The Batavians Defeating the Romans on the Rhine

In 1609 the Dutch Republic agreed a 12-year truce with Spain after four decades of revolt, and its leaders went looking for a past that explained them. They found one in the Roman historian Tacitus, who described how the Batavians, a Germanic people of the Rhine delta, rose against Rome in AD 69. The Dutch took the Batavians as their own ancestors, rebels against an empire just as they had been. In 1613 the States General, the Republic's governing assembly, paid for 12 small panels by Otto van Veen telling the story of that uprising, and hung them in the Binnenhof in The Hague. This is the fourth. A grey horse lies dead in the corner, one Roman sprawls on his back and another still raises his shield, while behind them the Batavian ranks surge forward toward boats on the river.