The Varusschlacht is history, something from his grandparents’ generation, when Pliny the Elder, the famous Roman scientist and writer and long lost ancestor of Edward Ware, pens a history of the event that the called the Germania or simply the German War. He recounted how the tricky Germans under Arminius, or Herman the German, slaughtered Augustus’s legions in 9A.D. But then with zest he detailed just how Germanicus, the Roman general, had gotten Rome’s revenge four years later in 14A.D. He feels that he knows all about it especially since he has been the governor of Germany stationed in Trier on the Moselle River. He claims to have found the skull of the slaughtered Herman the German which he personally dug up and carted back to his villa near Pompeii in the south of Italy where all the Roman aristocrats love to crowd in to see it and laugh at the pretensions of the barbarians.
Pliny founds a whole genre of Roman writers making fun of the Germans. Even his nephew, Pliny the Younger, and his friend, Tacitus, have put their pens to it. But what he doesn’t count on are the descendants of the slaughtered Herman the German who want revenge for their grandfather’s murder and his subsequent humiliation at the hands of Pliny. They set out to Pompeii with a map about how to find the Vesuvius volcano which will indicate where to find the man. They are bent on revenge in the Vesuvius Plot.
