For we must bear in mind the marked tendencies of our sources for the administration of Varus. Florus was concocting a melodrama; Dio arranging an explanation, which should save the credit of Rome and the Roman soldier by putting all the blame on the dead who tell no tales; Velleius distorting everything in maiorem gloriam of Tiberius, for whom Varus must serve as a foil at every turn. There is therefore nothing so stupid, arrogant, or wilful that it is not cheerfully ascribed to him, while perfectly proper and natural things, like the presence of lawyers on his staff, the making of arrangements regarding the quantity and character of the assistance to be rendered by the socii, the dispersion of little detachments of troops upon one or another small but necessary service, are exaggerated into acts of wanton folly and oppression, and interpreted as the inauguration of a totally new policy. Yet every one of these things must inevitably have taken place on all the numerous similar demonstrations that had been made in Germany; the only reason that they are not mentioned elsewhere is that we have no accounts regarding other operations in Germany in which such details would have been in place. They were the ordinary routine of campaigning and of no interest to the average ancient historiographer, save as they served to point a lurid description of a disaster, or to supply a basis, however flimsy, for a misrepresentation.
Varus was, we may feel assured, doing no more, in all probability much less, than his predecessors had done on numerous occasions. Two years of heavy fighting had not broken the Pannonian revolt. The forces along the Rhine, if not actually weakened in order to enlarge those in Pannonia, would doubtless be so represented by hot-headed Germans of the nationalist persuasion, particularly after two years of utter inaction. It was doubtless in response to suggestions that Roman prestige needed some refurbishing in the interior, and very likely at the express command of Augustus, that Varus undertook his fatal demonstration. The very fact that he left so large a force at the Rhine under Asprenas would indicate that he felt it safer to keep two armies in readiness for action at different points, rather than to concentrate his forces and so risk the breaking out of trouble in some quarter from which pressure had been removed. Without any open show of violence, rather with every expression of courtesy, confidence, and good will, he was engaged in the ordinary routine of a commanding officer upon such a demonstration in force, when suddenly attacked and destroyed. Graciousness and friendliness had been taken for weakness, as too often with the barbarian, and he and his men had to pay for a conciliatory attitude with their lives. All this is but the thing which we should reasonably expect under the circumstances; it is all that the sources, critically examined, will justify us in asserting. We do not possess, to be sure, the actual documents of alliance between Rome and various tribes or chieftains of Germany; we have in fact scarcely the name of any German preserved from Ariovistus to Arminius, but we can be perfectly certain that negotiations of friendship and alliance were frequently and solemnly entered upon. If Rome had made an alliance with Ariovistus in 59 B. C. (see above [n. 8]), while as yet he was a relatively unknown force, hundreds of miles from the frontier, how much more must she have been busy in organizing friendly relations with the German tribes that were immediately contiguous to the Rhine and through whose territories her armies so often marched in peace?
Finally, we would emphasize the general defensive character of the campaigns. In the great majority of cases some disturbance in Germany is definitely given as the cause of the operations, and if our sources for the Germanic wars were not so hopelessly fragmentary we should doubtless find that in every instance the Germans were the aggressors.[37] Even the proposed campaign against Maroboduus we have no right to regard as an act of wanton aggression, for Maroboduus had retired sulkily into the forests of Bohemia, and there developed a formidable army, and though his overt acts were conciliatory, his very presence, considering the inflammable character of the nation to which he belonged, and in which he might incite greater disturbances than had ever yet broken out, was a cause of justifiable apprehension.[38] Indeed any other German than Maroboduus and the fact that he did not seems to have been regarded by his fellow Germans as disloyalty to the national cause. Likewise the campaigns of Germanicus in 14 A. D., while apparently at the very moment unprovoked, were in reality a bit of deferred revenge for the treacherous attack upon the legions of Varus. Is it in fact not truly singular that among so many scattered references to the Germanic wars, there is nowhere, save in Florus, who has been dealt with elsewhere, any direct assertion that the purpose was conquest, reduction to a state of subjection, or the like? (Cf. pp. 27 and note; 75). All writers represent the Romans as being compelled to send troops from time to time into Germany to preserve the peace, and to make powerful demonstrations; there are none of the characteristic marks or processes of conquest. Were it not for the all but universal preconception that conquest was intended the sources speaking for themselves would tell a very different tale. That is briefly the following: for a generation from the time of Caesar to that of Drusus, Rome had been content with merely repelling attacks and punishing the immediate offenders, together with a local demonstration of her forces. That procedure finally appeared to be ineffective, and so a vigorous policy of terrorizing the Germans from further disturbances of the peace was tried. Some canals were dug to facilitate the movements of the fleet which was greatly needed for the purpose of transporting supplies upon the marches into the remote interior; close to the Rhine some swamp road construction was undertaken, subsidiary apparently to the naval operations; a few castella near to the Rhine and along the highways leading into the interior were erected as munition depots, and nothing further.[39] Preparations were made to facilitate incursions into Germany, and these were repeatedly undertaken, but every year Drusus came back to his starting point upon the Rhine, after the most approved manœuvers of the noble Duke of York, or of the perplexed Persian poet who tried to become a philosopher,
“but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.”
The campaigns of Domitius and of Tiberius are of exactly the same character, a rally, a raid, and a relapse. Regarded as attempts at conquest these operations represented from the political point of view sheer folly, from the military point of view a sequence of grandiose fiascos; considered as a prolonged series of demonstrations intended to establish a line of buffer states in the form of friendly, allied tribes as a further protection of a naturally weak frontier against the barbaric hordes of the remote swamps and forests, they were sagaciously conceived and to the highest degree successful.
Our argument has thus far followed the process of exclusion. The Roman operations in Germany were either those of permanent conquest or of demonstration; there is no tertium quid. If not conquest, and we have endeavored to refute that view at every point, it must have been demonstration. The nature of our sources does not permit a positive and detailed proof of our new interpretation; that, properly interpreted, however, they are in harmony with it, we have been at pains to show. By way of conclusion we shall undertake to strengthen our position by pointing out analogies and parallels, not merely in the general course of ancient history, but in the foreign policy of Augustus himself.
Punitive and monitory raids were frequently undertaken in antiquity without any attempt whatsoever at making permanent conquest. Such were the oft repeated razzias into Nubia made by the Pharaohs, the countless raids of Assyrian monarchs into the mountains to the east and north, especially the great campaign of Darius among the Scythians in 512 B. C.[40] Of the same sort were the frequent campaigns of the Macedonian kings against the Paeonians and Thracians, though no serious attempt was made to extend their dominion greatly in this direction. A typical example of such chronic punitive campaigning was the service of Clearchus in the Chersonese, who used that peninsula as his base of operations while raiding the Thracians above the Hellespont.[41] The whole history of the more powerful Greek colonies is filled with the record of such punitive expeditions intended to keep the restless barbarians at peace. Of this identical nature were Caesar’s demonstrations across the Rhine in Germany, and beyond the channel in Britain. He had surely no thought of making a permanent conquest, at least at that time, but desired merely to make a display of Roman power to the barbarians who were, or might be, interfering with the security of his conquests in Gaul.[42] It is true that the Romans were not generally in the habit of keeping a foe off at arm’s length in this fashion, but preferred to close with and destroy him once for all, but the time was bound to come soon or late when even the amazing vitality of the Romans would reach its limit, and when they must content themselves with defense instead of new conquest. And this limit was first reached along the Rhine, where an effort at further advance would have involved endless difficulties.
But we are not without examples of quite the same thing from the very reign of Augustus, and that too at a period considerably prior to the disaster of Varus. Of precisely this nature was the raid into Arabia in 25-24 B. C. There is no evidence that a permanent seizure of the land was intended; but occasion was taken to demonstrate the power of Rome, and then the expedition returned. That there may have been some intention of seizing or securing fabled wealth we cannot perhaps wholly deny, although men so well informed as the Roman merchants and administrators of Egypt could hardly have been guilty of such folly, but its main purpose seems to have been merely a demonstration of the vigor of the new Egyptian administration.[43] For it is significant that in the very next year began the Ethiopian wars, which lasted until 20 B. C., wherein likewise no effort was made at extending the limits of the new province, but the Ethiopians or Nubians were given a taste of Roman steel, and made to realize how serious a thing it would be to harass the new lords of Egypt.[44] Of quite the same nature was the invasion of Dacia, 12-9 B. C., and the later raids during the Pannonian revolt, 6-9 A. D. Augustus had certainly no intention of adding Dacia to the Empire; he merely wished to punish the tribes north of the Danube for interfering in the affairs of the province and to give a sharp warning against a repetition of the offense.[45] That the invasions of Germany were made more frequently and probably upon a larger scale than elsewhere, there can be no denial, but that is due to the fact that the Germans were more warlike and martial than the other contiguous barbarians. We have already observed that practically every campaign in Germany was preceded by grave provocation on the part of the barbarians, while frequently the difficulties raised were settled by diplomacy without recourse to armed intervention. But the lesson that an invasion of the Empire was likely to cost far more than it was worth, while it took a long time to teach, was in the end thoroughly learned. For two hundred years after the death of Tiberius almost unbroken peace reigned along this quarter of the frontier, which had been for half a century the storm center of the empire[46], and when the northern defenses finally began to crumble, it was towards the north and northeast, not the northwest, that they first succumbed. The policy of the first two principes was therefore abundantly justified by its lasting success.
As regards the secondary policy, i. e., that of the upbuilding and support of friendly or buffer states immediately contiguous to the actual frontier, there is no lack of parallels from antiquity.[47] Tiglath Pileser IV in 732 B. C., after annexing certain parts of Palestine, set up such a buffer between his empire and Egypt along the marches of Philistia, in the shape of a vassal principality under a Bedouin chief called “kipi, (or resident) of Musri” (i. e. Egypt).[48] Similar was doubtless the purpose of Nebuchadrezzar in leaving Jehoiakim of Judah upon the throne of a subject kingdom after his conquest of Palestine in 704 B. C. Only after two revolts, both instigated apparently by Egypt, did he apparently feel compelled to give up a policy which, though it made it unnecessary to invade Egypt directly, nevertheless allowed the temptation to renew hostilities without a desperate risk.[49] Something similar, though under very different conditions was the policy of Sparta in building a ring of Perioeci about her own Helot population on every side save that of Messenia, where by the destruction of cities and the closing of harbors the Helots were likewise cut off from contact with the outside world. The Perioeci thus formed a double barrier, warding off the enemy on the outside, and helping to keep in a disaffected servile population.[50] Again, this was clearly the policy of Alexander in the East, who set the Indus as his actual frontier, but secured that by establishing two powerful protected states, the kingdoms of Porus and of Taxiles, on the eastern bank.[51] A parallel not too remote, perhaps, can be pointed out in the case of the first contact of Rome and Carthage in Spain. Here the Romans seem to have set up Saguntum as an allied state to act as a buffer or check to the advances of Hannibal to the Ebro, and towards what they chose to regard as their proper sphere of influence (or, if one prefer, that of their ancient ally Massilia). That the policy in this case failed to prevent war is of course no proper criticism of its intent. There were also the numerous but ephemeral protectorates of the eastern marches, which served for the most part the purpose of preparing the formal advance of the empire rather than actually covering a difficult frontier, and so lasted only a short time. But in Armenia we have a truly classical example of a buffer state, whose fortunes no less an authority than Lord Curzon compares directly with those of Afghanistan, similarly situated between the two great rival powers of Russia and Great Britain.[52] One Roman general or emperor after another might have made Armenia a province, as Trajan actually did, although his successor immediately restored it to its former state of uncertainty, but for more than four centuries it was preserved as a buffer state against Parthia.[53] Less notorious but equally clear is the case of Mauretania. In 25 B. C. Augustus transferred King Juba from Numidia, which he thereupon transformed into a province, to Mauretania, which, after having been eight years a province, was once more made a kingdom. The purpose of this singular interchange of political status, must have been to protect the actual confines of the empire from direct contact with the barbarians of the south and west, who were not yet accustomed to the presence of the Romans.[54] It was not until sixty-five years afterwards, 40 A. D., when danger from this quarter might have been expected to have diminished or disappeared after two generations of a strong and peaceful government, that Mauretania was once more made into a province.[55]