Batavi Erotic

The Batavi were a small Germanic people of the Roman frontier who lived in the Rhine delta of the present-day Netherlands from the late first century BC until the third century AD, when they slipped out of the record and into the Franks who took over the same ground. What set them apart was a bargain. Rome asked them for no taxes and no tribute, only soldiers, and the Batavi supplied eight infantry cohorts, a cavalry regiment and, for a time, the emperors' own bodyguard, out of a population estimated at a few tens of thousands. Tacitus compared them to weapons and armor, kept for war alone. Their signature feat was to cross a river in full kit, horses and all, in formation, and come up the far bank ready to fight. They did it against the Britons at the Medway in AD 43, and Batavian cohorts held the front line at Mons Graupius forty years later.

Their homeland was the island between the Waal and the old Rhine that Dutch speakers still call the Betuwe. Tacitus says they came as dissident Chatti from the German interior, but the archaeology shows them settling among a Celtic-influenced population already there, and Batavian names turn up in both Germanic and Celtic forms. The economy ran on cattle and horses, stalled in long byre-houses. Their chief god was Hercules Magusanus, a Roman hero fused with a native deity, and at his sanctuary at Empel returning veterans left brooches, belt fittings and weapons as offerings. The inflection point came in AD 69, when Gaius Julius Civilis, a one-eyed Batavian noble and Roman officer with a grievance, turned his cohorts on Rome during the civil war after Nero's death. The revolt drew in Gauls and Germans from both banks and destroyed the legionary fortress at Vetera before Rome crushed it the next year. The relationship was rebuilt on harder terms, with Batavian units posted far from home. One of them, the Ninth Cohort, garrisoned Vindolanda on the northern British frontier, and the letters of its commander's household survive on the Vindolanda writing tablets.

The Batavi left the Netherlands its most durable origin myth. Renaissance scholars made them the ancestors of the free Dutch, Rembrandt painted Civilis swearing his conspirators to the rising, the revolutionary state of 1795 called itself the Batavian Republic, and the Dutch named their capital on Java Batavia. The name outlived the people in the army as well: Roman units still styled Batavi were fighting in the fourth century, long after anyone in the delta used it of themselves.