00:03:00.000Hello, everyone, and welcome to Victory Never Sleeps.
00:03:09.520This week, we have a very special episode for you.
00:03:13.760We got folk builder Chris Savage here to do another of his highly regarded history presentations.
00:03:25.080Tonight, he's going to talk to you about Prince Herman of the Trucy.
00:03:30.000And I think this is a hero that fascinated, certainly fascinated me when I first became interested in Auschwitz.
00:03:43.820It's one that I have seen. I had to pick one of our heroes that I think has inspired the imagination of the most members that I've heard about.
00:03:55.620it's probably herman um known to latin authors as armenius if you guys are interested and are
00:04:06.420familiar then this will be a treat if you guys have never heard about him you are in store to uh
00:04:11.940hear about a great man tonight and have really interesting show so before we get into that i
00:04:18.660would invite everybody to join us at thorshoff here in just a week and a half for uh austra
00:04:30.660at thorshoff in linden north carolina that's thorshoff's premier annual event at the hoff
00:04:38.900it is going to be amazing they've put a lot of work into beautifying thorshoff lately we've had
00:04:44.580guys out there doing painting and scraping it's about every weekend now for several weeks i know
00:04:50.340they put a lot of love into getting that place up it's our oldest hof and it's it's really charming
00:04:57.940it's got a lot of character to it the building in the bay itself is is beautiful um but it's
00:05:05.220you know it's a really special place if you guys haven't been there the building that stands there
00:05:10.900now is from we should give you the exact year in the i want to say i want to say on the centennial
00:05:23.700i want to say it's uh 1876 is when that building's from if not i'm off by maybe a year or two so
00:05:32.580it's uh anyway it's a neat place to go it's the home of the first of the murals that spawn painted
00:05:38.980the Thor mural there is amazing and it just dominates the space in a really impressive way
00:05:47.200we got great members there so I'm looking forward to seeing you there I will be there
00:05:51.180producer Nick will also be there as will other AFA luminaries so if you can make it out do any
00:05:58.200of our folk builders can get you all set up with you know how that works and how to go and any of
00:06:04.260details but that's going to be march 20th through the 22nd so do that if you can also top of the
00:06:13.140show things as always gw farmsworth impresses us with us with his generosity thank you for that
00:06:22.580donated thirty dollars towards restoring the heat at thorishoff and twenty dollars towards
00:06:26.820for services. Stephen in Japan donated $10 to Thoris Hoff Heat and $10 towards paying
00:06:35.780off Fraze Hoff. Thank you very much for that, Stephen. And someone bought us coffee. Thank
00:06:41.700you, someone. We appreciate you. Speaking of Fraze Hoff, how's that looking, Nick?
00:06:49.340excellent so we are 36.4% paid off um got 79,438 to go still and about 109 dollars per member
00:07:05.160will get us there so there you go thank you so much everybody who's donated we appreciate you
00:07:11.280guys' generosity. You all are awesome. That's what we got for the top of the program. So
00:07:20.120you actually, instead of me coming to you and trying to get you to do a show for us,
00:07:31.440this is one that you volunteered to do and you came to me with. What inspired that? Why Herman
00:07:39.200and why is this something that you brought to me so i would like to say i have a cool story about
00:07:47.000how uh prince prince herman moved me but um specking or brandy facet asked me to do a talk
00:07:56.400on herman on arminius and for reasons that aren't important it didn't end up happening
00:08:02.180and i already had all the stuff ready to go and i was like oh man i gotta do this on vns this is a
00:08:08.680sign i can't throw this away you know and so i i came forward with this because no this is this
00:08:16.000is a good one i think arminius is honestly of all of our heroes probably the one that has the most
00:08:22.200pop cultural reference in a certain sense there are some of our heroes like you know ralph the
00:08:30.440strong who while interesting to us don't have tv shows and operas made about them but arminius
00:08:37.820absolutely does i think arminius might also be the one to have received the most
00:08:43.480attention from like world leaders which we'll we'll get into that later but
00:08:49.500in the modern era of course not just in the ancient world
00:08:53.280all right well good enough i am glad that we are uh yeah i'm glad you brought that to us uh we
00:09:03.820Like I said, we get very good feedback about your shows.
00:09:09.500You do a great job making the subject matter clear and engaging to people that, you know, to people that are familiar with it and also to people that maybe it's their first time.
00:09:19.900So without further delay, tell us about the life and times of Prince Herman.0.92
00:09:27.600so let's set the stage as I like to do with these so 50,000 BC earliest homo
00:09:38.280sapiens enter Europe 11,000 BC Neolithic hunter-gatherers show up in what is
00:09:43.680today Germany that's where a lot of this tale takes place about 8,000 to 6,000 BC
00:09:49.980waves of Anatolian farmers show up in what is today Germany 6,000 BC or so the
00:09:55.580The Indo-European migrations begin, and the proto-Indo-European peoples start moving out of what is today the Ukraine.
00:10:02.700About 5,000 BC, Denmark is part of the, this is pronounced, Eotabulla culture in Danish, but the Eotaballa culture.
00:10:14.240This is in northern Germany. It's related to the linear pottery culture.
00:10:17.960These people are fishermen, and they don't exactly farm grain, but they do farm crops.
00:10:58.080Germany from then on becomes what we now think of Germany in a lot of ways.
00:11:03.8402000 BC, Proto-Indo-Iranic splits off of common Western Indo-European.
00:11:13.500This forms the Scythians, the Sarmatians, etc.
00:11:17.6601750 BC, 1750 BC, is Mycenaean Greece.
00:11:23.020So Greece, as we know it, is this, the southeast portion of a bunch of mountains. On the northwest of those mountains, there's this Grecoid horizon of groups like the Thrashians, who are related to the Greeks, but they're not philosophy, mathematics, and gyros Greeks.
00:11:46.780so 1100 bc the halstadt culture who are proto-kelts develops do you want to throw up the
00:11:56.520first picture nick right so halstadt is the yellow orange and then latene keep this up for a little
00:12:03.660bit nick is in green so these are the peoples that go on to lead to the proto-celtic and proto-italic
00:12:13.820peoples so the halstott culture has a lot of wealth from salt mines and gold mines in the
00:12:24.060mountains and then this allows them to buy things out of uh with gold but also just to make things
00:12:32.140with gold the salt is very important because it allows them to move long distances coherently
00:12:38.540if you're going for a journey you need food and water you either have to have enough food and
00:12:44.620water to last you from where you start to where you go or you need to get food along the way
00:12:50.540that's not a guarantee so in early human history how far people go is very much dependent upon how
00:12:58.140far they can bring food so these proto-celtic peoples can go a long distance because they
00:13:03.420they can preserve their food with large amounts of salt. So around 1000 BC, Proto-Celtic and
00:13:10.360Proto-Italic split. Then there is the Bronze Age collapse. This ties in with the collapse of the
00:13:17.900Halstatt culture. 716 BC, we are told that Romulus ascends and dwells with the gods in the heavens.
00:13:27.020509 BC, Blocias Tarquinios Superbus, the last Roman king, is ousted.
00:13:33.100The Senate rules Rome in place of a monarchy.
00:13:36.700500 BC, Proto-Germanic is reconstructable, and the Halstead culture starts to dissolve.
00:13:42.200This seems to be pretty much out of nowhere as far as archaeology is concerned.
00:13:48.140Something bad happened to the Halstead culture, and it breaks up into what's called the Latene culture.
00:13:54.400Archaeological cultures are named for where archaeologists found the stuff the first time.
00:14:01.420They found the first things of the Letene culture in the village in Switzerland.
00:14:07.000They found the first things of the Hallstatt culture in Hallstatt.
00:14:12.380Neanderthals are so called because they are from the Neanderthal Valley, the Tal of Neander.
00:14:23.040Nander being a guy this region was named after, right?
00:14:55.300The Proto-Germanic world develops on the periphery of this Hallstatt-Latene cultural sphere.
00:15:04.820So from the Proto-Germanic perspective, there's this huge Celtic civilization to the southwest.
00:15:13.320It's very wealthy. It's very sophisticated. It's very powerful. It's very intelligent.
00:15:18.520And the Proto-Germanic peoples are a small group on the periphery of that society.
00:15:24.360So around 500 BC, Proto-Germanic is reconstructable.
00:15:28.640The Halstead culture starts to dissolve.
00:15:31.340450 BC, the Latene culture crops up.0.93
00:15:34.800So this transition marks a shift away from the centralized world of the Halstead culture towards a more city-state, Republican nation kind of environment that characterizes the Celtic world.
00:15:52.760And what starts to happen pretty quick is that the war band develops.
00:15:57.380In Germanic and Celtic society, tribal polities, Republican city-states, start to break down as influences of wealth accrue.
00:16:05.180The warlord sociality develops as an alternative to the tribe, because now people can essentially offer bribes of violence.
00:16:13.220So Caesar describes a world that is very similar to the Italic one, and then archaeology backs him up.
00:16:22.240And academics for a long time were puzzled by that because they were certain that the Celts and the Italics were completely different people.
00:16:29.160They're not. If you were fluent in Latin, you could more or less understand the basics of Gaulish, which is the language spoken by the Celts in France.
00:16:39.280So the big difference between Gaulish Celtic and Italic society is that in Italic society,
00:16:47.720the rich people plant themselves down and then send the poor people off to fight in wars.
00:16:55.760In Celtic society, the rich people move around, and then the richer you are,
00:17:02.200the more you can go fight wars and do banditry and raiding.
00:17:05.920this is this has a lot of profound differences between italic and celtic culture they're not
00:17:11.740important here um the theory as to why this happens is that gaul actually had stronger
00:17:17.280more sophisticated governance so the the elites had to go raiding to get booty they couldn't just
00:17:23.020be a corrupt mafioso in the city-state all day okay so throw up the second nick it uh the second
00:17:31.420the second image nick so this is that celtic horizon that i was talking about and it shows0.82
00:17:43.320europe from the proto-germanic perspective so german comes to us from germanicus this is a
00:17:53.920Celtic loan word into Latin, what it means is either the people who scream or the people
00:18:01.200nearby, the neighbors. The people who scream is, there's a number of terms to refer to people who
00:18:08.460don't speak your language, people who speak nonsense, people who yell, and people who are
00:18:14.200mute are three really common ones. The word that the Germanics use to refer to the Celts is
00:18:21.100Walchaz. It means Celt, so if you actually look at where it's used to refer to people,
00:18:29.760it's always used to refer to the civilizational horizon to the southwest, right? You'll notice
00:18:36.900that it refers to people in Wales and Cornwall who were culturally Celtic and Roman, but it
00:18:43.320doesn't refer to the Irish. It doesn't refer to the Balts. It doesn't refer to Finns. It doesn't
00:18:48.720refer to Greeks. It doesn't refer to Slavs. It means Gallo-Roman. It is used as a term meaning
00:18:57.720foreigner in a few kennings, but it does not mean foreigners in general, okay? That's important.
00:19:04.640It gets loaned into Slavic words, like, I believe it's pronounced Wachu, is the Polish name for
00:21:00.540becomes in words that were loaned into Proto-Germanic before 500 BC this is why
00:21:08.520the raw German term for Emperor is Kaiser and not high cell because to stopped
00:21:17.100somewhere around 100 BC so Germanic peoples referred to themselves by tribal
00:21:22.980names you can take the picture off Nick they refer to themselves by tribal names
00:21:27.120which are usually in reference to a weapon, an animal, a hairstyle. They called themselves as a
00:21:32.560whole, Theudo, which means the race, the ethnos, the people. This is where Dutch, Deutsch, Diech,
00:21:39.840and Dieet come from. The king of Rohan in Lord of the Rings is Theoden. That name is actually a
00:21:46.480title that means leader of the race. The modern English cognate would be Theed if we used it today.
00:21:53.040All right, 600 BC. So we have this really complicated Celtic civilization, and 60 BC, not 600 BC. We have this very powerful, very wealthy, complicated, technologically advanced Celtic civilization, and at the periphery is this group of Germanics.
00:22:12.140A guy by the name of Ariovistus leads the Suebi and conquers the Gallic Idwi tribe west of the Rhine.0.92
00:22:23.400He unites a coalition of Eastern Celts and the Germanics against the Western Celts.0.81
00:22:30.900So if you kind of cut France down the middle, East France and Germany against West France.
00:22:37.340He is a highly Celticized Germanic leader.
00:22:41.060He had two wives, one Germanic and one Celtic, Gaulish.
00:22:45.920Both would be murdered by Roman soldiers.
00:22:49.260Caesar portrays him as a hostile tyrant in order to justify his illegal banditry in Gaul.
00:22:59.580Ergo, Caesar's crimes in Rome were justified.
00:23:01.900So, TLDR, Caesar breaks the law in Rome and then leaves with an army so that he can go steal gold from Gaul, so that he can then go back to Rome and pay off everyone that hated him.
00:23:16.940I'm greatly summarizing this because this isn't about Rome at the end of the day.
00:23:24.320Okay, so there's an ironic possibility that Ariovistus is actually trying to do the same thing from his side of the Rhine.
00:23:31.900As I said, he wrangled together a Gallo-Germanic coalition against the wealthier west half of the Gaulish groups.
00:23:41.360So there's a kind of an ironic possibility that he was trying to gather up enough money and arms to deal with the inevitability of Roman incursion.
00:23:49.380Because the Romans and the Germanics know about each other before this point, but they're not coming to blows, really.
00:23:57.920The Germanics are one of these strange peoples on the periphery of the world, as far as the Romans are concerned, for quite a long time before this happens.
00:24:07.040So, when Caesar goes to Gaul, the big fight is Caesar versus Ariovistus.
00:24:16.040Both sides end up using Gauls as meat shields against the other.
00:24:20.240In 55 BC, Caesar builds the first bridges across the Rhine, which is a big river.
00:24:25.620In 54 BC, Ariovistus is dead and his family have been murdered by Roman soldiers.
00:24:31.14049 BC, Caesar leads an army into Rome.
00:24:34.48044 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar dies on March 15th, the so-called Ides of March.
00:24:42.36030 BC, Gaius Octavius Caesar Augustus visits Alexander's tomb to celebrate emperorship.
00:24:49.880But as an aside, Gaius Octavius Caesar Robustus means the eighth guy named Gaius in the Caesar family, the great one.
00:25:00.060So, anyways, 30 BC, Augustus visits Alexander's tomb to celebrate his emperorship.
00:25:08.32027 BC, Marcus Licinius Carassus is given a triumph for defeating the Celto-Germano-Sarmatian Bastarnae in Thrace,
00:25:16.780the first post-Caesar real Germanic conflict with Rome. Thrace is the area that is today
00:25:26.320kind of the north of the part north of Greece of the Balkans. 22 BC Augustus steps down as consul
00:25:36.820in order to acquire greater power. 19 BC Augustus steps back up as general consul for life
00:25:45.060effectively making him de facto leader of everything for the rest of his life.
00:26:10.260394 AD, the hearth of Vesta is doused.0.92
00:26:12.960410 AD, Alaric invades Rome and strips it of its wealth as part of his rule as a Byzantine government official
00:26:19.080in order to fuel his political career in Byzantium.
00:26:25.620475, Orestes, the Byzantine stooge in Ravenna, names his son Romulus Augustus,
00:26:32.820which literally means the little August Roman, as emperor.
00:26:38.460However, 476 AD, a year later, Orestes refuses to pay his Germanic soldiers, classic blunder.
00:26:46.460Odoacer, their leader, rebels, defeats Orestes in battle, takes the city of Ravenna, and declares himself reix.
00:26:54.000The Senate in Rome submits to the rule of Zeno, the Byzantine emperor, shirking the then-in-exile Julius Nepos.
00:27:02.600Zeno then declares Odoacer to be a patricius and the duxitaliae.
00:27:08.340So at this point, the Western Roman Empire is gone because there's no one claiming to be the Western Roman Emperor.
00:27:13.400There is now a king of Italy and a duxitaliae, which basically means military goon in charge of place.
00:27:21.300So we have here about 500 years between Rome's first contact with the Germanics and the Germanics completely steamrolling Italy.
00:27:32.700Arminius is what begins that process.0.97
00:27:36.240I'm going to take a sip of my tea if you want to say something, sir.
00:27:41.720No, other than it's fascinating, I'm glad that we're getting such a detailed timeline of Roman history.
00:27:50.900I think a lot of people are very familiar in the periphery of the basic concept,
00:27:55.860but i think that understanding the timeline and like the key events is something a lot
00:28:01.780of people probably don't have readily accessible to them in their in their mind and the reason i
00:28:07.700want to do this massive timeline is to emphasize a few things much later in this this lecture
00:28:15.940as there's a crossover isn't there some of the stuff you were just saying i think you've said
00:28:20.740before i know you've talked about some of the theodosius and stuff yeah theodosius i i shouldn't
00:28:28.660have said theodosius is antifa's theodosius seems to have been a personally devout christian but as
00:28:33.780far as the actual christianian christianity versus paganism thing theodosius seems to have just kind
00:28:39.620of let christians do their thing like let uh let people more antifa than him do their thing right
00:28:47.780Right. But he also, Theodosius, was in an odd sense a patron of Asatru due to his relationship with the Thanaric.
00:28:56.440So this is all related. Right. But yes, the importance of this buildup is leading into the why do we care?
00:29:07.460Because it's greater than Arminius won a fight against Varus. Right.
00:29:11.860Okay, Arminius. Let's start with his name. Arminius. In the sources stands one manuscript that has Arminius, which is an obvious scribal error. Also, we have no evidence. Okay, what does that name mean?
00:29:27.440Well, the Armenius theory means the Armenian because he went to Armenia. Romans typically had names, so they would have a personal name like Gaius. A third of Romans are named Gaius, Caius, Gnaeus, or Knaeus.
00:29:47.140then they would have a clan name against this is where we get uh gentile gentilic genteel
00:29:54.960from a clan name like kaiser um julius uh like you julie ungi these kinds of things
00:30:03.760then they would typically take what is called a cognomen literally like their with name this is
00:30:11.000how people actually refer to them it's a nickname but it wasn't the romans had only so many names
00:30:18.820to call people so they came up with cognomene which would be like my friend gaius you know
00:30:24.960the one with the hair that's one theory as to why he's called julius caesar he's gaius of the julie
00:30:31.780you know the one with the hair which is an ironic thing because he was balding roman nobility loved
00:30:38.220taking these self-deprecating uh nicknames they thought it made them folksy like uh cicero0.82
00:30:45.660cicero means chickpea means testicle like that's the slang so you know like you know0.71
00:30:53.180bullsy right if you've ever watched the sopranos that's ancient roman i'm not kidding so0.87
00:31:00.300So they would take these nicknames off of locations that they had glory in.
00:31:09.680He's, you know, the one from Joimini, because he conquered Germans, right?
00:31:13.880So you'd have guys named things like Armenius, Armenicus, you know, the one who went to Armenia.
00:31:21.040There's no evidence that Armenius ever went to Armenia.
00:31:23.600Now, there is a crazy theory that it's a reference to his blue eyes, because there's a mineral Armenium.
00:31:30.300It's a form of Azurite mind in Armenia. We can compare his brother's name later.
00:31:35.880There's another theory that it's actually of Etruscan origin, but there's no evidence that he hung out in Etruria either.
00:31:45.140Later German romantic nationalists called him Hermann to claim him as theirs, but his name probably wasn't Hariamannas, that H that begins Hermann.
00:31:57.920The ancestor of that is actually pronounced H, which is why I said it was Walchaz.
00:32:05.600That H sound is translated into Latin with a CH.
00:33:54.140the more historically attested arminius is the name assigned to him by you know by his greatest foes
00:34:03.100and playing with the linguistics i make no claim that you know that's what his mom named him but
00:34:11.480that is what he's come down to in the history of his country and then looking back fondly and
00:34:16.700remembering him and so that's what i felt honored him the best and that's why we went with it but
00:34:24.620some people ask you know why this and not that and that was kind of the reasoning it's lacking
00:34:29.080something else i went with the german nationalist um conception because he fought for german
00:34:37.240nationalism and to be clear calling him herman or haman is not wrong i'm not saying you shouldn't
00:34:44.040call him that but to be clear but to be clear that's something that the germans in the 1800s
00:34:51.800picked yes that's likely entirely modern yeah there's speculation on like
00:34:58.200what mama herman named him we don't have a cool oath ring saying you know on this day prince
00:35:12.440son of segameraz did this defeating rome we that's not that's what i'm getting at here right
00:35:17.960Okay. So on to his origins. He was born 1817 BC to the Cheruskian king Segemer. I'm also not going to call them the Cheruski for just ease.
00:35:30.160The name Cheruski probably either means the people of the deer from Herut or the people of the sword from Heru.
00:35:38.560The name is confirmed by the Greek transliteration of Kerus.
00:48:28.060So, tribe is a word that academics use to refer to any kind of political situation in which kinship is relevant and they don't feel like figuring out what's actually going on.
00:48:38.960Tribe does not mean ooga-booga simple.
00:48:48.960The same qualifications of what is a tribe makes Athens a tribe.
00:48:54.400tribe comes i've talked about this before and i'll say it again tribe comes from the latin
00:49:00.840tribus which means third because rome was divided between the uh latins the sabines and the uh
00:49:09.500the third group i'm brain farting the etruscans excuse me and okay we're all one city now you
00:49:19.160guys are going to go over there and you're going to take care of yourselves so like the tribe of
00:49:23.680the Sabines was a tribal institution that took care of the Sabines, because there was not an
00:49:29.780institution that took care of the Sabines as far as the Etruscans and the Latins were concerned.
00:49:35.520So as an aside, in medieval Iceland, kinship was reckoned by descent from a common ancestor,
00:49:42.220and your kin was everyone who radiated out of that nine generations back shared ancestor.
00:49:48.280This is not how it works in mainland Scandinavia, where kinship was based on tribal membership, because everyone was, it just wasn't feasible to bind people together by, like, a common ancestor, because the common ancestor was, like, dozens of generations back.
00:51:41.540But Segemer being the first of his tribe, it means he's the leader of an independent ethno-republic.
00:51:46.640These are Germanics we're talking about, so we know from elsewhere that he would have had supreme military, economic, and religious power and authority.
00:51:53.580But his rule would have been for the good of his people.
00:51:56.120His position's title was probably something like Theodanas.
00:51:59.680Thus, Segemer's alliance with Rome would bind the entirety of the Cherusky to it.0.56
00:52:04.600to be Cherusky involved to be an ally with Rome.
00:52:08.140It's not immediately stated in the sources why the Cherusky allied with Rome.
00:52:12.960Segemer's position was based on essentially benefiting the Cheruskyan people.
00:52:17.100He would not have been democratically elected, but he had to keep the elites happy or they'd kill him, right?0.89
00:52:24.700So the swiftness with which the Cherusky allied with Drusus,0.80
00:52:28.600combined with the fact that their meeting actually occurs when the Cherusky ambushed Drusus' army,0.71
00:52:34.060right and then segamer immediately sending his sons to rome both of them mind you leads me to
00:52:40.420believe that segamer essentially demanded to be made a roman ally at spear point this would have
00:52:45.600given great wealth and status to the cheruscian nobility they had first mover advantage the
00:52:50.780cherusci were basically the first germanics to ally with rome so this plugs them deep deep deep
00:52:57.320deep into the Roman apparatus. The Cheruscian nobility probably wanted this. They probably
00:53:04.860sat down, saw what Caesar and friends were doing in Gaul, and said, let's benefit from this.
00:53:11.920Segemer, as the Theodenos, would have done what was best for his people, which was ally with Rome.
00:53:19.600So, keep that in mind. The Cheruscian nobility are pressuring Segemer to ally with the Romans. Segemer isn't necessarily a cultural Romanophile. He shows back up, so keep him in mind.
00:53:35.840the man himself. Arminius was born around 18 to 17 BC. He would serve for six years in the Roman
00:53:43.980military, which granted him Roman citizenship at, you know, 4 AD. Remember, Roman citizenship
00:53:53.280is a big deal then, along with the status of equus. As a citizen, Arminius was in. He was
00:53:59.940legally and economically Roman, and could even bring matters to the forum for settlement. So he0.88
00:54:05.360went to like the real courts he didn't go to like the the silly little you know oh you'll get justice
00:54:13.160don't worry peasant we'll make sure no he went to like the courts for people who matter to be an0.87
00:54:19.500equite which really means like a horseman required a minimum amount of wealth that was quite
00:54:25.000substantial so him being made an equite not only implied political standing but also substantial
00:54:30.140wealth that was accessible to the roman economy he could buy and sell in the forum because he had
00:54:35.820money money not just like gold back home in germany he was a knight yes knight is how this
00:54:42.860is turned and translated rich horsemen rich mounted cavalrymen the one of the things that i think is
00:54:52.620often glossed over or missed when people you know just have a brief understanding it's not like he
00:55:01.740was just a germanic tribesman that was you know emerged out of the woods in in 9 a.d
00:55:10.140no he was an accomplished like member of roman society he had status he had he was a professional
00:55:17.500he was some he was somebody he wasn't just you know a barbarian on the fringe he he had
00:55:25.100you know his his official roman status matters and it's why when uh spawn um painted his uh
00:55:36.620or i guess arded i don't know if actual painting was involved but came up with the um
00:55:42.300The arc we used for today's show and that we kind of use for him, it has him in, you know, a substantial amount of his Roman war gear is, you know, he was a Roman warrior of note, not just reputation wise, but also like actual status within the empire.
00:56:03.540within the empire arminius was fluent in latin he could not have achieved these statuses without
00:56:10.420being fluent in latin just for clarity here he would have been fluent in roman culture and
00:56:15.800religion he could not achieve the the status of citizen and equite without that to be clear
00:56:21.180about the armor remember at this time that the roman military equipment is stuff that they saw
00:56:29.680Gaul's wearing and got from Gaul. And at this time, the Romans are looking at the stuff the
00:56:37.900Germanics wear and are saying, wow, we need to get ourselves some of these Germans so they can0.99
00:56:43.840make us this stuff. The Roman military machine is not materially sophisticated in comparison to the1.00
00:56:52.820Gauls and the Germanics. What makes the Roman military machine so good at this point is that
00:57:00.620they have a massive plantation society designed to funnel food into cities to make lots and lots0.96
00:57:08.200and lots of Romans. The Roman military regime, Roman military supremacy was based on being able
00:57:16.060to funnel romans to wherever they wanted consistently so you'll you'll see at this
00:57:22.240time a lot of these conflicts like the romans will send like the sixth legion and the seventh0.71
00:57:26.900legion and there'll be this big fight with the herduri and then that's it the herduri are done0.97
00:57:32.820for because they used up every man they could win or lose for the battle for the romans they just0.84
00:57:39.680said a-o bada-bing bada-boom who wants to make some money going and getting in a fight and another
00:57:44.60010 000 people signed up for the draft right that's not because they have like super cool swords
00:57:51.260let's be clear here so um flowers was also given these distinctions although we're told much less
00:57:58.900about him as a character these positions of status would imply a great familiarity with latin blah
00:58:04.760blah i already said that we are told by roman writers a few things about arminius he was brave
00:58:11.060He was intelligent. He was alert and had striking eyes that belied a powerful mind.
00:58:17.320A focus on Arminius's mind and his eyes is very common in Latin literature about him.
00:58:25.400Arminius is not dumb. Roman writers do not think Arminius is dumb.0.91
00:58:30.960In fact, they almost kind of think he's too smart, right?0.99
00:58:34.920He was not a fool or an oaf who bungled into importance.
00:58:37.800his brother uh being named blondie flowers lends credence to the idea that he had blonde hair he0.66
00:58:44.620probably had blonde hair and blue eyes like he's a german at this time you know that's what they
00:58:49.360look like so i'm gonna pause for a sec over in the chat cfay uh 713 says matt i just wanted to
00:58:58.760let you know that your voice is soothing and reminds me of a father reading stories to me
01:04:35.900Rome is willing to sacrifice places like Germany to deal with Illyria.0.78
01:04:40.300Although it's not as romanticized as other revolts,
01:04:43.280the Romans saw this as the single most important thing of their time,
01:04:47.600akin to a long-standing enemy finally rearing its head
01:04:50.480because it finally was one single enemy.
01:04:54.120You can throw up the third map, Nick, map, Nick.
01:04:58.160The Illyrians actually assembled enough troops in sufficient quality and quantity to march into Greece, which they took.0.84
01:05:06.960They then prepared to attack Italy.0.89
01:05:15.700OK, so Illyria is really close to Italy.
01:05:20.900um we will see we'll have some we need some like elevator music pauses i feel bad i'm sorry nick0.90
01:05:31.520okay so the illyrians butchered roman colonists they sacked greece if you're wondering okay0.57
01:05:41.760greece is everything that matters because athens and sparta and then alexander the0.94
01:05:46.200great conquerors of the world and then rome why does greece start mattering or stop mattering
01:05:51.960part of that is because of this right so culturally there is a native revival of illyrian culture
01:05:59.480this is a very common theme with the romans you can see this archaeology archaeologically like
01:06:06.120rome is in power roman stuff is cool rome is out of power go back to nativism
01:06:12.640so so great was this conflict that augustus actually instituted a draft of all free men
01:06:20.000and not like literally all of them but you know like hey there's a draft now
01:06:23.580something that had not been done since canine modern authors generally view this period in
01:06:30.280arminius's life as one of cynical calculation rome was overextended stretched thin and organized
01:06:38.200barbarian forces, which again, remember, barbarian means not Greek, not Roman. It does not mean
01:06:46.180unsophisticated. Remember that at the same time that the Romans think that Germans are barbarians,
01:06:54.580they are desperately trying to get as many of them to come to Italy as they can
01:06:58.640to make armor and weapons, because German armor and weapons are better than Italian armor and
01:07:04.700weapons at this time. So organized barbarian forces could fight against
01:07:09.620Rome and take significant amounts of of territory with them when they started
01:07:15.560rising up. So modern authors view this as a cynical calculation on Arminius's
01:07:25.340part. Rome was overextended, he could get power. Thus Arminius saw his chance to
01:07:31.460attack Rome and attain power by doing so. This is not what I would say is the correct way to look
01:07:38.340at the matter. The problem with this is that it relies upon an overly detached academic
01:07:43.000interpretation of the tale and rejects both the Roman and German point of view, and indeed the
01:07:49.080textual sources in favor of the so-called, in favor of the so-called objective first-person
01:07:54.800point of view, reject this. From the perspective of a Cheruscian auxilia fighting in Pannonia,
01:08:01.760a few things would be obvious, and not merely that Barbaria could beat Italia. The first is
01:08:07.840that the Cherusci were being used as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy. Remember, Rome pulled
01:08:15.120troops out of Germania to move them to Illyria. Rome had imported Germanic troops, or more so,
01:08:22.800exported troops from Germania to Illyria and then moved troops from Italia into Germania.
01:08:31.120So while they're trying to put down a conquest or a resistance in Illyria, they actually engage
01:08:38.240in an attempted conquest of Germania and the Illyrians are so good at fighting that they
01:08:43.200have to pull troops that were supposed to be there to fight Germans out to send them to Illyria.
01:08:48.720entire legions that had been scheduled to fight and conquer Germanic tribes were moved quite
01:08:55.260hastily down to Illyria. Those legions were supposed to fight civilians. They were not
01:09:02.100supposed to fight soldiers. The second thing that would be apparent to a Cherbuskyan auxilia0.98
01:09:06.840is that the Romans were keen on destroying the Illyrians as a coherent people.0.87
01:09:11.740The Illyrians had come together as a united front and cast off Roman culture and norms.0.84
01:09:16.020In return, they were to be destroyed, as the Carthaginians had been.0.96
01:09:20.040The survivors would then be harvested, literally, they would be enslaved and worked to death.0.98
01:09:25.980They would be scattered to the wind and ground up as biomass for fields and factories.
01:09:30.920Because of how tightly the Roman religion was interwoven into the Roman state, and given how tightly the converse was true in Illyria and Germania,
01:09:38.420the cultural revolution that was at play here would be obvious to them in ways that would be missed on us today.
01:09:44.220Okay, she says, let me just sketch for you a little, imagine this, consider if your hometown was conquered by China, and upon the cessation of military hostilities, in order to vote for either of the CCP-approved candidates, you had to burn an incense stick to the Buddha before declaring eternal loyalty to communism and then kneeling before an altar of Qin Shi Huang, the more loyal you were to China, the more traditional American culture you were allowed to retain.
01:10:10.820In the Roman system, the more wealthy and powerful you were, the more native you
01:10:19.460could be. The poorer you were, the more Romanized you were. While the Roman1.00
01:10:25.340practice of religious syncretism was on its face and nominally more accepting of
01:10:29.540foreign, foreign to the Romans, of foreign religiosity when compared to
01:10:33.140Abrahamic religion, in reality a subtle intolerance is present. When Rome came to
01:10:38.900your land, you had to worship Jupiter. You would worship Jupiter. If you knelt to Rome willingly,
01:10:45.180you got to worship Jupiter, who was coincidentally also your native religion's god-king.
01:10:49.020If you did not kneel to Rome willingly, you simply worship Jupiter the Roman way,
01:10:53.900because he had sent his chosen people, the Romans, to tame you.0.96
01:10:57.340So, while the Cheruscian auxilia under Arminius are helping destroy the Illyrians,0.55
01:11:10.200they would be noticing that the Romans were planning on doing the exact same thing to them,
01:11:14.820and it had only been stopped by this, from the Germanic perspective,
01:11:18.480freak uprising of this other people scheduled for deconstruction.
01:12:17.220that one this is illyria so you'll notice that from the south they can just march into thrace
01:12:24.960thrace is let me see there we go thrace is this part of greece here right they marched into thrace
01:12:33.060and took like hellas too they then turned their troops around and they are literally on the
01:12:40.440border with modern Italy. So Rome is really like a few days march from the Illyrian territories.
01:12:50.360The Illyrians could bring an army to the city of Rome a lot easier than the Carthaginians could.0.86
01:12:56.540Can you bring up the next map? The Illyrian revolt one, the fourth one, that one. This just shows kind
01:13:03.200of the breakdown of the territory here. You'll notice part of what makes this so difficult is
01:13:08.040that the the Illyrian rebels are in a very mountainous region so they are in
01:13:13.660an extremely defensible position having a native revolt against a hostile
01:13:19.280foreign power that is essentially trying to destroy their culture and religion
01:13:23.880and again the Romans were more tolerant than modern Abrahamic religion but by
01:13:29.320this point the Romans were getting sick of 200 years of war against the Illyrian
01:13:32.980rebels so they were just done with this
01:13:36.800Flawis would remain in Pannonia, fighting until 9 AD, when he would lose an eye in the Siege of Andetrium.
01:13:44.400Arminius, however, returned to Germania somewhere around 6-7 AD.
01:13:49.300He would have arrived with a personal retinue of loyal retainers, numbering somewhere between 500 and 1,000 men.
01:13:56.300He would have arrived rich. He would have arrived with great status.
01:14:00.300He would have arrived with experience as a leader of men.
01:14:03.000He would have arrived with a vision for what a united Germania could look like.
01:14:06.600in comparison to a united Italia and a united Illyria.
01:14:11.380Because remember, Arminius not only knows what the Roman government looks like, but also the Illyrian one.
01:14:18.240He would have been intimately familiar with the political and bureaucratic machinery necessary to make these structures happen.
01:14:26.060At some point during the Pannonian conflict, Arminius decided that a line needed to be drawn between Italia and Germania, lest there be no more Germania.
01:14:36.600All right, let's talk about what the auxilia were. So in the Roman army, auxilia were usually ethnically cohesive military forces, sometimes from even a singular tribe within an ethnos.
01:14:48.680This meant that they lacked the massive provisioning system that could be used to provide the Roman economy's supply lines.
01:14:54.920However, it meant that they were light, nimble, usually equipped with missile weaponry and given substantial freedom to prosecute a conflict as they saw fit.
01:15:02.580They fought for glory and wealth and would use that wealth to equip and provision themselves as necessary for the conflict at hand.
01:15:09.980This altogether meant that they were essentially professional guerrilla fighters who could interface with line infantry as per a commander's needs.
01:15:18.160Again, there were usually about 500 to 1,000 men in an auxilia unit.
01:15:23.040This is where we get the term auxiliary from.
01:15:26.440Arminius and Flawis holding the status of equite has another important meaning, horsemanship.
01:15:32.180The Germanics, much to the bafflement of modern academics, were known for being fantastic horsemen.
01:15:37.860Thus, the auxilia that they, as high-ranking Cherisky and noblemen, led were probably actually cavalrymen.
01:15:44.440While they were not likely to be heavy cavalry at this time, yes, they're knights, but they don't wear heavy suits of armor, right?
01:15:52.940they would be mounted troops nonetheless, and they at minimum would have had a number of
01:15:59.600mounted troops in their contingent. This would necessitate great wealth and social standing
01:16:04.840amongst the troops that Arminius and Flavius were leading in order for them to be cavalry units.
01:16:10.940So the auxilia that Arminius and Flavius led were probably the sons of nobility lesser than them,
01:16:15.980but still no milady so again arminius is not an ooga booga primitive in the woods wearing like
01:16:23.820furs and ash and stuff he is a mounted horseman bedecked in what the world considers to be that
01:16:32.380the most advanced military technology of the day cavalry units actually had more than one horse per
01:16:39.740person so that you could swap out horses as you went through your your endeavors so arminius is
01:16:46.460actually leading a very powerful contingent of extremely wealthy and important people
01:16:51.660and they're all his boys they are cheruski who have served under him they have been in the thick
01:16:58.940of it with him and they will have been with him when he's been coming home from being with romans
01:17:05.820and were probably vented about what these gabagoo mafiosos were going to do to the Germans.
01:17:12.820So, the 500 to 1,000 men that Armenians commanded were not just a private military, but they were loyalists.
01:17:21.820They were loyalists who had been through what he had, they were downstream of his ideals, they were Germanic men, they were not just mercenaries.
01:17:29.820These were loyal thanes whose social position and indeed religious position in the eyes of the gods was determined by their tribe and their lord and their loyalty to both.
01:17:42.160Arminius being the son of the Theudanas meant he was more than just a lord.
01:17:46.620He was the future of the tribe, its people, and its faith.
01:17:49.960There would come a day when Segimer would pass his position to Arminius, and that meant Tubichuruski meant Arminius.
01:18:00.780so kind of an interjection here also with the nomenclature some people like why do you call him
01:18:07.900prince termine he should be chieftain he's this and that they wouldn't again he would not have
01:18:14.060called himself prince but the combination of the latin proto prince and the literal he was destined
01:18:26.780to be the leader of his tribe led me to feel that was an appropriate titling to give him trying to
01:18:35.020style people with what the title would be in a way that's legible and understandable to the audience
01:18:42.700is a part of it so that's kind of part of the thought process of why we went with that for his
01:18:49.020for his titling and to be fair like we do have to translate things in terms people understand to a
01:18:57.660degree if we called him because in in early germanic languages you would put someone's
01:19:05.580title after their name right so you'd have like olafra in norse right you still do that in modern
01:19:11.420Icelandic as well. So if we did that, if we called him
01:19:14.820Haryamannas Theudanas, people would think his name was
01:19:19.500Theudanas, the Hermannas, which is not true.
01:19:23.400That's not correct. And they would have no idea who we're talking about.
01:19:27.860Prince Hermann of the Cherusky is someone people know about.
01:19:33.100when Arminius arrived, while Arminius arrived home with a
01:19:38.560substantial and devoutly personally loyal private military force of Cheruscian noble sons,
01:19:43.580he would not have been able to take on the Romans with just a thousand horsemen. He would need the
01:19:48.080backing of large segments of the Germanic and specifically Cheruscian population. However,
01:19:53.200a portion of the Cherusci remained fast allies of the Roman imperial machine and were no doubt
01:19:58.240tightly plugged into it, securing great wealth for themselves by doing so. Opposition to Rome
01:20:05.480would have made enemies amongst the Cheruski. Luckily, Arminius had other Germanic tribes to1.00
01:20:11.080recruit from. So I want to talk for a brief moment here about the question that might be on some
01:20:17.760people's minds, was Arminius an oathbreaker? And I'm not a godhi, so I can't opine on the theology
01:20:24.100of that, but I'm going to make, I do not believe so, on the grounds that he personally did not
01:20:29.680were an oath to the Romans. His father made a contract of phoedratus with the Romans. So
01:20:39.140in the later period, 300s into 500s, you hear a lot about phoedrati, and that involves the
01:20:49.760settlement of a Germanic tribe on Italian or Greek or Thrasian or Anatomian land.
01:20:56.040At the time of Arminius, however, the diplomatic treaty that was made was a contract between two sovereign states.
01:21:06.160So when the Cherusky and the Roman polities make a diplomatic agreement, this is like Germany and France shaking and declaring a truce and saying, diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy.
01:21:21.660Yes, the Cherusky are much smaller than the Romans, but the Romans were actually viewing these people as a, like, a theoretically co-equal population.0.72
01:21:32.760The Romans actually had an entire priesthood whose job it was to interface with foreign groups, the Peregrini, sorry, the Fethils, the Peregrini, anyways, the Fethil Brotherhood.
01:21:48.060so the phoederati like the arminius flowers segamer they did not swear an oath of like loyalty
01:21:56.580to augustus they entered into a negotiable treaty mediated by on the roman end the fetal brotherhood
01:22:04.680who were essentially diplomat priests we're never told in any of the latin literature about arminius
01:22:10.520being an oath breaker if you read english translations betray stab in the back these
01:22:17.440words are used, but in the Latin, I checked the Latin, I checked the Latin, we're never told that
01:22:22.500Arminius betrayed the Romans. He struck at them. He attacked them. He laid them low. He defeated
01:22:28.740them. He waged war. He didn't betray. So the Romans had no problem breaking these diplomatic
01:22:40.100treaties. They did all the time. From the Roman perspective, these treaties were only binding
01:22:45.180and to be upheld in as much as they continue to be useful for Rome.
01:22:50.320It is worth noting, and we will talk about a bit of this in a little bit,
01:22:55.920but it's worth noting that while the Romans,
01:23:00.300after having signed a treaty of non-aggression against the Rome,
01:23:04.320with the Cherusky, the Romans continued to engage in hostile action against the Cherusky,
01:23:11.140against cheruski civilians like roman armies marched into germania and attacked people on
01:23:17.920their farmsteads hostile action right um the roman authors who tell us about most of all of this go
01:23:28.700so far at times as to defend arminius against the cruelty of drusus and later varus or their0.73
01:23:35.560foolishness the foolishness of drusus and varus or they'll talk about how amazing arminius was
01:23:40.740and thus how trusted he was arminius was amazing so he was trusted because he deserved to be0.98
01:23:46.900trusted and then these buffoons drusus and varus screwed it all up another thing that ends up
01:23:54.100happening uh showing up in the literature later is that there were omens from jupiter that were
01:23:58.020missed so like oh my god oh my jupiter why did this happen roman failure right arminius is not
01:24:07.220portrayed as this like malicious guy in the shadows the romans don't do that um to a degree
01:24:15.760this was simply a roman attitude to barbarians that they can't be trusted hey oh look what we
01:24:21.980got the fun trusting of this guy but throughout the sources there are a lot of hints that the
01:24:26.500romans at some level understood that they had misbehaved and the cheruscian resistance was
01:24:31.160merited even cassius dio even i'm almost done here so real quick i just want to sorry i'm
01:24:36.980a thing, I don't want to go. Cassius Dio even goes so far as to chastise Varus for not only treating
01:24:41.940the Cherusci as slaves, despite being free people with the Romans held as co-equals, but going so
01:24:49.780far as to forcibly extract wealth from them as if they were a militarily subjected nation. The
01:24:55.380Cherusci willingly entered into a diplomatic alliance with Rome, and they were betrayed by
01:25:02.420men like Varus and Drusus. They were diplomatic and political allies. No one man swore an oath.
01:25:10.180One thing is clear. The Romans in retrospect saw themselves as having been splashed by scandal
01:25:16.180here at the Germanics. As an aside, the legions in Germania that had been pulled out to fight in
01:25:23.220Illyria were planning on making an unprovoked attack on the civilians that were led by the
01:25:31.220Marco Mani chieftain Marobodwas. We'll get to him in a bit.
01:25:51.620This was something that was done because Augustus needed money.
01:25:57.140augustus was trying to harvest the germanics to pay people and bribe them drusus and varus were
01:26:04.980agents of that plan so when cassius dio is chastising varus he's doing the thing where you
01:26:14.420chastise the chinese emperor's favorite eunuch as a way of chastising the chinese emperor
01:26:20.500without getting yourself in big trouble go on sir no i was just going to say that is the
01:26:27.360the tradition when you read the literature it's not the treachery of armenius and it's
01:26:33.960it's telling you know at the risk of spoiler alert um augustus doesn't pace the halls of the
01:26:42.240of the palace you know saying damn you armenius he says rest give me back my legions it's not a0.58
01:26:50.500this external guy did something bad to us or betrayed us it's how come our people didn't0.97
01:26:55.940do better with this why weren't our generals able to be successful it was never
01:27:04.180in any of the right of the writing of the time that i've read or encountered it's never
01:27:11.380it's never that he's shady or villainous it's that he's a respected foe that bested them and
01:27:17.860they're mad about that but they're mad that they lost not mad that that he you know somehow violated
01:27:24.900some understanding or some trust it's oh my mars how could we have screwed this up this0.88
01:27:32.980guy was so amazing think of how many other barbarians he could have killed for us and0.61
01:27:38.180then we made and we we screwed it up and made him go do this little nationalist revival thing0.62
01:27:43.940this is such a big problem on our part. So the Tudorburg Forest Battle. You can bring up the
01:27:53.960Tudorburg, the fifth map, Nick. So three legions, approximating about 18,000 men total, were left
01:28:01.860in Germania. There were another two legions, about 12,000 men, in southwest Germania, a distance
01:28:09.140away. The larger force was led by a man by the name of Publius Quinctilius Varos. Varos had
01:28:18.640ruled in Germania as a wicked tyrant, raising villages and enslaving huge numbers of people,
01:28:24.280making many enemies by waging war on any tribe that caught his eye. The Germanic peoples at0.90
01:28:29.460this time lived in a sort of suburban village life, carving fields out of the forests as needed.
01:28:34.960although they had few urban centers. They were essentially everywhere in Germany.
01:28:39.820They had a very diverse selection of crops that they farmed. They ate large
01:28:44.140amounts of meat and dairy by ancient standards, not by
01:28:47.720modern standards, due to large-scale and widespread animal husbandry.
01:28:51.460Communication and organization of these omnipresent villages was done along
01:28:55.200kinship lines, and women, because women and less so, but still it happened, men,
01:29:00.760would journey from their home village to another to be wed. These Germanic0.52
01:29:04.900villages were ruled by ethno-republican tribal governments and the personal feudal regimes of
01:29:09.600warlords. It was these structures that Rome allied itself with. So when you hear about, you know,
01:29:17.160ancient Germanic tribesmen respected their women, that's partially because the women of these
01:29:23.140Germanic tribes were, in a sense, the diplomatic engines of this society. They were the ones who
01:29:30.160be in contact between tribes right um as an aside the typical germanic dwelling was a large hall
01:29:38.400sometimes called a long house because you can just make them extend infinitely these were owned by a
01:29:45.040patriarch and housed him his extended family and their animals who were usually kept it usually
01:29:51.120they'd be cut in half and half of the long house would be like a bar and the other half would be
01:29:54.560the house um exterior sheds or huts for the housing of tools and possibly animals were also
01:30:01.040common however the germanic longhouse even excluding the barn portion would have been far
01:30:06.960larger than dwellings than the dwellings of most romans but of course they'd be much smaller than
01:30:12.800the luxurious mansions and villas of the romans the germanic peoples had a far more egalitarian
01:30:23.040terms of wealth society than the romans did the average germanic tribesman was a lot wealthier
01:30:28.720than the average roman sit roman i almost said citizen but just person in rome not the average
01:30:34.480roman citizen citizen matters here's a term um so a modern parallel here would be that of varus
01:30:44.480uh varus is the guy tasked with managing germany to be clear he has three legions he's marching
01:30:50.160through germany he's attacking civilians as he goes he's essentially walking his army into a
01:30:55.760random suburb of an allied nation to punish it because members of a totally separate hostile
01:31:01.040nation sued for peace in an unrelated conflict and then he had his soldiers enter the houses0.65
01:31:06.880of non-hostile citizens of this allied state remove people from their homes beat the snot out0.52
01:31:12.720of them enslave them steal their stuff and then burn their houses down remember he's doing this
01:31:18.160two rome's allies i'm kind of skipping over why varus is marching through germany at this time
01:31:23.680it's not really important because he's attacking roman allies the cruelty of drusus and varus was
01:31:31.440so great that even roman authors comment on it as being foolish what's more we are told that these
01:31:37.280two men attempted to enforce roman laws upon the germanics and that the germanics did play ball
01:31:42.640It was Varus and Drusus that misbehaved here by themselves breaking those laws and not allowing for the Germanics to have proper redress when they came to Roman courts of law, as Varus and Drusus had broken Roman laws.
01:31:58.940Several years prior, it certainly must have weighed on Arminius that while he was off helping annihilate another nation much like his own, his nation was being oppressed by the very same sort of man he was working to repose upon the illiterates.0.74
01:32:11.760So I want to make it clear. We are told by the Romans that Germanic tribesmen went to Roman courts of law to seek redress for crimes against Romans and were denied a right.
01:32:24.320They were given by treaties that the Cherusky and the Romans had signed, right?0.97
01:32:29.980So the Romans are treating the Cherusky like crap.
01:32:32.760So, in the fall of 9 AD, three years after Arminius had returned home, Varus intended0.91
01:32:40.880to march his three legions from their northern outpost to the southern post holding the two
01:37:55.200But the point, okay, whatever he looks like in the statue.
01:38:00.4001875, Kaiser Wilhelm I, the first German emperor to rule over a unified German empire.
01:38:07.880As a big middle finger to France and Napoleon, he erects this big statue of the founder of the German nation, as he was called.
01:38:16.780he has peach fuzz in it he's got a tiny tiny little scruff this was supposed to be where
01:38:23.180the battle took place it's actually about a hundred kilometers to the northwest of where the
01:38:27.940the humans necmal is but it's semantics it's the same forest right um it's worth noting that
01:38:36.960archaeology indicates that this conflict actually spread out quite a bit towards the present day
01:38:42.360area of cotycles and it took place over several days so we like to think of this as like one
01:38:47.880single epic fight this was kind of a shorter than a week you know like a prolonged effort
01:38:53.400the romans had enough time to form a sort of wagon encampment to try and defend themselves that way
01:39:01.960um yes this is the statue i'm thinking of and for the record i'm wrong he has a little bit of
01:39:07.640he has a the tiniest indication of some peach fuzz on it if you zoom in
01:39:13.240uh that's what we're arguing about to be fair to be fair i don't know if you can actually see his
01:39:19.640facial hair when you're looking up at that statue no you got you gotta zoom in it's pretty small
01:39:24.680on that one but um yeah that's i had uh on a trip um with uh steve mcnalen
01:39:40.360trying to think what year that was now 2013 anyways long time ago um we were in the
01:39:50.040uh to the burger bald and it was a really cool feeling being there and seeing it and looking out
01:39:57.000over westphalia um it's a really special place oh and a side note another wombat you should still
01:40:08.280join the afa we did not close our membership roles you are welcome to join us at any time
01:40:14.280and i would encourage all of you to do so also another side note while i've duverted the
01:40:19.080conversation we have a request if you are listening to this and you are in las vegas
01:40:26.120nevada or the surrounding environs you should join the afa we've got a member who's very active
01:40:33.640there wants to get you get more people to join we have some members there already and you would love
01:40:38.760to see the activity increase so vegas listeners join the afa anyone else also join the afa and
01:40:48.040And if you are in Michigan, if you're in Michigan or North Indiana or Ohio, particularly Toledo, contact me at csavage at runestone.org, and I would love to talk to you.
01:47:38.640And how, obviously, at that time, all the money was at the churches, and they didn't have warriors there, and they fell very easily via just the shock and awe tactics of the raiders at Lindisfar in 793.
01:47:57.140three but people writing about it later uh the church scribes basically in a very similar way
01:48:08.980they kind of blamed god for it by basically but not in like basically saying basically he let it
01:48:16.100happen that they were that he had removed um their protection or whatever so like he removed
01:48:24.340the thing they really they said like the shield of over the area or something i don't know but
01:48:30.480it's a very similar thing where like the gods let it happen or their god let it happen because they
01:48:36.940did bad yeah no this is a big deal um i'll refer to i'll tell you what the romans call they call
01:48:48.540this event in, like, Roman history in a bit, but, um, upon hearing of the defeat, Augustus broke
01:48:54.980down in a frenzy, banging his head on the wall while yelling, Quintili, warre, legiones, reede!
01:49:01.540Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions. My legions returned them. Immediately, a border
01:49:09.740between Rome and Germania was firmly established. This was where the South ended and where the North0.50
01:49:14.840begun arminius is the supreme religious political and military authority in germania had drawn a
01:49:20.680line in the sand rome would go no further and it would not go any further this this battle actually
01:49:26.480defines pretty much the border between roman civilization and northern europe for a very long
01:49:33.880time and while there are military incursions into germania the romans just give up on taking north
01:49:40.620germania at this point they do not view this as something they can do the defeat is so grievous
01:49:47.440they almost treat it as a religious commandment not to go back up there do not try this again
01:49:53.480right varus we are told fell on his sword as was the customary practice for roman officers who fell
01:50:00.920in the field or failed in the field either that didn't happen and he was captured or his body was
01:50:06.420dragged out of the field, as either way he was beheaded and Arminius sent the head to one of
01:50:12.280Varus' Germanic enemies, Marobodwus, king of the Marcomanni. Remember how I had mentioned earlier
01:50:18.800that Augustus wanted legions in there to destroy the Marcomanni? Until Arminius came back to1.00
01:50:24.840Germania, the big man in Germania was Marobodwus. He was the guy that Augustus saw as being able to
01:50:31.800unify the Germanics against Rome, so Augustus wanted him gone. Augustus was willing to break
01:50:37.380trees, do whatever he could to get rid of Marobodwus. So until Arminius did the Teutoburg0.99
01:50:43.780Forest battle, Marobodwus was the guy in Germania that the Romans wanted gone. So when Arminius
01:50:51.740sends him Varus's head, Varus was the guy tasked with killing Marobodwus, find you. He's making an0.64
01:50:58.660offer of alliance, but also doing like, hey, we're on the same team. We're the same people.
01:51:05.540Look what I've done for you. I've helped you. The Marcomanni were the ones that Augustus had wanted
01:51:12.220the legions to march on and defeat before they were called away to Illyria. The Marcomanni had1.00
01:51:17.680been the victims of Roman aggression in the past, and it actually retreated eastward to avoid future
01:51:22.080conflicts. That wasn't good enough, however, and Augustus still sought to destroy them to remove
01:51:27.620any possibility of Germanic unification, as the Marco Mani were seen as the single greatest threat
01:51:32.000to Roman rule. Undoubtedly, that not being the case must have been one of those missed omens.
01:51:39.660Marobodwis, however, sent the head back to Augustus as a peace offering. Augustus still
01:51:45.220sought the destruction of the Marco Mani, however. This cowardice on Marobodwis' part was itself an
01:51:50.740omen of what was to come. Marobodwis and Armidius would eventually come to blows at some point,
01:51:55.680and Marobodwus would once again flee further east. Roman authors made a point to speak of the
01:52:03.120heinous human sacrifice of the captive Romans, who are assumed to have been exsanguinated,
01:52:09.440hanged, or drowned. Drowning shows up in Roman records as a particularly unique
01:52:14.640Germanic way of executing people. But little archaeological evidence supports that.
01:52:20.560dismembered corpses have been found, and we're told by Roman authors that the bodies and goods
01:52:25.840of this land were festooned across the trees as a warning to those who might come next.
01:52:30.480A warning seems more likely than like blood sacrifice to Wodenaz or something here,
01:52:35.200given the archaeological findings. We're told that the battle site became a sacred
01:52:40.080site for the Germanics, and there is some evidence for this, either literally in the
01:52:44.880asatru of the time or of the civic religion of the germanic peoples later the romans would actually
01:52:52.240find the site and desecrate it it would then be repaired and re-consecrated by germanic tribesmen
01:52:57.760after this like this shows up in the archaeological record there's like three stratas for the battle
01:53:04.080post-battle festivities i guess you could call them desecration re-consecration right so this
01:53:12.560is almost kind of like a mound you can see it as like it's a big grave site but it's also like a
01:53:19.100kind of center of power theudoburgs the races the races hill the people's mountain the fortification
01:53:31.340of the tribe right like literally the hill on which the people made their stand in a certain
01:53:38.080sense do you want to say something sir well i do one of the things that is
01:53:46.480compelling for herman's elevation to ascended hero there's plenty of heroes of our folk and
01:53:57.680great war leaders and people that happened to be also true but one thing that's that's noteworthy
01:54:06.560is the post um the post victory sacrifices sacrifices and trees um i do think sacrifice
01:54:16.720to odin in the trees is an absolute thing that likely occurred um the bog sacrifices would not
01:54:27.360surprise me either at the time depending on you know water sacrifice was known amongst our folk
01:54:35.760in a lot of ways and also the sacrifice of of war gear and it's
01:54:47.520poignant and interesting to me in years to come when they go and examine the battlefield and you
01:54:53.600know do expedition up there and see the uh the remains and the um the things done with the dead
01:55:01.920The fact that it became like a sacred site and a holy place in Germany for the tribesmen elevates this in character to not just be the heroic deeds of a warlord, but also a holy victory with the gods of victory being acknowledged in a more front and center way than in other accounts we have.
01:55:31.920of similar things? So archaeology confirms that at this time a massive
01:55:40.700cultural shift happens in Germania. As Roman culture and social systems recede,
01:55:45.960agricultural monoculture collapses and is replaced by a return to a local
01:55:51.160dietary diversity. So the Germanic peoples had a pretty diverse diet by
01:55:54.520ancient standards. I talked about how they ate a lot of meat and cheese. The
01:55:58.500average italian was despite the wonderful italian cuisine today the average italian back then
01:56:05.300basically subsisted off of grain and very dilute vinegary wine so like when caesar and his men are
01:56:11.860marching through gaul at one point he they run out of grain but they have these huge stores of
01:56:17.620like meat and cheese and vegetables and the soldiers are like hey oh bada bing about a boom
01:56:22.100what's a guy gotta do to get some a pita around here and he almost has to like he has to like
01:56:27.700really pull out some stops to keep the soldiers from just rebelling and going home because they
01:56:31.620literally are they're not going to eat cheese and meat and pears and what no they want they want
01:56:39.240bread right so this is this is a cultural thing for roman supremacy of bread as opposed to
01:56:46.560all the things a germanic tribesman would eat urbanization collapses and is replaced by return
01:56:54.360under the native village suburbanism, I guess you could call it.
01:56:58.360Importation of Roman goods ceases for all but the nobility, it's replaced with local products.
01:57:04.120How much of this is based on a receding of Roman colonists as opposed to taste changes in Germanic peoples themselves is uncertain,
01:57:12.160but the change had to be felt by Germanics, simply because there's just less Roman stuff, right?
01:57:18.960It's worth noting here, the Germanics had actually been importing things from Greece for a very long time, like 500 BC long.
01:57:27.960The Germanics would export iron goods back in like 500 BC, and they would import Greek drinking ware.
01:57:36.960Um, so the Romans refer to this event as the Clades Varian, the Varian disaster, although Clades has connotations of, like, beating, like, like, uh, the whooping, the whooping that Varus got, right?
01:57:57.640So, Arminius, the family man. This is a fun part here.0.89
01:58:04.260Arminius would take a wife, a woman by the name of Thusnelda, which is an obviously a Germanic name, around 14 AD.
01:58:12.060She would bear him a son, Thumelicus. Thusnelda was the daughter of Segestes. Remember that guy.
01:58:20.300himself a powerful Cheruscian noble. You can occasionally find statements that Arminius
01:58:26.120raped Thosnelda. That does not mean he sexually violated her, but rather that he married her0.52
01:58:31.660consensually. Her consent, not Segestes'. So, the specific wording that Tacitus uses is
01:58:40.500oxorum armini raptum, which literally means wife Arminius took. Rapere does not refer to
01:58:48.720sexual assault in Latin, but rather to taking something without asking for permission from
01:58:53.760its rightful owner. You know who owned Thusnelda? Segestes. You know why? Because men owned women.
01:59:01.100Women were property. That's literal. You know that meme where, like, the guy's like, I consent.1.00
01:59:06.400The girl's like, I consent. And then Jesus is like, I don't. It's like that. Like, literally,
01:59:12.040like this nelda gets with arminius that it doesn't matter what she wanted sigisties had
01:59:20.440he'd actually tacitus tells us he'd actually promised her to another man already and they
01:59:25.640have not that's universal in both cultures that we're talking about here the yeah no
01:59:31.960Pater Familius had the say over those kind of things.
01:59:37.400The Roman Pater Familius could literally execute anyone under his manus, under his hand, his legal authority.
01:59:49.220If you lived on someone's property, he could just straight up murder you for disrespecting him.
01:59:57.500And, well, I mean, hey, you shouldn't have been on his property if you were disrespecting him.
02:00:28.440There's a question of why that was the case.
02:00:30.160Tacitus tells us that she was promised to another man but you know let's just keep going the most
02:00:37.420likely answer is that what happened is that Thysnelda chose Arminius and Arminius wanted
02:00:41.340to marry her possibly out of politics possibly for romance we don't really know the father
02:00:46.300objects probably due to the politics of it as we'll see but he had already set her up to be
02:00:51.400wed to another man Arminius had already sprung his great trap when Thysnelda and Arminius got
02:00:57.620together, and there was a civil war taking place amongst the Cherusky, and the Germanics as the
02:01:02.880whole, remember from the map, right? Arminius had detonated a bomb in Germania. So Segestes was on
02:01:10.560the pro-Roman faction. Arminius didn't know that. Arminius was a burgeoning anti-Roman Germanic
02:01:18.740little emperor and sought to marry a woman. Thysnelda made the obvious calculation that0.76
02:01:25.920this was the best man that a princess of her standing could marry, the disagreement is obvious.
02:01:31.600And it ends in an elopement, the lack of reference to sexual misconduct by Roman authors,0.84
02:01:36.200who, remember, had no problem slinging the sexual mud around. Like, Caesar's enemies,
02:01:43.760Julius Caesar's enemies, they said that he was not fit to lead because he was the power bottom
02:01:49.520in the sexual relationship he had with his nephew, Gaius, great nephew, Gaius Octavian.
02:01:55.920And then when Gaius Octavian took power, his enemies said that he was not fit to leave because he was the power bottom in the sexual relationship that he had with his great uncle, Julius Caesar.
02:02:07.360So the fact that we're just never the heinous rapist barbarian from the north, that doesn't show up.
02:02:14.800There'd be no reason to not talk about it.0.94
02:02:17.360He's literally the Roman enemy, right?
02:02:19.980Like, so, as an aside, this usage of rapere to mean taking without permission shows up elsewhere in Greco-Roman literature.
02:02:30.660So, like, when you hear about Zeus raping someone, she consents.
02:02:35.780That doesn't mean that her daddy likes her being carried off by a giant swan or whatever is happening, right?
02:02:42.640So, the real problem here is that Arminius consented.
02:02:47.880Thosnelda consented, Sigistes did not.
02:02:54.940Sigistes was the snitch who alerted Varus about the plan at Teutoburg.
02:02:59.240However, Tacitus tells us that Sigistes actually fought at Teutoburg with Arminius
02:03:04.820due to consensu gentis, the consensus of the tribe.
02:03:11.120Against, remember, is a state, so this means that Arminius' plan was actually almost universally accepted,
02:03:17.000so much so that his enemies had no choice but to partake lest they lose status.
02:03:22.640So it's interesting that this battle happens with a huge number of people
02:03:26.420and what seems to be pretty universal acclaim,
02:03:29.180but then there's a civil war afterwards.
02:03:31.240Like, a large number of the Cheruski seem to have been willing to jump the Romans,
02:03:35.440but they didn't necessarily want the fallout that would happen afterwards.
02:03:43.300like, you don't want to be the guy that's too chicken to go fight the Romans, right?
02:03:50.500We are told that Segestes had a son by the name of Segemond, and these two had lost position and
02:03:58.900status amongst the Cherusci sometime after Tudoverg, and Segemond was sent as an envoy
02:04:04.100to Rome to seek Roman intervention to regain their status. Segemond was actually a priest,
02:04:09.460a sacerdotes, that we are told, who had been made one in what is now Cologne, a center of Germano-Roman syncretism.
02:04:17.220He was actually made a sacerdotes at an altar, a Roman religious altar, that was in Cologne.
02:04:26.200Again, Cologne was a center of Roman and Germanic syncretism and probably some Celtic stuff in there, just because that's how it always worked, right?
02:04:35.760So, um, we're told that when news of the battle had happened,
02:04:43.460Segemund, the son of Segestes, actually tore his oicta off and fled, like, ran off to go fight in the battle.
02:04:51.020A oicta is a headband, a white string that will be worn around the forehead and tied in the back,
02:04:58.600And that was actually the traditional priestly symbol of office of a Roman priest, or priestly official.
02:05:05.720Wearing white, actually, despite common opinion otherwise, is not a super priest thing to do at this time.
02:05:14.600Like, Greek priests didn't wear white robes, for example.
02:05:19.560The Greco-Roman indicator of priestly status was actually the wita, this headband.
02:05:24.840A laurel wreath is laurel, stuffed into one's weta, so like it's not actually like a U-shaped thing with leaves, it's literally plants stuffed in your headband and held there by that.
02:05:40.840So, Segestes and Segemin have to work with Arminius to not further lose their status, but they're also losing status by having been on the pro-Roman faction.
02:05:53.080So then they go to the Romans to try and get some kind of help.0.71
02:06:00.080So the Romans send a force to gather up any pro-Roman traders amongst the Cherusci and take their families with them.
02:06:10.080Like the heavily pregnant Fusnelda, who had been staying with her father and didn't know about this and didn't approve of it.
02:06:19.080So the Romans basically kidnapped Thusnelda because her father had not actually come out that he was betraying Arminius until literally a, I'm going to call them a Roman spec ops unit because that makes it sound really cool, but like a Roman spec ops unit comes to Germania to protect these pro-Roman traders that are fleeing to Ravenna to live in exile.
02:06:42.660And they're, like, kidnapping this heavily pregnant woman because Arminius and Thucenelda didn't know that Sigistes was a traitor.
02:06:52.020We're told in translation, because no one wants to hear the Latin.
02:06:56.340Was more of the husband than of the father, in that temper which sustains her, unconquered to a tear without a word of entreaty,0.99
02:07:04.600her hands clasped tightly in the folds of her robe, and her gaze fixed on her heavy womb.
02:07:10.200her. While she was subjected to humiliation by Rome, we are told that Arminius was enraged by
02:07:16.380this. So what probably happened was that Arminius came home, was far cooler than whoever Thusnelda0.60
02:07:22.380was supposed to marry, and took her as his own, something she accepted. This enraged Segestes,
02:07:28.260who was on the side of the Romans. Segestes' betrayal and turn to the Romans was probably
02:07:33.260not foreseen by Arminius or Thusnelda, hence why Thusnelda still dwelt in his estates,
02:07:38.760and hence why she was upset about being taken to Rome.
02:07:41.680She and her husband did not expect Segestes to stoop so low
02:07:45.180as to offer up his own pregnant daughter to the Romans as a prize.
02:07:51.520Tacitus confirms this in a, no doubt, fictionalized speech by Segestes to the Romans
02:07:57.420in which he says that his daughter is here only by force,
02:08:02.120implying that she did not betray her husband.
02:08:05.020Tacitus tells us furthermore that Segestes' true nature
02:08:07.480was only exposed to the Germanics as a whole after he and his estates had fled,
02:08:12.040meaning that Arminius and Fusnelda were certainly not aware that Segestes was an open collaborator
02:08:23.480The Roman response to Arminius' actions was one of immediately trying to stop Arminius'
02:08:28.040obvious goal of unifying the Germanic tribes into a permanent polity.
02:08:32.200This would go on to characterize Roman geopolitics regarding Germania for over three centuries.
02:08:37.480Divide and rule by pitting tribes against each other and ensuring that centralization and unification can never occur without actually trying to permanently occupy the territory, something that from then on the Romans essentially viewed as divinely granted.
02:08:51.100Again, remember, the Romans can't go back and conquer Germany.
02:09:02.340In 1580, the Roman leader Germanicus would get a better prize, Thucenelda.
02:09:07.920He led an incursion into Germania to retrieve the lost eagles, and along the way somehow managed to capture Arminius' pregnant wife.0.66
02:09:15.020This is where the Roman spec ops unit goes to go get the traitors.
02:09:18.580So Germanicus moves into Rome to get the eagles back, and while he's doing that, the traitors link up with him.
02:09:27.400So Thucenelda gives birth to Thumelicus.
02:09:30.300arminius's son in captivity she and her son would be dragged through the city to rome's in chains0.57
02:09:36.160as a grand display of rome's victory over germania in a triumph which was essentially a mock human
02:09:42.740sacrifice uh an act of ritual humiliation these would in the these often ended in the ritual
02:09:50.120strangulation of a prisoner of importance he was strangled who's no wasn't strangled in the triumph
02:09:56.480but um when caesar drags the gaulish chieftain i think it's a person get a ricks back to rome he
02:10:03.120is strangled to death at the end of the procession a um he's not then he's strangled so it's not
02:10:10.640technically a human sacrifice because if they drew blood then it would be a sacrifice which
02:10:14.720would imply cannibalism which would make the gods angry blah blah blah blah blah blah so0.83
02:10:20.560thus nilda being paraded through the city is a ritual humiliation of the germanic peoples1.00
02:10:25.440Look what we got, your pregnant queen.0.80
02:10:32.220Sigistes, we are told, stood in the crowd as a common onlooker and watched as his daughter was dragged through the city, humiliated.
02:10:43.260Tacitus tells us that he would speak of Thumelicus's fate, which was a sad affair, but never does.
02:10:49.360Tacitus's books are incomplete, not due to his failure, it seems.
02:10:55.440He and Thusnelda were scheduled to be taken to Ravenna, which was a center of gladiatorial combat.
02:11:01.480So some academics speculate that Thumelichus was essentially thrown into the arena to be killed for the crowd's amusement.
02:11:08.620Gladiators were trained as early as 16, and some of them even earlier.
02:11:12.400So it makes sense that this newborn would be thrown into combat very early, because he would literally be trained for it for most of his life.
02:11:30.540I personally think that Thumelichus going and fighting in the arenas is a really cool story nonetheless,
02:11:37.500but we don't know what happens to him.
02:11:40.180Thumelichus and Thunethusnelda are obviously Germanic names.
02:11:43.420Both of them are kind of uncertain in their etymology, though.
02:11:46.240One thesis regarding the etymology of Thumelichus is that it's actually a pet name, meaning little thumb.
02:11:51.960Another thesis is that it refers to the tumile, an altar involved in the worship of Dionysus.
02:11:59.960The crowd would dance ecstatically around the altar, so the crowd is mocking and jeering around this kid because they can't get at his father.
02:12:12.960That's the thesis, but we don't have that. It's a hypothesis.
02:12:15.960Interestingly, the Germanic peoples at this time tended to name their children with either illiterating or rhyming names.
02:12:23.960So, like, there's a thesis that the Seg in Segestes lends some possibility to him being related to Segemer, Arminius' father.
02:12:32.960Note that there are multiple Segemers at this time. Segestes was not the uncle of Arminius.
02:12:44.960Arminius' vision would not be realized, due to the small-mindedness of those around him.
02:12:49.960Marobodwus, the obvious ally, was too scared to come to blows with Rome, even while Augustus still literally was plotting to destroy him.
02:12:58.960Men like Syngistes and Flavius preferred trinkets and golden chains to what Arminius was proposing.
02:13:03.960Arminius' uncle, Ingwiomer, whose name coincidentally is that Ingwi, Ingvi, Ingvi Frey,
02:13:11.960sided with the Marco Mani despite helping Arminius fight the Romans.
02:13:16.960These traitors would end up murdering Arminius, ending the possibility of him or someone like him unifying the Germanics.
02:13:23.960So, to be clear here, basically everyone at this time fights against the Romans at Teutoburg.0.69
02:13:29.960They immediately start breaking up afterwards.
02:13:32.960Segemer and Ingweomer both fight against the Romans, so does Segestes.
02:13:39.440So interestingly here, hang on, Tacitus' narrative is actually really
02:13:48.640involved and has a lot of speeches and quotations. How accurate these are, it's
02:13:54.800Tacitus. But like there's a portion in the story where like Arminius and
02:14:01.160Laos are on two sides of the Rhine, and they start cussing each other out in Latin, and then they get, like, heated enough that they have to switch to Proto-Germanic, so, you know, they're like, at each other across the river, and Tacitus doesn't really have a very involved story for what happens to Arminius when his kinsmen betray him.0.62
02:14:22.000It's just kind of matter-of-factly, yeah, and then the Germanics, you know, they poison him, almost like he's kind of disappointed, right?
02:14:31.160Um, Arminius lived for about 37 years and was in power for 12 of them, so Tacitus tells1.00
02:14:55.960The Romans, we are told, refused the offer due to the great virtue of the Romans, who dealt with their enemies head-on.
02:15:03.840Undoubtedly, the need to rectify this grievous problem and not let it fade into the background was also a great concern of the Senate,
02:15:10.140which might have been why they didn't take up this offer of poisoning, because Arminius needed to die, or else he would remain a symbol.
02:15:20.680As an aside, the Chatti fought with Arminius at Teutoburg.
02:15:24.680In 47 AD, the remaining Cherusky, now a pacified and harmless faction in Germania, requested that Flavius' son Italicus be sent as an envoy by Emperor Claudius to rule them.
02:15:43.680They had been brought so low that they had to request for the Roman Emperor to order their king to leave the luxury of Rome to lead them.
02:15:52.680Italicus journeyed to Germania, and evidently things did not go well, so he was forced into exile shortly after.
02:15:58.680Chariomerus, presumed to be Italicus's son, but we don't have any confirmation of that, would replace him and also be driven into exile.
02:16:07.680In 88 AD, the Cherusky would finally be obliterated by the Chatty, who had fought with Arminius at Teutoburg, and then offered to kill him.
02:16:17.680do you want to go into anything here sir before i kind of ramble about some history stuff from here
02:16:28.320now you're going to start rambling about some history stuff i love it i love it no i'm good
02:16:34.400the points i want to make about this will be good when you're when you're afterwards they'll keep
02:16:41.680okay so i want to just talk about some results and alternatives about what happened here
02:16:47.680The death of Arminius was crucial in Roman geostrategy regarding Northern Europe.
02:16:53.680The traditional methods of blunt force were unreliable and ultimately could be defeated.
02:16:57.680To that end, Rome quadrupled down on divide and rule.0.64
02:17:01.680If the Germanics were too busy fighting each other, they could not resist Rome.0.73
02:17:05.680For the next 500 years or so, this would be the de facto official policy regarding how barbarians were handled.0.77
02:17:11.680handled. Official large-scale action could unify them, so Rome simply never acted against any given
02:17:17.480barbarian group as a whole. Rather, it pitted them against each other and used internal divisions to
02:17:21.980sow discord. Had Arminius not have died by treasury, it's likely that this policy would not have been
02:17:27.540adopted. Rome would have been pincered between Persia in the south and Germania in the north.
02:17:33.420Arminius would have established some kind of Germanic kingdom, probably a kind of feudalism
02:17:37.700come early rather than a bureaucracy, but it would have been a semi-unified military power that could
02:17:42.500resist Roman and later Hunnic aggression in any sense. Rome would have to enter a permanent
02:17:48.420defensive position from then on with an interesting geopolitical idea of allying with India against
02:17:55.380Persia. This would be done via higher taxes. The Romans would have to raise taxes in order to
02:18:02.340increase spending to fight the Germans, which would put greater strain on the Roman economy.
02:18:07.060The border with Parthia in the Levant, Parthia is Persia, would have been fortified.
02:18:12.740Either more or less focus would be put on Israel.0.59
02:18:15.840The reason the Romans cared about Israel was because it was the, if you draw, if you find the line of the lowest distance from Persia to the Mediterranean, it's smack dab through Israel, right?
02:18:30.780So Israel had to be fortified in order to keep the Persians from getting to the Mediterranean, which was the lifeblood of the Roman economy and world.
02:18:40.200So either more or less focus would be put on Israel, resulting in a stronger Jewish puppet kingdom, or a more tight-fisted Hellenistic Levantine fortress province.
02:18:51.380Either way, the middle ground that happened in real life would be abandoned.
02:18:54.820so probably no Christianity on those grounds alone, in addition to any other butterfly effect
02:19:00.760kind of things. Had Arminius succeeded in making a unified Germanic state, Rome wouldn't be split
02:19:07.700east and west, as there wouldn't be a military need for dividing the empire. The Roman Empire
02:19:12.400might have exploded nonetheless, but it probably would have resulted in a smaller Italian polity
02:19:18.720than a complete conquest by Germanics, because they would be in their own state and would
02:19:23.480extract wealth via raiding or tribute, not actual conquest.
02:19:27.620Alternatively, Rome's fall would be like China,0.80
02:19:30.460an occasional kerplu-y into war lordification,
02:24:39.660So one thing that I think is really cool is just how Tacitus closes out his bit about Arminius and eulogizes him in a way that I think is important and I've always really liked.
02:24:57.440you know he remarks that armenius was undoubtedly the liberator of germany a man who not in its
02:25:05.200infancy as captains and kings before him but in the high noon of its sovereignty threw down the
02:25:10.960challenge to the roman nation in battle with ambiguous results in war without defeat he
02:25:17.920completed 37 years of life 12 of power and this day is sung in tribal lays those he is unknown
02:25:25.600an unknown being to greek historians who admire only the history of greece the
02:33:48.700He was not a reactionary, but rather enacting a coherent system of ideas upon the world, a unified, organized, civilized polity.
02:33:59.140The Theudanas was not just the secular leader of the Cherusky, but their high priest.
02:34:03.620Arminius was, in a sense, structuring his society on that of Asgard.
02:34:07.040Our religious backing to Arminius' actions are threaded through this, as Tudorberg was a holy site to the Aesir after the battle,
02:34:15.520and casting off the yoke of Roman religion and slavery in favor of the faith of the forefathers
02:34:21.640is repeatedly stressed by the Roman authors.
02:34:25.160It's not super focused on by academics today, but the Romans saw this as having religious importance,
02:34:31.800not just for them, but for the Germanics.
02:34:35.000For the Germanic peoples, this meant that the Aesir wanted them to be independent.
02:34:41.420They didn't want them to just dilute into Rome.
02:34:43.560And the Romans, to a certain degree, kind of accepted the same. If Jupiter wanted the Romans to conquer Rome, or conquer Germania, well, either they would have won at Teutoburg, or they would not have, you know, you know what I mean here, like, this wouldn't have happened.
02:35:04.880Either they lost the chance, or they were denied it entirely.
02:35:09.880These three are priestly acts. Arminius is thus a hero not for our people, but for our faith.
02:35:15.880Arminius is the man with a vision. He had a vision to order his people in accordance with cosmic order and natural law, not as a decentralized and chaotic mass, but as an orderly nation.
02:35:28.880was to uphold the principle of the worship of the ancestors, the oldest ancestors being the gods.
02:35:35.200It's important to recognize here that he was not betrayed due to an alternative vision.
02:35:41.360He was not betrayed due to disagreements over principles or theology or political ideology.
02:35:46.160He was not even really betrayed because he disagreed with the ideals of Rome.
02:35:49.360We're not told that he was betrayed because his kinsmen particularly liked how Rome did things.
02:35:58.480he was betrayed by vice you by cowards by dishonorable men by those who chose he was
02:36:05.440betrayed because you're not the boss of me he was betrayed by those who chose the lower
02:36:12.640or the higher by those who could not strengthen themselves for the journey
02:36:17.760the results of that betrayal is what is thus always to traders destruction within a lifetime
02:36:23.920that Cherusky had fallen from the center of a grand new order to being a rump state casually destroyed by its neighbors.0.79
02:36:31.760Why? Disloyalty. Betrayal is always driven by vice.
02:36:35.360It is not a disagreement, there is no both sides, because the betrayer casts away having a side when they choose chaos.
02:36:46.560Betrayal is not a competing order, it is simply chaos.
02:36:50.880I want you to pause and reflect for a minute here, in that this betrayal is quite literally exactly what the Roman Empire wanted.
02:36:58.480In lieu of being able to completely conquer Germania, the Roman Empire enacted a policy of enacting chaos and disorder in Germania to neutralize it as a possible threat.
02:37:08.800Infighting, bickering, backbiting, and betrayal were all the tool and goal of Roman action in post-Arminius Germania.
02:37:17.440There were two sides—Rome and Germania. Any Germanic chieftain who did not side with Germania,0.51
02:37:22.960no matter what he said that he wanted, was aiding and abetting Rome and his own destruction.0.64
02:37:28.320Because if Rome couldn't have Germania, no one could. The Romans wanted it that way. Any Germanic
02:37:35.120leader who wasn't working for Arminius was, whether he liked it or not, working for0.93
02:37:39.680Rome and his own destruction. Today, whenever we fight, we are just twisting the knives deeper
02:37:46.160into arminius's back today whenever you break an oath you are saying that you would gladly work
02:37:52.020against arminius let's make this a little more relevant to today nick do you have a picture of
02:37:57.860odin's off on hand yeah one second i should have included that one i'm sorry i mean you do you boo
02:38:10.440getting loaded all right let's make this a little more relevant here every trader every
02:38:24.380oath breaker everyone who says oh well but the afa didn't massage my ego they are saying that
02:38:28.340they want this place torn down every bloat every stumble every house of hotny every wedding every0.91
02:38:33.120good memory they want them all chucked in the garbage heap and set on fire that is what betrayal0.98
02:38:38.080entails. Now, this is one of our places, but you can extend this outwards. It's not just an AFA
02:38:44.960thing. When we speak of loyalty, we do not only mean holding firm to those with vision, to those
02:38:50.640upon whose shoulders the gods placed their hands, to those who act so that we might have a better
02:38:54.880life. We also mean acting when those people need us to. We also mean helping to carry the load when
02:39:00.160they are not enough. If you do not help carry the load, then we are all one set of hands closer to
02:39:05.920being crushed by it disloyalty benefits no one not only the disloyal or not even not even the
02:39:11.680disloyal it is a net loss for everyone whenever a member of the group acts badly all members of the
02:39:17.760group suffer whenever a man breaks his oath all men are that much weaker whenever a man betrays
02:39:23.280his friends all men are that much weaker whenever a man spreads lies about his fellow men all men are
02:39:29.040that much weaker disloyalty to the gods to the folk to the gozar of the folk and the gods to the
02:39:34.160ancestors, these are all one and the same thing, and all will lead to the others.0.91
02:39:38.000Disloyalty will lead to the imposition of foreign customs and faith.0.99
02:39:41.200It will lead to forgetting one's ancestry, literally to forgetting one's image0.80
02:39:45.920or one's lineage. It will lead to turning on everyone else.
02:39:49.920If one is a betrayer, then they cannot trust anyone else to not betray.
02:39:53.040If one is a betrayer, then they cannot be trusted to not betray again.
02:39:56.560If you betray someone, you can't be certain that you're not going to be
02:39:59.280betrayed. You want proof? I mean heck, go look at
02:40:01.920the truth they betrayed stephen flowers and became universalist that was the trend that was a trend
02:40:08.800between 1987 and 1994 and initially focus group would have some member or members they get upset
02:40:14.880about something and then they would betray their so-called friends and then the betrayers would
02:40:18.400spiral into universalism because if you break the basic rules there's nothing stopping you from
02:40:23.040breaking the advanced rules i mean that literally the truth ended up doing like voodoo like what
02:40:30.320what are you if y'all contains betrayers? If you are willing to raise a middle finger to the Aesir
02:40:36.960or drive people away from their temples in order to prosecute some interpersonal feud,
02:40:40.960then you're not really working for the cause of the Aesir. If you are willing to stab your friends0.83
02:40:45.920and comrades in the back, you're not traditionally minded. If you are willing to spread lies to keep0.58
02:40:51.680people from worshiping Thor in his temple, then you are totally willing to worship Loki. What's
02:40:56.320stopping you you're driving people away from thor's temple might as well right no one sings
02:41:02.300songs of the men who betrayed arminius their names are lost to time that's a good thing but
02:41:07.620it's also a bad thing no one will sing songs of those men as the ones who stood firm next to him
02:41:12.500as a hero we have all of us lost because arminius was betrayed we should not repeat the same mistake
02:41:20.460and that was from when this was a uh lecture sermon i was going to give to a private afa
02:41:29.720audience instead of doing on vns but i didn't want to lose it so done
02:41:35.360no you did awesome tonight with that i thank you for presenting all of that and
02:41:43.680absolutely you know that was something that
02:41:47.460again, I hope everyone takes the lessons from his life and can internalize those and learn from
02:42:05.460them. Something on the historical significance that's, you know, that is interesting. It's
02:42:12.540funny that you say he's probably the second most important person in making the eddas happen um
02:42:22.940yeah it occurs to me what little we know of um of gaelic religion of celtic uh
02:42:30.540gaulish religion almost nothing because they were so quickly overcome and assimilated and their
02:42:37.580their religious practice you know lost to the myths of antiquity um and and just to say real
02:42:45.860quick here not just because of the romans mind you the romans were willing to allow
02:42:50.720religion to continue to exist what happened was the gaulish people were made extremely fragile
02:42:57.860to someone coming in and saying chuck your heritage in the bin true it it was christianity0.91
02:43:04.540that destroyed what we know what we would now wouldn't know what we would know today about
02:43:10.060gaulish polytheism but christianity could only do that because the gauls had been made weak enough
02:43:16.380that this could even be humor like we're not going to write it down first you know well and
02:43:23.420that's the thing is it's not just that so it isn't that you know latin mars worshiping rome
02:43:33.740obliterated all these things but just a historical truth this isn't even to villainize the empire
02:43:40.620it's just to say historic the historical truth is it created a venus system throughout
02:43:49.260its empire that the virus of christianity flowed through the the rhine was a barrier to that to
02:43:59.020where our our customs our lore our religiosity was able to survive to the time of writing and
02:44:09.260it wouldn't have been able to otherwise it's one of those you know by the time the people who were
02:44:14.460intimately aware of it and involved with it got to writing they would have long since been romanized
02:44:20.620and then infected with the spread of christianity much much sooner so it's such a a fortunate thing0.82
02:44:29.020That because of, you know, because of September 9th, 9 AD, we have access to all we have.
02:44:41.760It's funny because people will, you know, criticize our lack of, you know, all of the things we don't have, but it's amazing all the things we do have because that force was stopped at that moment.
02:44:59.020yeah you're we continue to get praise heaped on you in the chat and it's well deserved um i look
02:45:07.380forward to all of these that you can do because you do such a good job at it
02:45:11.500can i throw in a real quick about what i think is interesting about arminius
02:45:16.500you can throw in anything you like i think it's kind of interesting because arminius is
02:45:22.640i'm just gonna i i could be wrong here but i believe he's the only one of our heroes
02:45:28.960whose struggle did not involve christianity in some capacity right and in a certain sense
02:45:38.400that make that's because he's the most moral uh or ethical almost of our heroes in as much as his
02:45:47.040struggle was against immorality itself rather than doctrinal disagreements or disloyalty to the
02:45:54.000Aesir, right? You can get into complex theological debates about Christianity
02:46:01.120versus Asatru, and what is real and what is not. Arminius wasn't struggling against
02:46:09.020people who said, well, the Aesir are either demons or don't exist. He was
02:46:13.700struggling against people who would say, oh yeah, loyalty and oaths are awesome,
02:46:17.300and then sought to betray a man who, frankly, was saving their bacon from
02:46:22.860complete and utter destruction he's not necessarily a sectarian kind of fellow because
02:46:31.660at the end of the day his struggle is almost against our lesser nature than some kind of
02:46:36.620outside force in a certain way he's almost he's a uh a hero against a vice rather than christianity
02:46:45.100or or something like that less disloyalty to the icer and just disloyalty in general
02:46:57.980yeah that is that is a unique feature amongst our heroes
02:47:02.540um you know he was one of the earliest batch of heroes too
02:47:11.020so got a couple we got a couple of few questions here tonight
02:47:15.100One, is Proto-Indo-European the oldest known language that white people spoke?
02:47:22.780Has there ever been any speculation as to what language of any Neanderthals spoke?
02:47:30.480Do you have any insight on that, Chris?
02:47:32.360Um, so, a proto-language, anytime you hear proto-X, this is a statistical model that is trying to figure out what the most likely, based on the evidence that we have, language spoken at a given time was.
02:47:58.760So as an example, you might have heard me say things like theodoburgs, theodanas, that zz there at the end, that is a nominative singular suffix on a protodramatic noun, masculine noun to be precise.
02:48:15.700that is was first hypothesized due to the in in large part due to the that ends
02:48:26.580old norse strong masculine now it's like right uh that sound had to come from somewhere
02:48:37.140when we look at other languages and the sounds that they have what sound changes
02:48:44.060that are reflected elsewhere in the language
02:48:57.900There's two spears from both about, like, 500 A.D.
02:49:02.400One found in, like, Romania, one found in Denmark.
02:49:05.540And they both have the same word written on the spear
02:49:09.020as the spear's name, the spearhead, in runes.
02:49:12.120but they are in proto-norse which i just said it's i just said that's a statistical reconstruction
02:49:19.420proto-norse is actually not it got named and then we found things written in it um but the the name
02:49:26.120is uh in gothic it's like round rauna and in old and in proto-norse it's raunias it means reckoner
02:49:34.800but more actively it means tester like test like stabbing with the spear you know like
02:49:41.980let's find out right and it actually has uh the z written there right so that confirms the
02:49:52.660hypothesized sound right we're basically doing that with everything this is where like the
02:49:58.700That's where the laryngeals come from. That's why her name is Kheusos. That's why it's that H sound, as opposed to one of the myriad of vowels that are found prefacing the name in the daughter languages.1.00
02:50:11.700The earliest, farthest back reconstructed proto-language is proto-Afro-Asiatic. It's extremely reliant upon Egyptian for its reconstruction.
02:50:25.700spoken somewhere around 15 000 bc um neanderthals lived around uh four thousand forty thousand bc
02:50:39.220so it's a cool idea but linguistic reconstruction works by taking
02:50:47.460Linguistic reconstruction works by taking what we have and seeing how far back we can go, but the problem is it's a pyramid, and it eventually comes to a point.
02:51:01.460For Indo-European languages, the farthest back we can go with any degree of certainty is Proto-Indo-European.
02:51:12.460We can make statements about what pre-Proto-Indo-European probably entailed at some point.
02:51:16.460Pre-Proto-Indo-European was probably ergative, absolutive, and probably had a verb, subject, object, word order.
02:51:22.820That's why verbs end in a suffix that marks the subject.
02:51:27.960I see, you see, he sees, that z at the end of he sees, that indicates it's a third-person singular indicative noun.
02:51:43.140um so that that comes from an old something like see he it he sees it right he see it he see it
02:51:55.060emerge together um the ergative absoluto from pi can be determined because of the
02:52:01.540odd ergative nature of a lot of verbs regarding thought and uh the senses like i smell i smell
02:52:09.700the flower i smell bad right that sort of thing um i actually smell quite good just for the record
02:52:16.180but that's neither here nor there so the problem is that we don't have any sister languages to
02:52:25.620proto-indo-european because proto-indo-european isn't tested if we did we could figure out what
02:52:32.580pre-proto-indo-european looked like by looking at the sound changes between pi and its sister language
02:52:38.260so it kind of as we lose information from the family tree we can only go back to the common
02:52:45.820ancestor which currently seems to be about 15 000 bc again this is largely reliant on the extreme
02:52:55.200conservatism of egyptian now there are linguistic theories about nostratik and they are
02:53:28.360We don't use this anymore, but like unk,
02:53:31.060unk would be the object form of the second person.
02:53:35.160the dual first-person pronoun, if we still use that.
02:53:40.260We don't. Thank the gods. Wit and unk sounds terrible.
02:53:46.360So I can't say anything about Neanderthal language.
02:53:49.560I would honestly imagine that we just don't have enough to say anything meaningful on it.
02:53:54.560I do know there are some people that like to look into...
02:53:58.960They like to posit about what Neanderthal brains could be like from the skulls,
02:54:02.760which is a cool idea. But at the same time, remember, it's entirely possible to be a postal
02:54:08.020worker, have a perfectly normal skull, and then be also missing 95% of your brain matter.
02:54:13.580Like, the brain is really squishy, and you really have to screw up a brain's shape
02:54:19.600before it'll just squish into shape, you know? Now, as far as white people go,0.96
02:54:28.500I think you could make quibbles about what constitutes white people because, like, our ancestors spoke the Neolithic hunter-gatherer languages and the Anatolian farmer languages, and those predate Proto-Indo-European, but we can't take, we can't reconstruct those before pi, right?
02:54:51.300um even the vast cognic languages the the ones that bask is related to bask is the only pre pre
02:55:01.640indo-european um language in europe left that hasn't entered into europe like finnish maltese
02:55:09.340hungarian these all entered into europe after the proto-indo-european migrations right
02:55:13.300basque is not related to pi um so yes but i i don't think that's necessarily a hard
02:55:24.740the earliest you know white people writing is linear a and that's 1000 bc you know that's old
02:55:37.020but there's still like 5 000 years of history between the proto-european migration and
02:55:43.280and linear be right do you have anything to add sir no other than the sad truth is with a lot of
02:55:53.660historical things you can only go back so far and then unless you discover some new piece of
02:56:00.320archaeology or some new you know you unearth some new thing there's only so far back you can take
02:56:07.020it you know everything comes from somewhere there was at some point when our people first started
02:56:12.020making noises and when those noises first started making sense and when you made a different noise
02:56:17.700for a buffalo than you did for lightning over time but all of that's just a common sense
02:56:26.500speculation about how things came about but no i thought that was an extremely thorough answer
02:56:33.300and yeah as far as accessible language with like a lexicon of terms the farthest back that i'm
02:56:41.220aware of is the supposed proto-indo-european um hey there question for the show tonight apart from
02:56:50.900the clear answers i.e praying giving offerings etc when do you feel the closest to the gods
02:56:59.300in your day-to-day lives and why thanks chris when do you feel the closest to the gods in your
02:57:07.300day-to-day life and why oh that's a hard one because it's like you've already excluded all
02:57:15.700of the religion things you know um being with family being with with family with friends and
02:57:27.360family being part of that i'm a father so i'm no longer like the the the tippy buds of the family
02:57:37.040tree right i have a branch coming off of me but being part of that that kind of wave as it unfolds
02:57:46.740across the sea with with my kinfolk i think that would be the most i think that would be when i
02:57:54.760have a religious feeling that isn't caused by literal religious behavior or actions right
02:58:02.180because it's like you know my wife and myself and my daughter we hail the dawn every day you know
02:58:08.800and I like I pray before bed and we do offerings and stuff but that's kind of excluded by what you
02:58:13.460were asking for so I do think it's being part of my folk as a living unfurling thing
02:58:21.180watched over by the gods and the ancestors going back to the
02:58:25.820you know going back to the ancestors but also going back to the gods
02:59:10.220It's not like when I'm in the woods, I'm closest to the gods or when I'm, you know, driving in my car, I take a moment to reflect and I feel like I'm closest to the gods.
03:09:10.400you can take inspiration for anything and so i don't think we can ever say oh it had nothing
03:09:15.200to do with the inspiration of it i mean maybe but they're not similar enough that it's like
03:09:21.840a secret coded message that this is what this is or that is it's just not and and we don't see that
03:09:28.640with other characters like no one needs to encode this guy or that guy they just come out and say
03:09:35.120oh yeah this dude then they'll make up some odd backstory about him being like a hunt or something
03:09:40.240but it's just this dude now having said that in a certain sense though arminius does show up in
03:09:48.640modern germanic sagas um arminius was really big ever since the ever since the uh tacitus annals
03:09:59.440and other works started getting published in the renaissance and had been a symbol of german
03:10:04.640nationalism for a very long time like 600 years now um big important character in a lot of
03:10:12.160of literature, a big figure of opera. He was a figure of resistance by the Germans against
03:10:19.540insert bad guy here. Like I said, Kaiser Wilhelm was big on having him as the founding father of
03:10:29.200the German nation in opposition to Napoleon, in opposition to France, the supremacy of French,
03:10:35.400italic and british culture over germany hearkening back to this ancient german past right um luther
03:10:46.360martin luther it's people often say that luther is the one who said that um arminius equals herman
03:10:54.700i don't know if that's true i know he was an early user of it it doesn't really matter
03:10:59.060he saw arminius as a figure of opposition to the papacy to rome the man in rome right
03:11:07.660arminius was a figure of a lot of operas in the literature and stories and tales about
03:11:14.480him and what his struggle mean meant for the people living that time um the national
03:11:23.240socialists were really big on him and after that their regime fell in west germany it became pretty
03:11:29.960pardon the pun phil bolton to talk about arminius at length but in east germany humorously enough
03:11:37.560they uh they spun arminius into being like a kind of spartacus rising up with the workers against
03:11:45.080the decadent roman capitalist slave owners kind of a figure i think he he is a very romantic figure
03:11:55.240in that regard and i think as frankly as long as there's going to be germanic peoples speaking
03:12:00.600germanic languages arminius is probably going to be someone who's very interesting because he does
03:12:05.480in a certain he literally is the germanic founding father in a certain sense he's the one who says
03:12:11.240there's going to be germanics from here on out i'm willing to stab someone over this
03:12:15.960and because of the roman source material because of tacitus we have we have a lot of meat there
03:12:24.040i think there's other figures that you know capture the imagination in a lot of ways but
03:12:28.040it's very hard to find that much meat to flesh out the character or their circumstance or things we
03:12:38.040have a substantial amount of um source material to go on to have a deeper understanding of herman
03:12:49.960and he doesn't he just to say real quick he doesn't lose in a certain sense like there's
03:12:56.280this one gothic warlord who will brings this huge horde south and he wants to like go down to rome
03:13:03.080and sacrifice the entire senate and then he ends up losing in like a really big military catastrophe
03:13:10.920arminius yes he gets betrayed but it's not like his struggle was defeated by him
03:13:19.480apostatizing to christianity or being like actually i think i'll take the villa into
03:13:24.360truria like he he dies a victor ultimately in as much as no one really intellectually defeats him
03:13:33.120yeah he's unbroke yeah he's assassinated or maybe dies in like a duel or something by traitors but
03:13:41.140it's not like he had a there he didn't have his ideas didn't have competition and even if he had
03:13:48.920been brought to rome and strangled to death after a parade it wouldn't really have undone what he did
03:13:54.280all right um which group had more gods and goddesses the roman pagans or the germanic pagans
03:14:06.840what say you and he did throw in or the slavic pagans after the fact or the slavic pagans
03:14:15.400what say you chris i think if you had to go by sheer number of attested deities it'd probably
03:14:22.120have to be the romans if just because i know this isn't necessarily fair but there's like a bit
03:14:28.360where augustine does like the oh really you worship the gods may every god bit and he like
03:14:36.560makes fun of a bunch of these deities that are supposed to be involved in like marriage and
03:14:43.160there's like 10 of them involved in this one stage and five involved in the next i think
03:14:50.000the massive amount of literature that we have from the romans makes that easy to do but i don't
03:14:58.540think that necessarily gives us a good because it's like what do you mean by more per se so you
03:15:06.860said it right when you said the most attested and that's the thing when you're counting all of the
03:15:14.820things that you know there's the olympians or there's the icer but there's a bunch of
03:15:24.820local deities that you would call that that are of place that are of rivers that are of you know
03:15:32.980different household functions the romans had a way of also personifying lots of just regular stuff
03:15:41.300as deities um so yeah the the i don't think we know that i don't think we're ever going to know
03:15:49.060the actual answer to the question but the the attestation certainly would go to the
03:15:54.980to the romans in that sense but i think an important thing and it's here and it's also
03:16:00.340with the historical side of things is sometimes it's not about what's written it's about what's
03:16:06.340not written and just and and chris has done it tonight and he's done it many other times in the
03:16:13.540past and he did it with the whole the the the raping thing where that's not the definition
03:16:20.740of rape that they used and this is a very similar situation of yeah they wrote down all of these
03:16:28.660things but just because somebody else didn't write it down doesn't mean it wasn't a thing somewhere
03:16:33.780else as well so it's it is important to note the context and just the reality of the way things
03:16:40.580were at that time for one these are all the same deific sources these are the arian gods it doesn't
03:16:50.880matter if it's the german gods or the the mediterranean gods it's the arian gods so
03:16:56.980So the number of spiritual entities is the same.
03:17:02.340It's just we relate to them a little bit differently down here by the water than we do up there in the forest.
03:17:08.580I think that there's also a bit of a, just to say real quick, a kind of classification problem isn't the right term here.
03:17:15.120But like, is every nymph mentioned in Greek mythology a goddess?
03:17:22.880Should you include them in a list of the gods?
03:17:26.120But if you're going to be doing this, it's almost like how many individuals are within the tribe of the Aesir?
03:17:34.920Yeah, it's not a fair question. It's not a fair question, because at some point, the question is involving any, you know, good spiritual entity, which, you know, which can be your ancestors, which can be a bunch of different things, depending on how you term that.
03:18:04.020if we believe yeah well there's i'm saying there's not the linguistic distinction there of like
03:18:09.780big g gods versus little g gods you know in rome every house there's a you know a different deity
03:18:18.660for your house there's all these different things we recognize that as you know
03:18:23.700land vetier and various alfar and things that way what of that really counts and doesn't in the
03:18:32.680question i think is very hard to uh flesh out and like if we're just topically if we're to propose
03:18:40.120that arminius has ascended and dwells with the gods it's like is he a god well that's yes ascendant
03:18:49.320mortals again depending on how you classify so i don't think that's it's an ambiguous question as
03:18:56.760As far as attested deities, certainly I'd say wrong.
03:19:03.420And I think we touched on this a little bit,
03:22:52.480west indo-european and it's this blob that celtic and germanic and slavic and italic and all these
03:23:02.360come out of and the proto-indo-iranic peoples blob out of that and go west east they start in
03:23:09.200The Proto-Indo-Iranic peoples are European when they start their existence, and then they move east.
03:23:17.200Then they move south, and they become the Scythians, and the Sarmatians, and a bunch of these odd steppe peoples that aren't here anymore in Eastern Europe.
03:23:27.200But then they also become a bunch of things in Central Asia.
03:23:30.200um they end up becoming the vedic peoples and the iranians hence indo-iranic as an aside
03:23:39.580language families you can have families within families germanic is a language family within
03:23:46.420proto-indo-european right um language families are given a name based on the theoretical maximum
03:23:52.360extent of the known languages within the family at the time of the naming when indo-european was
03:23:59.480coined the indo-european languages were spoken everywhere from india to europe this is extremely
03:24:06.920vague because you could call it the you know galo sri lankan language family because they're spoken
03:24:14.040everywhere between ireland and sri lanka at the time proto or at the time indo-european was coined
03:24:22.120tokarian was not understood even though something i can't remember the oasis that tokarians
03:24:29.480that the tokarian stuff was found in but you know like you could call it the
03:24:33.640indo-euro tokarian language family sino-tibetan it's in china and tibet yes
03:24:39.940there are sino-tibetan languages outside of china and tibet we just found them
03:24:44.760after they were named um so bactrian is an east iranian
03:24:48.660language um related to persian related to uh pashto you know um the problem with a lot of
03:25:02.100these groups though this is the thing like with the huns what is a hun well there's like ethnic huns
03:25:08.580and then there were people who were politically working with the hun i'm just gonna call it
03:25:12.820con it for lack of a better term bactria and gandhara and those central asian regions had a
03:25:19.860lot of internal ethnic and thus linguistic and cultural and religious diversity so it's kind of
03:25:25.860like when we talk about bactrians there's the east you know the east iranian group but then there's
03:25:32.100just like greeks like zorba yabadeva duplis the gyro salesman greeks living in gandhara and
03:25:39.700bactria it's kind of like okay but what who are you actually talking about when you say a bactrian
03:25:46.420the bactrian people spoke in east iranian language however there you go um and then
03:25:54.260to cap it off tonight is the afa planning a hof in the uk yes conceptually we would love to do that
03:26:02.740like all things we need a thriving membership there we need leadership there that are going to
03:26:09.700be committed to making the hoth perpetually successful um
03:26:19.300i will say this the uk is a challenging place for a lot of things now i think until
03:26:25.700they get a lot more free than they currently are it makes the challenges and the threshold
03:26:34.500of doing it much higher i think it looks much more appealing when they have freedom of speech
03:26:41.660and thought and existence um i think it would be a very challenging thing for us to be
03:26:51.180you know racially exclusive and to exclude uh sexual mental illness
03:27:00.900and be able to do that over there especially um as an american-based church i think it would be
03:27:11.760really interesting if we had the members over there that's the thing we're committed to doing
03:27:17.500the right thing if we had the members and we had the leadership over there to make it viable we
03:27:21.580would have to figure out what would need to go into an international hof and how that would flesh
03:27:29.900out but if we had the members in the in the gothar there to make that happen we would love to do that
03:27:35.900and that's absolutely an area we would love to see advancement in if you are a brit or anyone
03:27:46.700who's not an american or canadian that is a a call to arms and a chance to attain glory
03:27:54.860not like a literal physical violence called arms you know what i mean i'm being metaphorical
03:27:59.420it's a kenning that is a chance to attain glory in in a a very very virgin territory
03:28:09.680and you know if you are a brit and you're listening
03:28:12.400you might be able to get the first european half in the uk yeah but but if you don't if you don't
03:28:20.500act swiftly enough it might go in in sweden or norway or france or even ireland you know but like
03:28:30.460it is a tremendous opportunity to to move forward and build something so yeah we'd love to see that
03:28:38.000happen um and he was in the chat tonight i'm still looking at you i want my first croatian member
03:28:45.200you need to join dude absolutely you and wombat there you need to join mr everybody
03:28:53.520if you are a heterosexual white person join the astro folk assembly now's the time we've got to
03:28:58.640stay united we stand strong we have great things to do we do them better when we do them together
03:29:05.600Join the Ask True Folk Assembly. Today's the day. With that, Chris, thank you so much for coming on
03:29:12.640again. As always, a masterful presentation. I'm very thankful for you sharing that with us and
03:29:21.680for the hard work putting in on that and so many other AFA things. Appreciate you. My pleasure.
03:29:27.360all right well i will talk to y'all next week where we will continue through uh spawn and i
03:29:34.880will continue through the gilford genning until then hail the isere hill the folk
03:29:40.800L-E-A-F-A. Remember, victory never sleeps.0.98