The Romans tell us more about the worship and the priests of the Germans living in Germany than about their gods. The German priests were held in great respect, but they did not form a special class like the Druids or the priests of the Gauls. Their singers, like those of the Gauls, were not priests but poets and singers of battle songs. The Germans had no images of their gods, and they did not honour them in temples but in sacred groves in which the priests offered up sacrifices for the people. Among the victims there were captive foes. The will of the gods and the future were interpreted in different manners, preferably by the neighing of sacred white horses which were kept in the groves of the gods.
If we turn back from this general observation of the Germanic nations to their wars with Augustus, we find the Romans in hostile contact with them on the Rhine and the Danube. Since the time of Cæsar some German tribes—of which the Ubii in the region of Cologne and the Vangiones, Tribocci, and Nemetes between Schlettstadt and Oppenheim, were the most important—had settled on the left bank of the Rhine and had begun to adopt Roman customs.[b]
THE GERMAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE AGAINST ROME
Augustus had no liking for war; he was wont to say that laurels were beautiful but barren, and it was his glory and pride that during his reign the Temple of Janus at Rome was repeatedly closed, and that the Parthians voluntarily restored the ensigns and prisoners captured from the army of Crassus. His mind was not set on the augmentation and extension of the empire but upon the founding and consolidation of monarchical institutions, his wars in Spain and the Alpine regions were undertaken for the purpose of protecting and safeguarding the frontiers of the empire, and the war in Dalmatia and Pannonia was purely defensive. On the Rhine alone he indulged in schemes of conquest; there Cæsar’s Gallic campaigns were to be continued, and the martial honours of the Julian race and name enhanced.
[16-11 B.C.]
As long as Gaul was not completely tranquillised, and stubborn tribes defended their hereditary liberties in the Alpine valleys, the Germans were treated with consideration. The imperator Augustus even confided the safety of his person and of the Capitol to a German troop of horse, as the divine Julius had done before him, and Vipsanius Agrippa settled the Ubii, who were hard pressed by the Suevi, on the left bank of the Rhine and founded the “Agrippine Colony,” the parent city of Cologne. Even the attack made by the eastern dwellers on the lower Rhine on the camp of M. Lollius, who had made an inroad into their territory because they had seized and crucified some Roman spies, went unpunished. But when the new division of Gaul into provinces had been accomplished, and the Alpine districts had been reduced to submission to the sway of Rome, Drusus the gallant and daring stepson of Augustus conceived the project of extending the borders of the empire beyond the Rhine and advancing further along the road which the great Cæsar had trodden.
After providing for the protection of the river by strongly fortifying the ancient confederate towns from Basel (Augusta Rauracorum) to Cologne (Colonia Agrippina)—to wit, Strasburg (Argentoratum), Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Bonn, etc., and creating fresh bulwarks and points d’appui both for defence and attack by founding the “Old Camp” (Castra Vetera) where Xanten now stands, and other castella, he next attempted to secure the northern districts. He induced the Batavians, who inhabited the marshy lowlands from the Rhine and Vaal to the North Sea, and their neighbours on the east, the Frisians, who occupied the seacoast as far as the Ems, to enter into friendship and alliance with the Romans; and then, by constructing a navigable canal which bears the name of “Drusus-Furt” to this day, he connected the lower course of the Rhine by means of the Yssel with the inland lake of Flevo, which at that time communicated with the sea by a navigable river of the same name, but which has since been widened out by the floods into an open bay, the Zuyder Zee. He then sailed into the German ocean with the fleet built on the Rhine, and, skirting the Frisian coast, came to the mouth of the Ems, where the legions fought some skirmishes with the Bructeri and Chauci. The fleet was here exposed to a great danger, for the ebb of the tide drew the waters of the channel away from the ships and left them high and dry. They were only saved from destruction by the aid of the Frisians who had accompanied the Romans by land with an army. When the incoming tide floated the ships once more Drusus returned to Batavia.
The hardihood of the enterprise, unsuccessful as it was, seems to have alarmed the Germans. The tribes between the Rhine and Weser therefore entered into an alliance for the defence of their country against the enemy who menaced it. The Chatti refused to join this league, and their neighbours the Sugambri consequently went to war with them, just as Drusus, who had spent the winter in Rome, reappeared on the Rhine and crossed the boundary stream at the “Old Standing Camp” (at Xanten). He subjugated the Usipetes, and having made a bridge over the Lupia (Lippe), he traversed unopposed the country of the Sigambri, which was denuded of its fighting men, and attacked the Cherusci on the left bank of the Weser. Scarcity of provisions and the approach of winter forced him, however, to retreat. On his return march the Germans attacked him fiercely on all sides. Pent in a narrow gorge and hard beset, he and his army would have been irretrievably lost had not the Germans, thinking the enemy already vanquished, ventured upon the final massacre with savage eagerness and without any order or method. The victory of which they thought themselves certain passed over to Roman strategy. The Germans were beaten and had to look on while the Romans built the castellum of Aliso which they garrisoned and used as a point d’appui for later undertakings. The emperor refused the title of imperator, by which the army hailed their general, but granted his victorious son an ovation and triumphal honours.
Drusus