Augustus: The Life and Times of the Founder of the Roman Empire

by Evelyn S. Shuckburgh

Drusus in Germania B.C. 12-9.

Meanwhile Drusus was not idle. The Sugambri and their allies crossed the Rhine into the district called Lower Germany, a part of Belgium (now North Brabant), where they would find tribes nearly allied to themselves, and willing to shake off the Roman yoke. Drusus had been engaged in the consecration of an altar to Augustus at Lugdunum, where he had invited the attendance of leading Gauls from all these provinces. He hurried back to the Rhine and drove the invaders over the river, and then throwing a bridge across it (somewhere below Cologne), he attacked the Usipites on the right bank of the Lupia, and then marched up the Rhine to attack the Sugambri. But there was a fleet of ships supporting him in the Rhine. He cut a canal from the River to Lake Flevo (Zuyder Zee), so that this fleet might sail up the coast to the mouths of the three rivers—the Amisia, Visurgis, and Albis (Ems, Weser, Elbe). He proposed to make the Elbe the limit of the Roman Empire, instead of the Rhine; but in this first year only reduced the coast as far as the Visurgis. The next year (B.C. 11), he advanced by land to the same river, only farther inland, and occupied the country of the Cherusci (Westphalia), and though on their way home his men were nearly caught in an ambush, they got back safely to the banks of the Lupia, and several forts were established in various parts of the country. The next year (B.C. 10) he was engaged with the Chatti (Hessen), who endeavoured to regain the territories from which he had driven them in the previous year.[267] In B.C. 9, being now consul, he pushed as far as the Elbe, where he erected a trophy to mark the extreme limit of the Roman advance, through the land of the Chatti and Trevi. But on his return march he fell and broke his leg, and there being no skilled physician with the army, he died after thirty days’ suffering. Besides these marches into Germany, he had, during his command, established a line of fortresses on the Lower Rhine, to the number of fifty, as far up the stream as Argentoratum (Strassburg).

Tiberius in Germany B.C. 8-7.

On hearing of his brother’s accident, Tiberius, who was at Ticinum, hurried to his side, was with him when he died, and accompanied the corpse on foot back to Rome, where he delivered a funeral oration, and Augustus, who returned from Lugdunum at this time, another. The ashes were placed in the Mausoleum of Augustus. Tiberius was appointed to succeed him on the Rhine, and in B.C. 8 crossed the river to attack the Sugambri. But as the other tribes made their submission, the Sugambri were induced to send some of their leading men to negotiate also. Augustus then took a step which requires, at any rate, some explanation. He seized these legates and kept them in confinement in various towns as hostages. It had the immediate effect, however, of keeping the Sugambri quiet, large numbers of them were settled on the left bank of the Rhine, and Tiberius was able to come home for his triumph in B.C. 7, with which the name of Drusus was also associated.

No wars of any consequence disturbed the peace of the Empire for nearly nine years. Tiberius retired to Rhodes in B.C. 6, and his successors in the command of the army of the Rhine had the task of maintaining and strengthening the conquests of Drusus. The two districts on the left bank of the river, Germania Inferior and Superior, though for some purposes they belonged to Gallia Belgica, yet as military districts were distinct, and they included some fortresses on the right bank of the Rhine. The country between the Rhine and the Elbe was in an ambiguous position. It was not a province, and yet the commanders on the Rhine occupied as much of it as they could from time to time maintain.

Tiberius again in Germany and Illyricum, A.D. 4-7.

But in A.D. 4 Tiberius, now returned from Rhodes, and adopted son of Augustus, took over the command on the Rhine, and immediately began a great forward movement like that of his brother Drusus. He too advanced to the Weser and reduced the Cherusci who were in revolt; and after marching to the Lippe again, advanced to the Elbe (A.D. 5), reducing the Chauci and Longobardi, this time with the support of a fleet that entered the mouth of the Elbe. Some others thought it safer to send envoys and make terms of friendship with Rome. Next year (A.D. 6) he was to attack the Marcomanni under a powerful leader named Marobudus. The attack was to be made from two sides. C. Sextius Saturninus, an able and experienced officer, was to lead one army from the Rhine, through the territory of the Chatti (near Cologne), while Tiberius himself led another from Noricum across the Danube. The two were to converge upon the district now occupied by the Marcomanni answering to the modern Bohemia. Tiberius was accompanied by the governor of Pannonia (Valerius Messalinus), and a large part of the troops stationed there. But the expedition was prevented by a sudden rising in Pannonia and Dalmatia. The inhabitants of these countries had not become reconciled to Roman rule; they felt the burden of the tribute, and the opportunity afforded by the withdrawal of so many troops was eagerly seized. Tiberius was forced to offer terms to Marobudus, which he accepted, and hurry back to Pannonia, while Saturninus returned to the Rhine for fear of an outbreak there. The rising in Pannonia and Dalmatia was with difficulty suppressed after a weary struggle lasting between three and four years. Many legions had to be drafted into the country from other provinces as well as large auxiliary forces. Germanicus was summoned to assist with a new army, and Augustus himself came to Ariminum to be near at hand. Suetonius affirms that it was the most serious struggle in which the Romans had been engaged since the Punic wars. In B.C. 9 Tiberius indeed returned to Rome to claim his triumph, but had to go back to put a last touch to the war.

The fall of Varus, A.D. 9.

Meanwhile the army of the Rhine had been under the command of P. Quintilius Varus. Velleius gives an unfavourable account of him. He was more a courtier than a soldier, and in his government of Syria had shown himself greedy of money. “He entered a rich province a poor man, and left a poor province a rich one.” From the time of his accession to the command in B.C. 7 he seems to have regarded the country between the Rhine and Elbe as completely reduced to the form of a Roman province, and proceeded to levy tribute with the same strictness as he had been used to do in Syria. But the German tribes did not regard themselves as Roman subjects. The Romans were only masters of so much as their camps could control. While Varus was living in fancied security in his summer camp on the Weser, busied only with the usual legal administration of a provincial governor, four great German peoples, the Cherusci, Chatti, Marsi, and Bructeri, were secretly combining under the lead of the Cheruscan chief, Arminius, to strike a blow for liberty. As the autumn of A.D. 9 approached Varus prepared to return to the regular winter quarters on the Rhine (Castra Vetera). Arminius, who had served in the Roman army, and had been rewarded by the citizenship and the rank of eques, had ingratiated himself with Varus, and was fully acquainted with his plans, and though Varus had been warned of his treachery he seems to have taken no heed. In order to bring him through the difficult country where the ambush was to await him, a rising of a tribe off his direct road to the Lower Rhine was planned. He fell into the trap, and turning aside to chastise the rebellious tribe, was caught in a difficult pass, somewhere between the sources of the Lippe and Ems, and he and nearly the whole of his army perished. For three days the army struggled through a thick and almost pathless forest, encumbered by a heavy baggage train, and a number of women and children, attacked and slaughtered at nearly every step by the Germans who were concealed in the woods, and continually made descents upon them. A miserable remnant was saved by the exertions of L. Asprenas, a legate of Varus, who had come to the rescue. Varus and some of his chief officers appear to have committed suicide. The loss of three legions and a large body of auxiliaries greatly affected the Emperor, now a man of over seventy. For many months he wore signs of mourning, and we are told that at times in his restless anxiety he beat his head upon the door, crying, “Varus, give me back my legions!” Perhaps this is the picturesque imagination of anecdote mongers. Though alarmed for the possible consequences both at home and in the provinces, he acted with spirit and energy. He ordered the urban pickets to be carefully posted, suspended all changes in provincial governments, and held a levy of citizen soldiers, enforcing by threats and punishment the duty of giving in the names. For some time past service in the army had been regarded as a profession sufficiently attractive to draw volunteers, without having recourse to the legal right of conscription. But a sudden emergency like this seems to have found men apathetic or disinclined, and he had to resort to the old methods. He thought it necessary also to get rid for a time of Gauls or Germans who were serving in the city cohorts or residing in Rome. Tiberius, on the news of the disaster, hurried from his Pannonian quarters to Rome, and was appointed to the Rhine command, to which he went early in A.D. 10. The danger most to be feared was that the victorious Germans would at once cross the Rhine. But this had been averted partly because the Marcomanni had declined to join the insurrection, even when Arminius sent the head of Varus to their chief, Marobudus, and partly by the fact that the rebellious Germans themselves wasted time in blockading Aliso, the fort erected by Drusus on the Lippe, which was obstinately defended by its garrison under Lucius Cædicius. It proved to be the Ladysmith of the German war, for the Germans, fearing to leave it on their rear, missed the opportunity of attacking the camps on the Rhine before they could be reinforced. The brave garrison, when their provisions were exhausted, escaped on a dark night and reached Castra Vetera in safety. Still, the result of the rising was to free Germany beyond the Rhine. When Tiberius arrived to take the command in A.D. 10, he spent the first year in strengthening the forts along that river; and though in A.D. 11 he moved his summer camp beyond it, he never went far, or apparently engaged in any warlike operations then or in A.D. 12. In the next year he returned to Rome and was succeeded in the command by his nephew, Germanicus. The forward movements of this young prince belong to the next reign, but Tiberius no doubt learnt now what a few years later induced him to recall Germanicus and be content with the frontier of the Rhine.