"We shall either achieve freedom if we venture or lose nothing by defeat." The Revolt of Gaius Julius Civilis.

The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis by Rembrandt.

My favorite bookstore these days is the one I can afford: Trussville Public library, where every discard book is a quarter. Readers may recall that the Vanderboeghs hail from Cadzand in the Netherlands:

Family history has it that the Vanderboegh (also rendered as van der boeg and van de boeg) history begins in Zeeland in the Netherlands on the coast near the Belgian border. We first were farmers on the island of Cadzand, then migrated to Vlissingen across the water where we became boatbuilders about the time of Admiral De Ruyter. (The "boeg" is the prow of a ship, also referring specifically to the hawser hole where the anchor rope ran through. Thus, "Vanderboegh" means "man from the bow of the boat.") When the troops of Napoleon overran the Netherlands, they deliberately put the Dutch shipbuilding industry out of business and the impoverished Vanderboeghs returned to the farms around Cadzand. (I always knew there was a reason I didn't much care for the French.)

In 1849, my branch of the Vanderboeghs, who belonged to a bunch of religious dissenters of the Dutch Reformed Church called "the Seceders", decided to go to America, where they settled in western Michigan. Others migrated to South Africa. As near as I can tell, the name itself seems to have died out in both Holland and South Africa, leaving only those of us in America with the ancient moniker.

So it was only natural that I picked up a volume of insomniac reading material from TPL the other day, entitled The Horizon Concise History of the Low Countries by Anthony Bailey. Published in 1972, this little book mentions a character in history, Gaius Julius Civilis, that I must confess I was ignorant of. Bailey writes:

While fighting Germanic tribes along the Weser and the Elbe rivers, the Romans settled other Germans on the south bank of the Rhine. To many of these Germans who often served as Roman mercenaries, the Roman Empire was, as the historian Christopher Dawson well put it, less an enemy than a career. Tacitus, the Roman historian, wrote in his Germania: "The most conspicuous of all these peoples, the Batavi . . . are not insulted by tribute or ground down by the tax gatherer. Free from imposts and special levies, and reserved for battle, they are like weapons and armor, 'only to be used in war.'" The revolt of one such band of the Batavians had little long-term effect on the Roman occupation, but7 it made great impressions on Tacitus and the elder Pliny, from whom Tacitus got the details for his account. And it made perhaps even more of an impression on later historians. To the eminent seventeenth-century jurist Hugo Grotius the rising of the Batavians was the first Netherlandish war for freedom. Writing in the nineteenth century, the Bostonian John Lothrop Motley regarded the Batavian revolt as a forerunner of the struggle of the Low Countries against Spanish tyranny. Julius Civilis, the name under which the leader of the Batavians served as a Roman mercenary officer, seemed to Motley a primitive, Netherlandish George Washington. "The spectacle of a brave nation inspired by the soul of one great man and rising against an overwhelming despotism will always speak to the heart, from generation to generation."

But perhaps a keener insight into the actualities of the situation in the Low Countries at the time of Nero's death is to be observed in the fragment of a large painting by Rembrandt. It shows Civilis receiving the oath of allegiance from his men, a hazy red-gold scene of barbaric splendor. (The painting was commissioned for Amsterdam's town hall, but evidently Rembrandt's powerful protrayal of Civilis as a one-eyed guerrilla leader did not fit well with the burgomasters' notion of him as an aristocratic hero, for the painting was soon removed and cut down in size; it is now in Stockholm.) This revolt against the Romans failed, and the Batavian fortress, near the present town of Nijmegen in the southern Netherlands was burned. The fate of Claudius Civilis himself is lost in the lowland mists. -- Page 13.

Tacitus' Histories, Book 4, contains this speech by Civilis to a Roman emissary:

'A fine reward I got for my efforts,' said he, ' — the murder of my brother, my own imprisonment, and the vicious clamour of this army for my execution. For this I seek satisfaction according to the law of nations. As for you Treviri and your fellow craven spirits, what recompense do you expect for the blood you have shed so often, other than unrewarded service, endless taxation, flogging, the block and the devilish ingenuities of tyranny? Look at me. I am the commander of a single cohort, and rely on the Cannenefates and Batavians, who form only a tiny fragment of the Gallic provinces. Yet together we have utterly destroyed those vast but useless bases or are now cracking them in the grip of war and hunger. One final argument: we shall either achieve freedom if we venture or lose nothing by defeat.'

Thus it is throughout history, the battle between the slaver and the free man, between the collective and the individual. Thus it still is in the 21st Century. We are all Batavians, even today. In any case, I'm glad I ventured a quarter's risk. I received much more than I paid for.