The Provinces of the Roman Empire (Illustrated Edition). Theodor Mommsen
and dispersed were able to effect their escape. The captives, especially the officers and the advocates, were fastened to the cross, or buried alive, or bled under the sacrificial knife of the German priests. The heads cut off were nailed as a token of victory to the trees of the sacred grove. Far and wide the land rose against the foreign rule; it was hoped that Maroboduus would join the movement; the Roman posts and roads on the whole right bank of the Rhine fell without further trouble into the power of the victors. Only in Aliso, the brave commandant Lucius Caedicius, not an officer, but a veteran soldier, offered a resolute resistance, and his archers were enabled to make the encampment before the walls so annoying to the Germans, who possessed no weapons for distant fighting, that they converted the siege into a blockade. When the last stores of the besieged were exhausted, and still no relief came, Caedicius broke out one dark night; and this remnant of the army, though burdened with numerous women and children, and suffering severe losses through the assaults of the Germans, in reality ultimately reached the camp at Vetera. Thither also the two legions stationed in Mentz under Lucius Nonius Asprenas had gone on the news of the disaster. The resolute defence of Aliso, and the rapid intervention of Asprenas, hindered the Germans from following up the victory on the left bank of the Rhine, and perhaps the Gauls from rising against Rome.
Tiberius again on the Rhine.
The defeat was soon compensated, in so far as the Rhine army was immediately not simply made up to its strength, but considerably reinforced. Tiberius once more took up the supreme command, and though for the year following on the battle of Varus (10) the history of the war had no combats to record, it is probable that arrangements were then made for the occupation of the Rhine–frontier by eight legions, and simultaneously for the division of this command into that of the upper army, with Mentz as its headquarters, and that of the lower with the headquarters at Vetera, an arrangement, as a whole, which thereupon remained normal for centuries. It could not but be expected that this increase of the army of the Rhine would be followed by the energetic resumption of operations on the right bank. The Romano–German conflict was not a conflict between two powers equal in the political balance, in which the defeat of the one might justify the conclusion of an unfavourable peace; it was the conflict of a great civilised and organised state against a brave but, in a political and military aspect, barbarous nation, in which the ultimate result was settled from the first, and an isolated failure in the plan as sketched might as little produce any change as the ship gives up its voyage because a gust of wind drives it out of its course. But it was otherwise. Tiberius, doubtless, went across the Rhine in the following year (11), but this expedition did not resemble the former one. He remained during the summer on that side, and celebrated the emperor’s birthday there, but the army kept to the immediate neighbourhood of the Rhine, and of expeditions on the Weser and on the Elbe there was nothing said. Evidently the object was only to show to the Germans that the Romans still knew how to find the way into their country, and perhaps also to make such arrangements on the right bank of the Rhine as the change of policy required.
Germanicus on the Rhine.
The great command embracing both armies was retained, and retained accordingly in the imperial house. Germanicus had already exercised it in the year 11 along with Tiberius; in the following year (12), when the administration of the consulate detained him in Rome, Tiberius commanded alone on the Rhine; with the beginning of the year 13 Germanicus took up the sole command. The state of things was regarded as one of war with the Germans; but these were years of inaction.21 The fiery and ambitious hereditary prince bore with reluctance the constraint imposed on him, and we can understand how, as an officer, he should not forget the three eagles in the hands of the enemy, and how, as the son of Drusus, he should wish to re–erect his structure that had been destroyed. Soon the opportunity presented itself, and he took it. On the 19th August of the year 14, the emperor Augustus died. The first change in the throne of the new monarchy did not pass over without a crisis, and Germanicus had opportunity of proving by deeds to his father that he was disposed to maintain allegiance to him. But at the same time he found in it warrant for resuming, even unbidden, the long–wished–for invasion of Germany; he declared that he had by this fresh campaign to repress the not inconsiderable ferment that had been called forth among the legions upon the change of sovereign. Whether this was a real reason or a pretext we know not, and perhaps he did not himself know. The commandant of the Rhine army could not be debarred from crossing the frontier anywhere, and it always to a certain degree depended on himself how far he should proceed against the Germans. Perhaps too, he believed that he was acting in the spirit of the new ruler, who had at least as much claim as his brother to the name of conqueror of Germany, and whose announced appearance in the camp on the Rhine might, doubtless, be conceived of, as though he were coming to resume the conquest of Germany broken off at the bidding of Augustus.
Renewed offensive.
However this may be, the offensive beyond the Rhine began anew. Even in the autumn of the year 14, Germanicus in person led detachments of all the legions at Vetera over the Rhine, and penetrated up the Lippe pretty far into the interior, laying waste the country far and wide, putting to death the natives, and destroying the temples, such as that of Tanfana held in high honour. Those assailed—chiefly Bructeri, Tubantes, and Usipes,—sought to prepare the fate of Varus for the crown–prince on his way home; but the attack recoiled before the energetic bearing of the legions. As this advance met with no censure, but on the contrary, thanks and marks of honour were decreed to the general for it, he went farther. In the opening of the year 15 he assembled his main force, in the first instance on the middle Rhine, and advanced in person from Mentz against the Chatti as far as the upper confluents of the Weser, while the lower army, farther to the north, attacked the Cherusci and the Marsi. There was a certain justification for this proceeding in the fact that the Cherusci favourably disposed towards Rome, who had, under the immediate impression of the disaster of Varus, been obliged to join the patriots, were now again at open variance with the much stronger national party, and invoked the intervention of Germanicus. He was actually successful in liberating Segestes, the friend of the Romans, when hard pressed by his countrymen, and at the same time in getting possession of his daughter, the wife of Arminius. Segestes’ brother Segimerus, once the leader of the patriots by the side of Arminius, submitted. The internal dissensions of the Germans once more paved the way for the foreign rule. In the very same year Germanicus undertook his main expedition to the region of the Ems; Caecina marched from Vetera to the upper Ems, while he in person went thither with the fleet from the mouth of the Rhine; the cavalry moved along the coast through the territory of the faithful Frisians. When reunited the Romans laid waste the country of the Bructeri and the whole territory between the Ems and Lippe, and thence made an expedition to the disastrous spot where, six years before, the army of Varus had perished, to erect a monument to their fallen comrades. On their farther advance the Roman cavalry were allured by Arminius and the exasperated hosts of the patriots into an ambush, and would have been destroyed had not the infantry come up and prevented greater mischief. More serious dangers attended the return homeward from the Ems, which followed at first the same routes as the march thither.
Retreat of Caecina.
The cavalry arrived at the winter camp uninjured. Seeing that the fleet was not sufficient for conveying the infantry of four legions, owing to the difficulty of navigation—it was about the time of the autumnal equinox—Germanicus disembarked two of them and made them return along the shore; but inadequately acquainted with the ebbing and flowing of the tide at this season of the year, they lost their baggage and ran the risk of being drowned en masse. The retreat of the four legions of Caecina from the Ems to the Rhine resembled exactly that of Varus; indeed, the difficult, marshy country offered perhaps still greater difficulties than the defiles of the wooded hills. The whole mass of natives, with the two princes of the Cherusci, Arminius and his highly esteemed uncle Inguiomerus, at their head, threw themselves on the retreating troops in the sure hope of preparing for them the same fate, and filled the morasses and woods all around. But the old general, experienced in forty years’ of war service, remained cool even in the utmost peril, and kept his despairing and famishing men firmly in hand. Yet even he might not perhaps have been able to avert the mischief but for the circumstance that, after a successful attack during the march, in which the Romans lost a great part of their cavalry and almost the whole baggage, the Germans,