Summary Of Peter S. Wells The Battle That Stopped Rome

Peter S. Wells, The Battle That Stopped Rome: Reviewed by Kaylin Cline

In the "Battle that Stopped Rome" Professor Peter Wells brings to light discoveries in the recent find of one of the most famous and influential battles of the ancient world known as the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. This should be a welcome work, the battlefield is the most complete one of its kind ever found, located in a semi-rural area of Germany and undisturbed for two thousand years. Unfortunately rather than stating the discoveries and giving a view to all possible theories, which would have made this a seminal work, Wells misses this opportunity by embarking on an opinionated interpretation of the event. Judicious and balanced this work is not. Perhaps this is possibly …show more content…
While Wells states that Germans engaged in a militarization because of the Roman intrusions, the truth is that they were not peaceful natives conducting tea party's. They were notorious raiders who often preyed on each other and known to both the Gauls and Caesar two generations earlier, as a serious military threat. There is a chapter that describing battle from an individual's perspective and a section that discusses battlefield wounds; both are stimulating and intelligently drawn. It's a tragedy that the most informative and important chapter in the book on the archeology of the battlefield is extremely brief although the eight pages of pictures are helpful and …show more content…
This is squarely in opposition to Cassisus Dio's written description over a century later that a large part of Romans escaped initial destruction and built defensive works nearby succumbing to the Germans within three days. But Wells gives no reasons for his this major departure and states only in a footnote his agreement with scholars who doubt Dio. While ancient writers must often be taken with a grain of salt, one does so in such a dramatic fashion with peril. Velleius Paterculus, a contemporary of Varus and probably acquainted with him, writing only a few years after the battle says the two prefects survived long enough to speculate on surrender of the remaining forces or death in combat and one Lucius Caedicius may have made it back to a Roman camp with a band of survivors. Tacitus as well, relying on reports from survivors and veteran's of a later campaign, writes that the legions under Germanicus finding the site saw ramparts where it looked clearly like defensive works were built, indicating much more than an hour-long battle (to be fair Tacitus may have mistaken the partially fallen German wall used to cover their ambush for the army's defensive positions). Wells ignores this completely. He ignores that human remains found buried together were almost certainly