The Defeat of Varus and the German Frontier Policy of Augustus

by W. A. Oldfather; H. V. Canter

This contest, therefore, waged under such circumstances, could not have been in any sense a real test of the military strength of the contending forces. Remembering too that it was a fundamental policy of Rome to take no backward step in the face of defeat, and considering also the known strength of Rome at this period, it is inconceivable that the loss of three legions could in itself have reversed the policy of that great world-power, particularly when it is remembered that only a few years before (6 A. D.) Tiberius had assembled twelve legions against Maroboduus[6], while in that same year, against the Dalmatian-Pannonian insurrection, the Roman legions were increased to twenty-six, a body of troops such as had never since the close of the civil wars been united under the same command.[7] This difficulty has not escaped notice. Schiller recognizes it[8], and while denying that the explanation is to be found in the exhaustion of the empire, he urges the advanced age of Augustus and the financial situation, which, without the creation of new revenues, could not have provided sufficient means. Similarly Mommsen observes[9]: “We have difficulty in conceiving that the destruction of an army of 20,000 men without further direct military consequences should have given a decisive turn to the policy at large of a judiciously governed universal empire.” Immediately following this Mommsen offers as explanation: “there is no other reason to be found for it than that they [Augustus and Tiberius] recognized the plans pursued by them for twenty years for the changing of the boundary to the north as incapable of execution, and the subjugation and mastery of the region between the Rhine and the Elbe appeared to them to transcend the resources of the empire.” Seeck, commenting on the difference in Rome’s policy in the time of the Punic wars and after the disaster to Varus[10], believes that Augustus turned back to his “weaker wisdom” of an earlier day (the year 20 B. C., when he said the empire was large enough), because the Germans threatened only the provinces, not Rome itself, as did the Pannonians, whom Rome was at all hazard and at any cost compelled to subdue. Eduard Meyer thinks that although Arminius’ revolt and the battle as a military event had no greater significance than the revolts and victories of the Celts and the Pannonians, the battle nevertheless was decisive because it was not possible for Rome to raise troops sufficient to win back the advantage lost, the two legions that were levied being raised by proscription, and from the non-citizen class. Further, whereas the insurrection in Pannonia left no choice but to increase the army, the war with Germany would have imposed not only too great a financial burden, but would have revoked in the most drastic way the old rule which permitted service in the army only to citizens.[11] To have subdued Germany at such a cost as this, argues Meyer (p. 487) would have been as inexpedient as to subdue the Parthians.

These suggestions by Mommsen and Meyer as to Rome’s lack of resources necessitate, before any conclusion is reached as to the permanent effect of this one defeat, a consideration of the relative resources of Rome and Germany at this period.

When we compare the general resources of the Roman empire with those of Germany the balance is found to be overwhelmingly in favor of the former, had its whole strength, or even any considerable fraction thereof, been employed. The population of the empire under Augustus was not far from 55,000,000[12], and, as service was voluntary and men of any nationality were admitted, at least into the auxilia, practically the whole free male population of the empire was available for service. There was, of course, the traditional custom according to which the legions were restricted to Roman citizens, and the auxilia, consisting of foreigners, were kept at about the same number as the legionaries[13], but Pompey and then Caesar had enrolled legions of provincials (the so-called legiones vernaculae), and in the armies of Brutus and Cassius and the triumvirs this was done on so extensive a scale that Vergil, Ecl. I, 70 f. calls the veterans who were settled in Italy out and out “miles ... barbarus.”[14] Now Augustus appears to have made some consistent efforts to restore the old conditions, but even then the eastern legions seem to have been recruited, in large part at least, from the Orient, while those of the west were drawn from Italy and the Latin Occident[15], and under the succeeding emperors the provinces were more and more heavily drawn upon, until Roman citizens almost wholly disappeared from the ranks of the imperial army.[16] Seeck indeed, after a renewed examination of the material collected by Mommsen, comes to the conclusion that Augustus did exercise much greater caution in drawing the bulk at least of his forces from the citizens of Italy and the Roman citizens of the provinces.[17] But granting this position for the sake of argument, and admitting that Augustus would recruit his legionaries only from Roman citizens (for we prefer to give minimal estimates in order to avoid any charge of overstating our case), the citizen population of the empire (about 4,700,000 in 9 A. D.)[18] was sufficient to raise an army of 400,000 men under the inspiration of some great national cause, which, with an equal number of auxilia, would yield a total potential military force of 800,000, not counting the fleet which was frequently employed in the operations in Germany, and must have been heavily drawn upon if any permanent conquest of the land was to be undertaken.[19] That such a figure as this is not beyond reason is clear from the fact that after Actium Augustus found himself in possession of 50 legions, a total army of between five and six hundred thousand men[20], while after Mutina, 66 legions, at least 660,000 men, were in the field at once, and after the defeat of Sextus Pompey in 36, Octavian and Antony had together no fewer than 74 or 75 legions under arms, which, counting everything, and including naval contingents, must have amounted to at least 800,000 men.[21]

However, even if the numerical superiority of the Roman empire may not appear so overwhelming in the number of troops which might be raised, we must remember that the resources of the whole population were available to the full for maintaining in the field, at the highest efficiency, and for an indefinite period, an army of several hundred thousand men; for all the inhabitants of the empire without exception contributed abundantly in money and materials, so that in this respect the great numbers and vast economic resources of the empire gave it a position of immeasurable superiority over the barbarians. Furthermore for a war such as the organized conquest of Germany would have entailed, a huge levy of men suddenly rushed to the spot, would have proved useless—or rather positively injurious; without adequate means of communication in that rough country it would have been almost impossible to make effective use of them at one spot, or even along one line, while the difficulty of provisioning them would have been quite insuperable. What was needed was a force of moderate size, capable of meeting any concerted effort on the part of the enemy, which could press steadily forward, constructing roads, establishing depots of supplies, firmly seizing and organizing the territory that was reached and passed, and leave no possibility of revolt in their rear. For this an army of ten to twelve legions operating from two established bases, the Rhine and the Danube, would have sufficed. Before such methods Germany must inevitably have succumbed after two or three campaigns.

For the actual size of the standing army under Augustus was ample to have carried on precisely such operations. The number of his legions varied somewhat from time to time. After Actium Augustus had about 50 legions; this number was reduced to 18, then raised again to 26 at the outbreak of the Pannonian revolt.[22] Three were lost in 9 A. D., and in their place but two were added, so that the number left at his death was 25.[23] Taking this latter as that of the average number about the time of the defeat of Varus, calculating the theoretical strength of the legion at 6000 men[24], and adding in an equal number of auxilia, the city troops, the praetorian cohorts, the fleet, and various detached contingents[25], we get about 325,000. The effective force would be somewhat less than this, of course, but would not probably fall much if any under 300,000 men.[26] Now the majority of these could have been launched upon Germany with little or no difficulty. Fifteen legions, or nearly three-fifths of the total force of the empire had been concentrated in Pannonia for three years (Suetonius, Tiberius, 16), and there is no conceivable reason why these same legions might not at once have turned upon the Germanic tribes, their task in Pannonia now accomplished, especially as twelve legions, that is to say, two-thirds of the whole army as it stood at that time, were actually operating in Germany at the time of the outbreak of the Pannonian revolt. Fifteen legions and the whole of the otherwise unoccupied fleet would constitute an effective strength of at least 175,000 men, a force several times as large as that with which Caesar had accomplished the conquest of Gaul.

On the other hand the population of Germany between the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Danube was extremely small. The Germans had no regular cities (Tacitus, Germania, 16), some tribes had as yet scarcely passed the nomadic state, there were immense forests, and undrained swamps, while there were here and there wide stretches of waste and uninhabited land on the marches between hostile tribes.[27] Agriculture was primitive, and industries did not exist at all. Under such conditions the density of population must have been low indeed. And yet the traditional view represents the Germans as being very numerous, several millions in fact (Gutsche und Schultze, Deutsche Geschichte, I (1894), p. 236, for example, estimate the total number of Germans at no fewer than 15,000,000, more in fact, rather than less!), and the persistence of such utterly uncritical opinions explains in part the strange tenacity with which even those who know better are obsessed with the idea that the conquest of Germany, because of its teeming millions, would have been a very difficult undertaking.[28] Fustel de Coulanges long since and H. Delbrück more recently had insisted upon the numerical weakness of the tribes which actually overthrew the empire in the fifth century[29], and Ch. Dubois, in an elaborate study of Ammianus, has shown that the actual numbers of the Franks, Alamanni, etc., who wrought such devastation in Gaul in the fourth century, were astonishingly small.[30]

H. Delbrück was the first to use severely critical methods for the calculation of the population of Germany.[31] On the basis of Beloch’s calculations for Gaul he estimated an average density of population of 4-5 per square kilometer, which makes for the region between the Rhine, Elbe, and the Main-Saale line, with which alone he is concerned, a population of roughly 515,000 to 645,000, or as he prefers to count it at 250 per (German) square mile, about 575,000 (calculating the area of this district at ca. 2300 (German) square miles). For the whole region between the Rhine and the Elbe he estimates not more than about 1,000,000 inhabitants. That makes for all Germany about 2,000,000, taking the first group of tribes as constituting not quite one third of the whole nation.[32] This calculation he supports on the basis of a totally different one, which is derived from the number of warriors who could take part in an assembly and be addressed by a single speaker. Setting this at a maximum of six to eight thousand, and taking the average as five thousand, at the ratio of 5 to 1 he gets 25,000 as the size of the average German tribe, and as there were about twenty-three of these between the Rhine, Elbe, and Main-Saale line, he reaches exactly the same figure of 575,000 for the population of this district.

A different line of attack was pursued by G. Schmoller shortly after Delbrück’s critique.[33] Taking the results of extensive studies in the population of nations at different stages of economic development, he estimates the average density of population per square kilometer for “the north Indogermanic farming and cattle-raising communities about the beginning of the Christian era” to have varied between the limits 5 and 12, setting that of Germany as 5 to 6. This would give for the area between the Rhine, Elbe, and Main-Saale line a population of roughly about 640,000 to 770,000, or for the whole of Germany, taking this portion as not quite one-third, a total population only slightly in excess of two millions. The substantial agreement in the results reached by these three different methods employed independently, the historical-statistical, the institutional, and the economic, makes an exceedingly strong case. It can be further strengthened, perhaps, by one or two other considerations which have as yet not been employed. They are the following.

Maroboduus at the head of the Marcomannic confederation, which included a large number of tribes (even the distant Semnones and the Longobardi) seems, at the height of his power, to have commanded a total force of 74,000 men.[34] This number, as Ludwig Schmidt has pointed out[35], bears every evidence of being reliable, because of the immense force, twelve legions, one hundred thousand men at the lowest estimate, which Tiberius felt he must employ in order to crush him.[36] Now this is probably the total number of males who in the last extremity might bear arms, i. e., following the customary Roman calculations[37], one-fourth of the whole population. The Marcomannic confederation at its greatest development would have had, therefore, a population of 296,000, or let us say, in round numbers, 300,000. Now some years later the Cheruscan confederacy under Arminius waged war with Maroboduus on fairly even terms; hence it is not unreasonable to suppose that the strength of the two confederations was about equal.[38] Of course a large number of the tribes which lay even between the Rhine and the Elbe must have held aloof from the struggle, certainly those along the sea coast like the Cannanefates, the Frisii and the like, who were under Roman control, but doubtless many others also in the remoter parts of the district concerned. The neutrals may very well have been as numerous as either confederacy, but hardly more numerous than both combined, for the struggle is represented as a great national movement. In one case we would get a total population of 900,000, in the other 1,200,000, figures which agree very closely with those already reached by Delbrück and Schmoller.

Again Posidonius in his description of Gaul (in Diod., V, 25) has calculated that the smaller tribes of Gaul counted 50,000 members, the largest a scant 200,000. The average would be 125,000, but, as E. Levasseur, who has used this datum for his calculations of the population of Gaul, observes[39], the number of large tribes was probably very small, so that a lower average (he accepts 100,000) must be taken. On what seems to be a fair assumption, therefore, i. e., that the 60 tribes of Gaul which were represented on the great altar at Lyons[40], existed in Posidonius’ day, one would get a total population of about 6,000,000, which is astonishingly close to Beloch’s own revised calculations, who concedes the possibility of 6,750,000, but prefers 5,700,000.[41] Now the Germans being without cities, developed agriculture or elaborate commerce, must have had a very much scantier population, certainly not more than an average of 50,000 per tribe, and probably much less. Hence taking 50,000 as a maximum figure, we should get for the whole of Germany with about 60 tribes[42], a maximum of 3,000,000, and for the Rhine, Elbe, Main-Saale district with 20 to 23 tribes[43], a maximum of 1,000,000 to 1,150,000, and a probable size of about three quarters of a million—or even less. These numbers, while somewhat larger than those already reached by other methods, are yet reasonably close to them to serve as a sort of confirmation, and in any event come very far below the figures customarily given for the population of Germany.