the month of December; Tiberius then returned to Rome, leaving his
soldiers in winter quarters near the sources of the Lippe. He was back
again early in the following spring, and in this year successfully
completed the operation in which Drusus had failed, on a more extended
scale; he made the Elbe, not the Weser, his objective, and sent round
a fleet to meet his troops with fresh supplies. Paterculus attributes
the success of this enterprise not only to the good fortune and
diligence of the Commander-in-Chief, but to his careful study of the
seasons. On this occasion the Romans first came across the Lombards,
“a race whose courage surpassed even German ferocity”; they seem to
have been settled on the East of the Elbe in the region of Magdeburg.
Paterculus has a doubtless true story of an elderly German who asked to
be allowed to see Tiberius, and on receiving permission paddled across
the Elbe; after having stared at him for some time he touched his hand,
and declaring that he had now beheld the gods, bewailed the folly of
his young men who insisted on fighting with their superiors; he then
returned to his boat, and departed across the Elbe, still keeping his
eyes on the group of Roman officers. There is nothing improbable in
this story; savages are particularly impressed by size, and the stately
form of Tiberius, glorious in such a uniform as we see on the Augustus
of the Prima Porta, may well have appeared superhuman to the uncultured
Lombard.
The practical results of the campaign were to convince Tiberius that an
eastward extension of the Roman frontier was alike impracticable and
undesirable; the problem was to find a defensible line of outposts
near the Rhine and overawe the tribes who lived beyond it; but before
Tiberius had time to rectify the frontier he was called off to deal
with a far more serious war nearer Italy.
Maroboduus, the King of the Marcomanni, settled his followers in the
neighbourhood of Vienna, having formed the idea of creating a great
military power in Germany; it was the first conception of a German
Empire, for many tribes were to be united in the confederacy by which
the aggressions of Rome were to be stopped, and the tide of invasion
possibly turned in the opposite direction. This man, a Suevian by
birth, had been a hostage, and was brought up under the care of
Augustus at Rome; in this case, as in several others, the policy of
educating a native prince, so that he might bring his people under
Roman civilization, proved to be of doubtful advantage. Maroboduus
applied the lessons which he learned at Rome to resisting the extension
of the Empire. He got together a force of 70,000 foot and 4,000
cavalry, drilled them carefully in the Roman fashion, and fixed upon
Bohemia as the suitable centre of his Empire. He did not attack the
Romans, that was not his first object; he wished to civilize Germany
and create a counterpoise to Rome. Tiberius saw that this could not
be permitted; the proposed German Empire was too near the turbulent
Pannonian region for safety; it was necessary to nip the nascent
civilization of Central Europe in the bud. In order finally to break
the power of Maroboduus, Tiberius decided to carry out another of those
vast combined operations in which he had already twice succeeded. He
sent Sentius Saturninus with one army to march from the Rhine through
the Hercynian forest to the Danube, while he himself brought up another
army from Cis-Alpine Gaul through the Julian Alps. The operation was
so admirably planned and its details so well considered, that the two
armies found themselves each within five days of their meeting point,
when a fresh outbreak of Pannonia and Dalmatia threatened Tiberius in
the rear, and compelled him to take his army back to another scene of
war. Though this great operation failed in one way, it seems to have
succeeded in another; it effectually cowed Maroboduus, who did not
intervene, as might have been anticipated, in the Pannonian troubles,
while it shook the confidence of the Germans in their self-appointed
Emperor; we find him at a later time a fugitive living under the
protection of Rome.
The precision with which Tiberius was able to time the arrival of the
army of Saturninus indicates a greater knowledge of the geography
of the districts north of the Alps, and a less savage condition of
those regions, than the statements of Cæsar would lead us to imagine
possible. We can hardly take literally the statement of Paterculus
that Sentius was told to cut through the Hercynian forest; such work
may have been necessary on the watershed of the Neckar and the Danube,
or, if, as is most probable, the advance was made by a more northerly
route, between the Main and the Danube, but when once in the basin
of the Danube, the Roman soldiers must have found their way fairly
open, and they must further have found sufficient supplies of food.
The central uplands of Germany were then as now covered with forests
and more thickly covered, but there must have been known tracks along
which an army could be led. In the southern basin of the Upper Danube,
after the conquest of the Vindelici, a Roman military colony had been
founded at Augsburg, indicating that measures were rapidly taken to
sweep the rich country north of the Alps into the net of the Empire.
Everywhere the traders, whose chief business was slave hunting, pushed
in advance of the Roman armies, and Tiberius was thus able to get
sufficiently accurate information to launch an army upon the country
north of Vienna from the north-west, timed to meet his own advance from
the south-east. The conception was a daring one, and the accuracy with
which it was carried out would be admirable even today. To render such
elaborate strategy successful a commander must not only be able to
plan accurately, but he must be able to depend on the obedience of his
subordinates and possess their absolute confidence.
The rising in Pannonia was of a very serious nature. During the
interval of seventeen years since Tiberius had last waged war in that
direction the country had become so far Romanized as to have adopted to
a large extent the language of its conquerors; garrisons of veterans
had been established, and the war began with a general slaughter
of these, of resident Roman citizens and of travelling merchants.
The province of Macedonia was invaded and devastated. At Rome panic
prevailed; Augustus publicly declared that the enemy was within ten
days’ march of the city; levies were held, veterans were called back
to the colours, and men and women alike were compelled to enfranchise
a certain proportion of their slaves according to the amount of
their assessed property, that they might be enrolled in the armies.
Paterculus was put in command of the reinforcements that were sent to
Tiberius from Rome.
The war lasted for three years, and was eventually ended partly by
diplomacy, partly by the patient strategy of Tiberius. Great pitched
battles were impossible in that difficult country, and the strategy of
the enemy did not permit them. Tiberius kept dividing the forces of his
opponents, cutting off the supplies of the isolated detachments, and
conquered them in detail. Paterculus particularly admires his prudence
in breaking up his own forces after finding that the numbers, on which
others were disposed to rely, were too unwieldy to be effective; he
spread his winter quarters over the country, and himself spent the cold
season at Siscia, high up in the hills near the sources of the Save.
Paterculus does not give us a consecutive account of the campaigns, but
he mentions a few personal details with reference to Tiberius, both on
this campaign and on the subsequent one in Germany after the Varian
disaster, which are worth quoting.
“During the whole of the war in Germany and Pannonia, no one of us or
of those above or below our rank was ever ill without finding that
his health and safety were attended to by the care of Cæsar, in such
a way that his mind seemed to be so free from the weight of all its
other burdens as to be concentrated on this task alone. For those who
desired it there was a composite vehicle ready, his litter assigned
to the general benefit, whose advantages I experienced along with
others; physicians, food, all the apparatus of a bath, carried for this
purpose alone, were ready for every invalid; home and servants alone
were wanting, but nothing was missing which they could supply or need.
I will add a fact which everybody who was present at that time will
recognize at once along with other things which I have related; he
alone always rode, always dined sitting along with his guests during
the greater part of the summer campaigns; he was indulgent to breaches
of discipline, provided there was no bad example; he frequently
advised, sometimes reproved, very rarely punished, and took a middle
course, being blind to most faults, checking others.”
This is the first mention of a field hospital, reserved, apparently,
for the use of the staff and their attendants. Other Roman generals
took an elaborate bath establishment with them on their campaigns for
their own use: Tiberius utilized it only for the sickness of others.
Other generals travelled in carts or on a litter: Tiberius always rode.
He took his meals like an active man in a sitting posture, not lying at
full length after the customary Roman fashion.
Suetonius declares that in the German wars Tiberius proved to be
a martinet, and mentions the case of an officer who was severely
punished for sending his freedmen to hunt on the opposite side of
the Rhine contrary to orders. Tiberius would indeed have been a bad
general if he had neglected to punish a gross violation of discipline,
which by revealing the presence of his force might spoil a carefully
devised operation. Similarly Suetonius sees excessive severity in the
strictness with which Tiberius cut down the transport of officers.
Those better versed in the difficulties of warfare will be inclined to
take a different view. There were fashionable and luxurious officers
then as now, whom it was essential to keep in order. Doubtless some one
of these cherished his grievance and left it recorded in his memoirs to
be added to the evidence compiled by the historians of a later age.
A mysterious transaction with the Pannonian chief Bato, who was
spared after the surrender because he had allowed Tiberius and his
troops to slip through an encircling force on one occasion, suggests
that diplomacy was employed, as well as arms, in bringing about the
surrender of the Pannonians, though it is possible that Tiberius
accompanied an act of kindness with an ironical reference to an
occasion on which he had outwitted Bato.
The Pannonian war was barely concluded before Tiberius was called off
to the Rhine; he left his nephew Germanicus to finish his work east
of the Adriatic, and hurried to the scene of his former victories
in Germany. Quintilius Varus, the Governor of the Southern German
Marches, had been enticed into a trap by the German patriot Arminius,
and slain along with two legions, the greater part of a third, and
their complement of cavalry and light-armed troops. Arminius, like
Maroboduus, had been educated at Rome; he was even a Roman citizen
and a member of the Equestrian Order; he too had measured the weakness
of Rome, and was only waiting for a favourable opportunity to strike.
The rising was organized on a great scale; the Gauls who lived in the
country round Vienne were tampered with, the object being to check the
advance of a Roman army across the Alps. Fortunately they were only
half-hearted in the cause, and were easily suppressed by Tiberius on
his way northwards. More serious were the movements on the lower Rhine.
The great camp which had been fortified originally by Drusus at Aliso
on the Lippe was invested, and a general rising of the tribes who had
been settled on the west bank of the Rhine was only prevented by the
decision of Lucius Asprenas, who without waiting for the arrival of
Tiberius marched two legions down the river. The garrison of Aliso
succeeded in cutting its way through the enemy.
In assigning to Varus the command of the Rhine Augustus had been
premature. Varus was a civilian rather than a soldier, and his
mission was to consolidate the Rhine frontier by the arts of peace,
and by bringing the comparatively uncivilized Germans to recognize
the blessings of Roman law. It is more than probable that even as a
civil administrator he was not particularly upright; he had previously
been Governor of Syria, and, according to Paterculus, enjoyed the
reputation of having found that province rich and left it poor. He had
repressed the military ardour of his subordinates, adopting a policy of
conciliation, and deliberately closing his eyes to the necessity of
armed interference when events showed that it was advisable. His ruling
passion was love of money; in other respects he was inactive both
in mind and body, a man of preconceived ideas, such a man as has on
other occasions and in other places invited disaster. Arminius fooled
him to the top of his bent, the Germans invited him to settle their
quarrels according to the honoured forms of Roman law; he was gradually
enticed with his force further and further away from the frontier;
the summer operations took the form of a judge’s circuit. Meanwhile
the German forces gradually closed in behind his rear. Varus was deaf
to the remonstrances of his officers and to the information given him
by a German rival of Arminius. At last when the pedantic Governor had
been successfully lured into a hopeless position Arminius struck. The
Roman soldiers, having no confidence in their leader, were completely
demoralized; they were slaughtered literally like sheep, sacrificed
to the gods of the Germans. The commander of the Roman cavalry basely
deserted the infantry and tried to secure his own safety, but was cut
down with all his force before he could reach the Rhine. Varus himself
committed suicide; his example is said to have been followed by some
Roman youths, who, having been taken prisoners, dashed out their brains
with their own fetters.
The situation, however, was not so grave as it might have been.
Arminius sent the head of Varus to Maroboduus, but that chieftain,
either from want of confidence or from jealousy of a rival, took the
Roman side, and transmitted the relic with a friendly message to
Augustus.
It is not incumbent upon us to believe that after this disaster the
aged Emperor acquired a habit of dashing his head against the wall,
and crying, “Varus, Varus, give me back my legions!” but that the
calamity was a sufficient one to disturb his equanimity seriously
is self-evident. Soldiers had been found only with great difficulty
for the Pannonian war, as we have seen; the recall of veterans to
the standards was always considered a desperate measure, and still
more desperate was the employment of slaves as soldiers; the absolute
destruction of two whole legions and six cohorts along with their
cavalry meant a loss of 17,300 men, as large a force as the permanent
garrison of Italy. It imposed upon Tiberius the necessity of husbanding
his men, even if he had not been naturally disposed to circumspection,
for nearly a tenth part of the whole Roman army had been wiped out.
Tiberius quickly avenged the army of Varus; he swept through the
country, leaving devastation behind him, but he failed to capture
the ringleaders of the revolt. During this campaign, in which he was
soon joined by Germanicus, he abandoned his ordinary policy of acting
entirely on his own initiative and without consultation with his staff;
he carefully explained to them the reason of all his movements. In
fact, he now set to work to educate his successors, for he saw that
other duties would shortly prevent his personal activity in the field.
Both Augustus and Tiberius have been reproached with an unadventurous
policy on the German frontier. Augustus discouraged the distant
expeditions of Drusus into the heart of Germany, and Tiberius was to
be accused of jealousy in the near future in similarly restraining
the ardour of Germanicus, but those who lightly make these charges
overlook the difficulties of the problem. The conquest of the basin of
the Mediterranean had been a conquest of civilized peoples, who knew
when they were beaten, and who once having accepted the arbitrament
of the Roman arms found acquiescence in the Roman domination the
best security for civilization. But the conquest of Central Europe
was another matter; in one sense there was nothing to be gained by
it. When Tiberius met his fleet upon the Elbe, he had traversed many
miles of that desolate flat of Northern Europe which has only been
gradually reclaimed from the wilderness and rendered fertile by the
patient labour of many centuries. There was no trade. There were, so
far as he knew, no minerals, there was nothing to invite settlers in
the endless marshes, and to an Italian the climate was detestable.
If, on the other hand, he turned his attention to the hill country,
there was the same absence of attractions; even if the valleys were
cultivated they were too far off, and the climate was too severe to
enable them to compete with the more accessible territory of Gaul;
the mineral treasures of the hills were as yet undiscovered, and even
if they had been discovered, they were practically inaccessible. It
seemed wiser, and more immediately practicable, to limit the expansion
of the Empire to the lines suggested by the Danube and the Rhine,
and to spread such a terror of the Roman name beyond those limits
as would secure the settlers on the outlying lands from attack. This
policy was partly realized; it was not fully realized, and the German
frontier remained the running sore of the Roman Empire till the Empire
itself became German, and even then fresh hordes were to push on from
Central Asia. Nor was the Empire absolutely at peace within itself;
there were still sporadic outbreaks to be dealt with even in Gaul and
Spain, still African tribes threatening Mauretania and Egypt, still
the ever-watchful Parthian in the East. Augustus rightly considered
that the expansion of the Empire was ended, and that the time for
purposeless conquests had gone by.
With the German campaign Tiberius ended his career as a general.
Twenty years of his life had been spent in the field, and though his
name is associated with no dazzling victories, it is equally free
from any suspicion of failure. Had he suffered even minor reverses,
his critics would not have failed to make the most of them; but there
is not a suggestion of anything of the kind, and the silence of less
friendly historians supports the opinion which Paterculus held of
his leader’s merits. Of the two brothers Drusus was the more dashing
soldier, as he was the more generally attractive man, but Tiberius
was the greater general; and his services to the Empire were none
the less solid because in comparison with the brilliant feats of
Cæsar they were inconspicuous. Perhaps we should have formed a higher
opinion of the value of Tiberius in the field had he too been able to
leave his commentaries; but, alas! his exploits are concealed in an
almost impenetrable night along with those of the brave men who lived
before Agamemnon. His three great combined movements, that by which
the Vindelici were conquered behind the Alps, the ferocious Longobardi
frightened on the Elbe, and Maroboduus cowed in Bohemia, anticipated
similar great operations of Napoleon.
X
The Last Years of Augustus
Twenty-nine years after the battle of Actium the Senate, by the
voice of one of the noblest of their order, Marcus Valerius Messala,
hailed Augustus as the “Father of his Country.” The now aged Emperor
burst into tears, and declaring that he had reached the summit of his
ambition, prayed to the gods that they would allow him, so long as
life lasted, to continue to be worthy of the confidence thus expressed
by his countrymen. The title had perhaps been somewhat soiled by use;
Cicero had arrogated it to himself after that exhibition of consummate
statesmanship which quelled the conspiracy of Catiline, but it was none
the less a tribute to the singleness of purpose with which Augustus
had devoted himself to the welfare of the vast Empire committed to his
care. In the press of daily business and vexatious details Augustus may
often have failed to perceive how general was the recognition of his
services to the State, and we can pardon the display of uncontrolled
emotion which interrupted his customary calm on receiving this solemn
assurance that his labours had not been in vain.
As a matter of fact at this time, and for the rest of his life,
Augustus had no enemies save those of his own household. There was no
political opposition to the Emperor; small conspiracies such as those
of Murena and Cæpio there had been, the work of hot-headed youths who
wished to emulate the example of Brutus, and there were, as we have
seen, intrigues in the Emperor’s own family. As Suetonius mentions
among the plots directed against Augustus one in which Lucius Æmilius
Paullus, the husband of the younger Julia was concerned, we are at
liberty to suspect that in her case, as in her mother’s, it was thought
better to punish a graver offence as a case of domestic misconduct.
It was on this occasion that the poet Ovid learned that there is a
limit to the liberties which a man of fashion can allow himself, and
was forced to withdraw from his butterfly existence at Rome to the
mosquito-haunted swamps at the mouth of the Danube, where he wrote
poems more worthy of his dignity than any he had previously composed.
The power of the Emperor was based largely on his patronage. The Empire
had been divided between the Emperor and the Senate; those provinces
in which it was necessary to maintain a standing and mobilized army,
in which swift action, continuous authority, and unity of purpose were
imperatively necessary, were governed by Augustus as a private estate;
their highest official was a “Procurator,” “a manager”; they comprised
two districts in the west and north of Spain, the whole of Gaul, the
Germanic frontier, the Balkan, Cilicia, Cœlesyria Phenicia, Cyprus and
Egypt; the Senate retained the old settled provinces, Eastern Spain,
Sardinia, Sicily, Northern Africa, the district round Cyrene, the west
of Asia Minor, and Achaia. Thus the Emperor’s direct patronage was
large, but even in the Senatorial Provinces he could intervene with
superior powers, and the liberty which the Senate enjoyed of appointing
their Governors, was nominal rather than real, for the Senate itself
was increasingly composed of men who had owed their advancement to the
Emperor, or expected further promotion from his hands.
Senatorial Governorships tended to become merely honorary, and the
wealthy or noble men, who held courts for limited periods in Sicily or
Asia had little more actual responsibility or power than an English
Viceroy in Ireland. Further, those parts of the Empire in which active
work was to be done, or in which the administration really tested
capacity, and was rewarded with further promotions, were precisely
those parts in which the Emperor was exclusive patron.