Fifteen thousand eight hundred men are estimated to have formed the army lost in the Teutoberger Wald. This irreparable loss gave to the heart of Cæsar Augustus its pathetic cry enduring even to the day of death, “Varus, Varus, give back my legions, Varus!”
Suetonius tells us that at the news of the Black Forest disaster, Augustus, in bitter grief, beat his head against the wall crying incessantly and inconsolably, “Bring back my legions, Varus”: and that after many years had passed and even to the day of his death he lamented the loss as irreparable. Not, indeed, because so many men had fallen; Rome was prodigal of human life; but because his prophetic eye saw in this defeat the beginning of the end of Roman supremacy; the change of policy from aggressive to defensive; the fatal turning of a tide which should roll down upon southern Europe in inundations of desolation.
Many other ancient writers attest the seriousness of this defeat to Rome and corroborate what Suetonius says as to its effect upon Augustus. Dion Cassius says, “Then Augustus, when he heard the calamity of Varus, rent his garment, and was in great affliction for the troops he had lost, and for terror respecting the Germans and the Gauls. And his chief alarm was, that he expected them to push on against Italy and Rome; and there were no Roman youth fit for military duty that were worth speaking of, and the allied populations that were at all serviceable had been wasted away.”
Florus also expresses its effects: “Hac clade factum est ut imperium quod in litore oceani non steterat, in ripa Rheni fluminis staret.” (The result of this disaster was that the empire which had not been content that it be bounded by the shore of ocean was forced to accept as its boundary the River Rhine).
Arminius.
There was an attempt made many years ago to erect a statue to the memory of Arminius. The site chosen for this imposing monument was, of course, the Teutoberger Wald. It was suggested that contributions be received only from the English and German nations and that the statue should stand as a memorial of the common ancestry and heritage of the German-English races.
Arminius is indeed more truly an English national hero than was Caractacus, if the Saxon genealogy be properly traced.
However, the project fell through. England and Germany are not yet amicably one under the tutelage of a far off German war-lord: and no colossal statue of Arminius—successful strategist and wholesale slaughterer—rises today in gloomy Teutoberger Wald from out the dark depths of Der Mordkessel.