In AD 9, a young Roman hostage from the Germanic Cherusci tribe was leading an auxiliary military group deep into the Teutoburg Forest. With him were the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth Legions of the Roman Imperial Army led by Publius Quinctilius Varus. Varus mistook the Latin-speaking Arminius for a Roman patriot, and he died ruing that mistake. Arminius, raised in Rome and kept as a hostage to maintain peace with his father’s tribe, hated the Romans and led the legions deep into the German forest, where they were ambushed and left to die in the swamp that prevented their escape.
