The Oath of Civilis

Julius Civilis was a Batavian of royal descent, from the people who lived on the islands of the Rhine delta in what is now the Netherlands. The Batavians paid Rome no taxes; they gave soldiers instead, and their horsemen and infantry were among the best in the Roman army. Tacitus notes that Civilis had lost an eye and liked to compare himself to Sertorius and Hannibal, who bore the same scar.

In AD 69, the Year of the Four Emperors, civil war tore the empire apart. Tacitus tells how Civilis gathered the leading men of his people in a sacred grove under cover of a banquet. When the feast had run late and spirits were high, he spoke of the wrongs done to the Batavians, of the levies that took their young men, and of Rome's weakness. The chiefs agreed, and he bound them, in Tacitus' words, by a barbarian rite and ancestral oaths. The revolt that followed besieged the legionary fortress of Vetera, and Tacitus' account breaks off in AD 70 as Quintus Petillius Cerialis is negotiating its end.