Chief of the German Cherusci, who served as an officer in the Roman army and acquired Roman citizenship. However, in AD 9 he allied with other German tribes against the Romans, and annihilated an entire Roman army of three legions commanded by Publius Quintilius Varus. He was later murdered by some of his own kinsmen.
Arminius (also Hermann, Armin, 16 BC-AD 21 was a chieftain of the Germanic Cherusci who defeated a Roman army in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Although later unsuccessful in creating a united German front against the Empire (having later been defeated by Iulius Caesarius Claudianus Germanicus in subsequent Roman punitive operations (Tacitus, Annals 2.22, Suetonius, Caligula 1.4), Armanius' upset victory has since resulted in far-reaching influence throughout Germanic history.
Biography
Born in 17 or 16 BC as son of the Cheruscan war chief Segimerus, Armanius was trained as a Roman military commander and attained Roman citizenship before returning to Germania to drive the Romans out. The name "Hermann" (meaning "army man" or "warrior") came into use as the German equivalent of Arminius in the Reformation period, apparently through the efforts of religious reformer Martin Luther who wanted to use an ancient and heroic figure as a symbol of the Germanic peoples' fight against Rome.
Battle at the Teutoburg Forest
Around the year 4 A.D., Arminius assumed command of a Cheruscan detachment of Roman auxiliary forces, probably fighting in the Pannonian wars on the Balkan peninsula. Arminius soon began plotting to unite various German tribes and to thwart Roman efforts to incorporate their territories into the empire.
In the fall of 9, in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, Arminius — then twenty-five years old — and his alliance of Germanic tribes (Cherusci, Marsi, Chatti and Bructeri) ambushed and annihilated a Roman army (comprising the 17th, 18th and 19th legions as well as three cavalry detachments and six cohorts of auxiliaries) totalling around 20,000 men commanded by Varus.
Further conflicts with Rome
After his victory, Arminius tried for several years to bring about a more permanent union of the northern Germanic tribes so as to resist the inevitable Imperial counter-offensive. After the Teutoberg disaster other Germanic tribes did become more openly hostile to Rome, but Arminius did not succeed in unifying the German war effort in the face of tribal jealousies.
In 13, the Romans under Germanicus invaded the same area with 50,000 troops, found and buried the dead of Varus' legions, and raided much of the surrounding area.
In 15, Germanicus again raided Germanic settlements and captured Arminius' wife Thusnelda who was delivered to the Romans by her own father Segestes as an act of revenge on Arminius. Segestes and his clan were Roman clients and opposed the policy of Arminius, as did Arminius' brother Flavus.
The last major battle between Germanicus and Arminius, the Battle of the Weser River, took place in 16 at Idistaviso near the Weser river. The third eagle was recovered later under emperor Claudius (Cassius Dio, Roman History 60.8)
Inter-tribal conflicts and death
Once Rome had withdrawn behind the Rhine in triumph, war broke out between Arminius and Marbod, the other major Germanic leader of the time, who was king of the Marcomanni in modern Bohemia. Arminius had repeatedly sought to forge an anti-Roman alliance with Marbod (he even sent him the head of Varus after the victory of Teutoburg Forest) (Velleius II 119,5), but Marbod was not willing to play a supporting role to Arminius.
In 19 A.D., the same year his formidable opponent Germanicus died, Arminius was murdered by his chieftains who felt he was becoming too powerful. Earlier in the same year Tiberius refused an offer from a German noblemen to assassinate Arminius, declaring that Rome did not employ such dishonorable methods.
Legacy
Rome
In the accounts of his Roman enemies he is highly respected for his military leadership skills and as a defender of the liberty of his people. Based on these records, the story of Arminius was revived in the sixteenth century with the recovery of the histories of Tacitus by German humanists, who wrote in his Annales II, 88:
Arminius liberator haud dubie Germaniae et qui non primordia populi romani, sicut alii reges ducesque, sed florentissimum imperium lacessieret: proeliis ambiguus, bello non victus. (Arminius, without doubt Germania's liberator, who challenged the Roman people not in its beginnings like other kings and leaders, but in the peak of its empire; in battles with changing success, undefeated in the war.)Arminius was not the sole reason for Rome's change of policy towards Germania; The resources for the conquest of Germany may have been lacking after the great Roman civil wars in the Late Republic and loss of three legions in the Teutoberg Forest, but they were not however lacking later on (Goldsworthy, Roman Warfare 122).
Germanic Sagas
The story of Arminius and his victory might have lived on in Germanic sagas, resulting in the dragon slayer Siegfried of the Nibelungenlied (who is called Sigurd in the Scandinavian tradition).
Martin Luther
In Germany, he was rechristened "Hermann" by Martin Luther, and he became an emblem of the revival of German patriotism fuelled by the wars of Napoleon in the 19th century.
Germanic Nationalism
In 1808, Heinrich von Kleist's published but unperformed play Die Hermannsschlacht, unperformable after Napoleon's victory at Wagram, aroused anti-Napoleonic German sentiment and pride among its readers.
In 1839, construction was started on a massive statue of Arminius, known as the "Hermannsdenkmal", on a hill near Detmold in the Teutoburg Forest;
The Order of the Sons of Hermann, named for Hermann the “Cherusker”, had its origins as a mutual protection society for the protection of German immigrants in New York City during the 1840s.
Modern popular culture
In The Oppermanns by Leon Feuchtwanger, a novel describing the rise of the Nazis to power, a major theme is the struggle between a liberal, half-Jewish pupil and a Nazi teacher - over the student's paper on Arminius which the teacher considers "unpatriotic" and "an insult to German nationalism".
User Comments Add a comment…