2. Classical Sources
But there is more to
this story, for “while the minute (and often erroneous) stories of
Nero and his fiddle and Julius Caesar and Brutus continue to be
told, something as amazing as the fact that Roman legions on
occasion battled giant soldiers has been covered up.”157 Indeed, no less
than the famous Roman historian and man of letters Pliny the Elder
reported that the bones of one such giant, who had been observed by
the Romans while he was alive, had been “brought by Marcus Scaurus
from Joppa in Judea... The monster was over 40 feet long, and the
height of its ribs was greater than that of Indian elephants, while
its spine was 1 ½ feet thick.”158
In fact, ever since
Rome cast its imperial eyes in the form of Julius Caesar on the
conquest of Gaul, the disciplined Roman legions seem to have been
dogged by encounters with the Northern branch of the Gomarians,
that branch that migrated into Europe. Here, the legions ran into
the stock of a new and formidable enemy: the Celts, and their
cousins, the Teutons, or Germans.
This new enemy was
something different than Rome had ever faced, and Rome had faced
quite a bit, from Hannibal’s Carthaginian armies with its war
elephants, to all manner of intrigue and scheming.
Not a lot is known about the people who would become known as the Celts. It is known that they migrated across Asia Minor, through northern Europe and into what have become the Celtic countries of Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Most accounts of them include references to the giants that were often found among them. The ancient Greek historian, Pausainias, called them “the world’s tallest people.” Modern historians now believe that, in fact, the giants among the Celts were a ruling class that held control over the indigenous population that formed the majority of Celtic tribes.(The) modern historian, Gerhard Herm, agrees that the Celts were “blond giants” who struck terror in the hearts of every foe, even in the mightiest of mighty Rome. As such, the Celts fought several ferocious wars with Rome and captured, sacked, and burnt many Roman outposts to the ground. Although the Romans would eventually devise methods of defeating these giant warriors, attacking long legs that couldn’t be guarded by the massive shields these creatures carried, the blue-eyed, blond giants inspired terror among those facing them in battle for the first time.159
The unusual size
reported for the Celts was not a feature noted merely by Roman
historians in the wake of the conquest of Gaul. The Greek
historians Arrian and Diodorus also comment on their unusually
large size, Arrian mentioning them in connection with Alexander the
Great’s encounter with them after he had burned down one of their
cities on the Danube in 335 BC.160 Moreover, when
Alexander queried the Celts as to what their worst fear was, they
gave him the strangely intriguing answer that their worst fear was
“that the sky might fall on their heads.”161 The Celts, it
seems, preserved in their beliefs and legends, along with other
ancient peoples, that there had been a time long ago when the sky
had done just that.
But beyond Gaul, east
of the Rhine, the Roman legions faced an even fiercer foe, indeed,
the only foe ever to best the vaunted legions of Rome, the foe that
closed out forever any Roman conquests in central Europe — in what
today would be modern Germany — and that foe was the Teutons, or
the Cimbri....the Germans. The classical historian Strabo notes of
these tribes that they were even “wilder, taller, and having
yellower hair.”162 Indeed, when
Caesar’s men at Besancon asked some Gauls, “who were themselves of
great stature” about the Germans, Caesar wrote the following about
the Gauls’ reply:
They described the Germans mentioning their enormous physique, their unbelievable valor, and extraordinary military training. The Gauls said that often when they had encountered the Germans they had not been able to endure even the expression on their faces or the glare of their eyes.163
Indeed, at the famous
Battle of the Teutobergerwald, the Germans would so utterly
decimate four Roman armies in the brutal fighting that Rome would
maintain a more or less defensive posture with respect to the
Germans until the Western Empire’s final collapse. The
Gallic-Celtic giants were one thing, but their even taller cousins
across the Rhine were quite another.
Eventually, however,
some of these Germans were captured by the Romans, and one of them,
a particularly troublesome King by the name of Teutobokh, was
paraded in Rome in the customary triumph. The Roman historian
Floras reports that this king was so tall that when his captor
returned to Rome, “Teutobokh could be ‘seen above all the trophies
or spoils of the enemies, which were carried upon the tops of
spears.’ This suggests that Teutobokh was easily nine feet tall and
perhaps considerably taller.”164