Battle of Teutoburg Forest

[Jona Lendering]

it seems to stick to the facts as known ... I did not get a sense Wells ignored Tacitus or Dio

One of the points where he ignores them, is that he presents the battle as a one-day affair. Dio explicitly mentions a protracted struggle; Tacitus -quoting Pliny- mentions several camps, which also suggests (but does not prove) that fighting took several days.

Wells wants it to be a one-day fight. He offers an analysis that it was possible to gather sufficient Germanic men to create an army, but that is insufficient proof, because he ignores two steps that are necessary for this argument: (a) that this assembly of men could be used as an army (hunting experience makes no warriors) and (b) that what was potentially possible, actually happened.

The first objection is perhaps not very important; but the second is. In the terms of formal logic: Wells confuses the modalities of his statements.