QUEST FOR THE LOST ROMAN LEGIONS

The author was an officer in the British army when he went out with a metal detector and found a number of Roman coins on the edge of the Teutoberg Forest near Osnabrück. This area had been proposed by the great German historian Mommsen as the likely site for the loss of three Roman legions in AD 9, as they tried to conquer Germany for Caesar Augustus under the command of Varus. Mommsen's theory was dismissed because relatively few artefacts had been discovered, and the classical historian Cassius Dio had described the battle as taking place in forested uplands, not a valley. This remains true for the start of the battle, but it is now believed the troops swung down into the plain where they met the final ambush. Following Clunn's persistent trawl of the Kalkriese area, large numbers of Roman coins were unearthed. They could have got there through trade, but crucially some Roman slingshot was also discovered, which showed that the military had been in the area. Intense archaeological activity in the Kalkriese-Niewedde Bowl finally revealed evidence that the 17th, 18th and 19th mounted legions, and six regiments of footsoldiers, all under the command of P. Quinctilius Varus, were ambushed and defeated by west German clans under the leadership of Arminius, a German prince who was ostensibly an ally of the Romans and a member of the Roman auxiliary army. The defeat put paid to Augustus's dream of adding Germany to the Roman empire. The author covers the archaeology of the site, the movements of the armies and the likely course of the battle. At the same time he tells a fictionalised account of the struggle between the Roman forces and the rebels in a parallel series of episodes. In the fictionalised account, Varus is convinced that Arminius is loyal and that his pleas for help are genuine. Pinpricks of light on the edge of the forest tell a different story, but Varus is heroically obstinate, with tragic results. 371pp, paperback, maps, glossary, photos.