Imperial camp, Lupia, Cherusci kingdom, Germania, mid-september 178
In a matter of days a small hill near the cheruscian capital of Lupia had become a little Rome. Situated alongside the river Lupia, the town had always carried the same name in the roman archives, although the locals had their own name for it, something properly barbarous looking like Thomhamme if the imperial translator had transcribed it correctly…
The Cherusci had not controlled the land for long, it was a result of the last war when they had crushed the Marsi tribe and conquered the area. The localization of Lupia had been chosen both to impress on the defeated Catti that the land was now Cherusci, their former vassal’s, and to facilitate communication with the Romans, who had helped conquer the area.
In fact the city was the second one the Romans called Lupia, for the former capital of the tribe had had the same name despite not being on the river Lupia, something that was rather confusing to some of the older officers.
But right now Lupia and the massive hall of the king of the Cherusci was no longer the largest or more impressive town of the area. In less than a week a force of legionaries and auxiliaries had erected a large camp at the heart of which stood a large purple tent. No hostility was displayed on either side as this was a diplomatic mission, but the emperor would have been a fool had he not had a camp built in the middle of the germanic territory : treason was still a possibility, or simply a murder attempt by a disgruntled Chatti.
And so the imperial fast displayed itself in this mobile court : the tent was made of leather died a dark shade of purple but inside it was serican silks in a wide array of colours, coffers made of precious woods, beds and chairs made of finely worked bronze, splendid silvered chandeliers laid on a floor of marble panels that decorated a number of rooms.
Marcus Aurelius had wanted to impress, and impress it would… It had required no less than ten barges to bring all the equipment for this tent to the camp, and a hundred slaves had worked to erect it in time for the arrival of the emperor.
Yet it had been done without problems and on schedule as the team had been properly warned by the new signals towers built alongside the Rhine in the last eight years : the telegraph had warned them as soon as the emperor had arrived at the mouth of the Rhine, two weeks ago, giving them the time to implement the pre-planned procedure that had also be agreed upon with the Cherusci.
Two cohors of the XXX legion Ulpia Victrix had in fact arrived in Lupia earlier in the summer and had prepared the terrain of the camp, cutting the trees and building terraces on the hill that added to the monumentality of the tent and paving part of the terrain so that dirt would not soil the emperor’s feets. The use of scrappers, which the legion’s engineer had seen of the site of a future canal when he’d been in the area of Narbo a few years before, had greatly helped prepare the ground : the soldiers had built small stone walls and filed the ground behind them with scrapped soil to make the terrasse in record time.
The arrival of the imperial baggage and it's escort of a further two auxiliary cohors had then transformed the hill from a succession of mostly empty terraces to a full camp with tents enough for a legion and the imperial court.
When the emperor had arrived in Castra Vetera he’d been escorted by four other centuries alongside his praetorian guard, two from the legion and two auxiliary units, a formidable force but also less than it could be, a clear sign of the emperor’s strength and confidence despite the fact that the Cherusci were the tribe of the loathsome traitor Arminius, who had caused such grief to the divine Augustus.
But Marcus Aurelius also knew that the cherusci king’s position was not as secure as it seemed : while his victories had given him a lot of prestige, his control on the Chatti land was still somewhat shaky, while other leaders were not happy at being once more allied to Rome after their tribe had almost been destroyed in the time of the divine Tiberius.
Also the Romans had three legions in striking distance of the Cherusci lands, alongside many auxiliaries that made a total of fifty thousand seasoned warriors that could be called against the Cherusci, with at least ten to twenty thousand more ready to intervene as reinforcements in less than a month, something the tribe knew and understood well.