Julius Civilis
Julius Civilis was a Batavian noble and Roman auxiliary officer who raised the Rhine against Rome in the year of the four emperors, destroyed two legions, and disappears from the record in the middle of a sentence. The Batavians were a small people of the Rhine delta whose treaty with Rome exempted them from tribute in return for soldiers, and they supplied the best cavalry and the emperor's bodyguard. Civilis, by Tacitus's account, had served twenty-five years, had one eye, and had been sent in chains to Nero on a charge of treason and acquitted under Galba, while his brother was executed. In 69, when Vitellius stripped the Rhine of troops for his march on Italy and his recruiters began seizing Batavian boys, Civilis called the tribal leaders to a feast in a sacred grove and put it to them, and the rising began under the cover of support for Vespasian, whose partisans had asked him to pin Vitellius's legions in place. He beat the Romans at Nijmegen, brought over the eight Batavian cohorts that were the core of the army, besieged the legionary fortress at Vetera, and in the winter of 69-70, when the Gallic tribes of the Treveri and Lingones joined and proclaimed an Empire of the Gauls, the garrison of Vetera surrendered on terms and was massacred on the road, and the camps from Bonn to Mainz burned. It was the gravest revolt on the Rhine in the empire's history. Vespasian, secure in Rome by then, sent Petillius Cerialis with eight legions in the summer of 70. The Gauls went home, Cerialis beat Civilis at Trier and again near Vetera, and the Batavians fell back into their island. The last surviving page of the Histories has Civilis meeting Cerialis on a broken bridge over the Nabalia to negotiate, and there the manuscript ends. What terms he got, and whether he lived, nobody knows. The Dutch made him their Arminius: Rembrandt painted the oath in the grove for the Amsterdam town hall in 1661, and the city rejected it.
- Lived: 25 CE – ?
- Nationality: Batavian
- Roles: military, rebel_leader
