Roman soldiers bought their own equipment and supplemented and replaced it as they needed to, so an Augustan legion would have been far from uniform. On the whole their shields were in the process of evolving from the curved, oval scutum of the previous century into the straight sided and highly curved scutum of the last half of the First Century AD. In AD 9, the shield still had curved sides, but was shorter than the older style and flat at the top and bottom.

The most common helmet was the Coolus style - with a fairly simple bowl of bronze or iron and attached cheek and neck guards. A mail shirt, or lorica hamata, was the most common form of body armour, but finds from the Varus battle site at Kalkriese have revealed that at least some of Varus' troops also wore segmented lorica segmentata. It had been thought that this wasn't introduced to the legions until Claudius' time, but several finds at Kalkriese show that it was in use much earlier.

At least some of the warriors who fought with Arminius were from his auxiliary units and are likely to have been equipped Roman style, or at least to have been better armed that the average Germanic warrior. Most Germanics fought without any armour or helmet, relying purely on shields for protection. The most common weapon was the spear, with each warrior carrying several for throwing and one for hand-to-hand fighting. Tacitus paints a picture of Germania as highly poor in iron and of warriors with wicker shields and fire-hardened poles for spears. Archaeology tells a very different story about the quantity of iron available and Tacitus' image is probably based more on literary convention than direct report. That said, Germanic weapons finds often include bone spear and arrow heads alongside iron ones and the average Germanic's equipment was much more primitive than that of the Romans.

Germanic chiefs may have had access to Roman-style equipment or to mail shirts and helmets in Late La Tene Celtic style. Swords were rare, and most would have been modelled on the Roman gladius or have been long slashing Late La Tene swords.

Arminius' army is likely to have had a core of his auxiliary troops - trained and probably equipped Roman style - along with the better armed retinues of the various tribal chiefs. The rest of the warriors would have been armed with spears and shields, with long knives and possibly axes as hand weapons.