The conquest of the Roman castella between the Rhine and the Visurgis followed close on the heels of the defeat of Varus. Aliso held out longest; thither the Romans had carried their women and children and there the scattered and fugitive remnants of the army had taken refuge. When their provisions came to an end the besieged tried to slip through the sentries of the besiegers under cover of a stormy night. But only the armed men succeeded in cutting their way through to the Rhine, the greater number of the helpless fell into the hands of the victors and shared the fate of other prisoners, and the fortress of Aliso was destroyed. Asprenas, who was guarding the bank of the Rhine with his two legions lest the revolt should spread to the excitable Gauls, was powerless to lay the tempest. Thus was Roman supremacy broken down on the right bank of the Rhine.
The dwellers on the north coast, the Chauci, Frisii, and some other tribes, alone adhered to the alliance with Rome. Tiberius, who had hastened up with his freshly enlisted troops, confined his efforts to the strengthening and safeguarding of the Rhine frontier and to watching over Gaul, and deferred to the future his revenge for the tarnished glory of the Roman arms. He did, indeed, cross the Rhine next year to show the Germans that the might of Rome was still unbroken; but he did not go far from the river bank, and the strict discipline which he observed and the hard camp life which he imposed on the legions and enforced by his own example, bore witness that the Romans were alive to the danger that menaced their dominion from the Germans and had learned a lesson from bitter experience.
However much Velleius[e] may vaunt his hero, when the commander left the Rhine in the year 12 to celebrate at Rome his triumph over pacified Germany, he could boast of no achievement which obliterated the disgrace inflicted in the Teutoburg forest. This was left for his nephew Germanicus, the gallant son of Drusus, on whom the governorship of Gaul and the supreme command over all the military forces on the Rhine was conferred after the withdrawal of Tiberius. [Tiberius had, nevertheless, proved himself an able commander.]
THE CAMPAIGNS OF GERMANICUS[3]
About the time that Augustus departed this life at Nola, Germanicus was startled by the news that a mutiny had broken out among the soldiers at the “Old Camp” (Vetera). The change of monarchs and the mourning feasts which were the consequence had interrupted military exercises, discipline had grown slack, and the minds of the soldiery were filled and inflamed with all sorts of hopes and desires. Hence threatening agitations and mutinies took place almost simultaneously among the Pannonian and German legions. Germanicus hurried to the lower Rhine from Gaul, where he had been busy with the taxation, to find there a refractory army which had cast away all bonds of obedience and discipline, which complained of its long and arduous service, demanded higher pay and presents of money, offered the sovereignty to him with boisterous clamour, and maltreated at the altars the emissaries of the senate who brought the news of the change of government. The commander-in-chief succeeded in restoring quiet and order, though with great difficulty, and not until a schism had arisen among the rioters themselves and the ringleaders and most audacious spirits had been hideously murdered by their fellow soldiers.
Roman Emperor in the Dress of a General
(After De Montfaucon)
The Illyrian revolt was put down by Drusus, the emperor’s son. To expiate the crimes they had committed the German legions demanded to be led against the enemy; they believed that there was no way of appeasing the spirits of their murdered brothers in arms but by covering their own guilty breasts with honourable wounds. And Germanicus willingly gratified their lust of battle by a campaign in the regions beyond the Rhine.
Germanicus was one of the last heroic figures of decadent Rome. He was in the prime of life and combined all physical and mental excellencies with the virtues of a valiant warrior. Noble in figure and bearing, versed in the highest Greek culture of the age, famed as an orator and as a poet, and endowed with admirable qualities of mind and heart, he was the darling of the legions and the people. They honoured in him the son of Drusus, whose noble likeness he was; the husband of the admirable Agrippina, granddaughter of Augustus, who had borne him a number of blooming children; the descendant of the triumvir Antony, whose daughter his mother Octavia had been. And if his achievements in Pannonia and Dalmatia had gained him the confidence and devotion of his comrades at arms, the kindliness of his nature and an address in which affability was mingled with dignity and majesty won him the hearts of all men. When he went in disguise, as Tacitus tells, through the lines of the camp to spy out the temper of the army, he heard enthusiastic praise of himself from every tent, and when he came to the city he was always surrounded by a throng of friends and dependents of all ranks. Tiberius had adopted him in deference to the wishes of Augustus, but the talents and excellencies of the youthful hero inspired the gloomy soul of the emperor with envy and suspicion. [So at least Tacitus assures us. But possibly that writer’s tendency to invent, or make partisan use of evil motives, may have falsified the facts. Some historians believe that Tiberius trusted Germanicus to the end.]