 men, killed or disabled, of whom 400 were Romans. Gabinius had the harder task and accomplished it with the loss of only 800 men. He took a last minute suggestion of mine, which was not to make straight for Bremen but to invade the territory of the Angrivarians, who live to the south of the Lesser Chaucians; and from there to send a flying column of cavalry against Bremen, in the, hope of capturing the town before the Chaucians: thought it worth while to remove the Eagle to some safer repository. It all worked out exactly to plan. Gabinius’s cavalry, which he commanded personally, found the Eagle just where I had expected, and he was so pleased with himself that he called up the rest of his force: and drove right through Lesser Chaucia from end to end, burning the timber shrines of the German Hercules one after the other, until none was left standing. His destruction of crops and villages was not so methodical as Galba’s; but on the way back he gave the Istaevonians plenty to remember him by He took 2,000 prisoners.

The news of the rescue of the Eagle came to Rome simultaneously with that, of Galba’s successful sacking of the Chattian towns, and the Senate immediately voted me the title of Emperor, which this time I did not refuse. I considered that I had earned it by my location of the Eagle and by suggesting the long-distance cavalry raid, and by the care that I had taken to make both campaigns a’ surprise; Nobody knew anything about them until I signed the order, instructing the French and -Italian levies to be under arms-and on their way to the Rhine within three days.

Galba and Gabinius were given triumphal ornaments. I should have had them granted triumphs if the, campaigns had been more than mere punitive-expeditions. But I persuaded the Senate to honour Gabinius with the hereditary surname Chaucias” in commemoration of his feat. The Eagle was carried in solemn procession to the Temple of Augustus, where I sacrificed and gave thanks for his divine aid: and dedicated to him the wooden gates of the temple where the Eagle had been found - Gabinius had sent them to me as a gift. I could not dedicate the Eagle itself to Augustus; because. there was a socket long ago prepared for its reception in the temple of Avenging Mars, alongside the other two rescued Eagles. I took it there later and dedicated it, my heart swelling with pride; The soldiers composed ballad verses-about the rescue of the Eagle. But this time, instead of building them on to their original ballad, ‘The Three Griefs of Lord Augustus’, they made them into a new one called ‘Claudius and the Eagle’. It was by no means flattering to me, but: I enjoyed some of the verses. The theme was that I was an absolute fool in some respects and did the most ridiculous things - I stirred, my porridge with my foot, and shaved myself with a comb, and when I went to the Baths used to drink the oil handed me to rub: myself with and rub myself with the wine handed me to drink. Yet I had amazing learning, for all that: I knew the names of every one of the stars in Heaven and could recite all the poems that had ever been written, and had read all the books in all the libraries of the world. And the fruit of this wisdom was that I alone was able to tell the Romans where the Eagle was that had been lost so many years and had resisted all efforts to recapture it. The first part of the, ballad-contained a dramatic account of my acclamation as Emperor by the Palace Guard; and t shall quote three verses to show the sort of ballad it was: