With the battle of Actium the wars of Rome against nations equally civilized with herself came to an end; henceforth the rulers of the world were only called upon to round off the ring fence of their domains, and establish scientific frontiers. The Empire which is so often spoken of as the establishment of a military despotism was, in fact, absolutely the reverse; the power wielded by Marius, by Sulla, by Pompeius, by Cæsar, by Antonius, had this character, for it depended upon the military capacity of these generals; they were soldiers in the first place, and owed their predominance in the civil government to their own sharp swords and the fidelity of the men who had followed their standards. Till the Roman was sole umpire in the circle of the Mediterranean, war was in every respect a profitable investment, and a military career was the readiest path to political supremacy; not only did a Roman general return laden with spoil, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, but his conquests appealed to the imagination of his countrymen; everybody might be proud of generals and armies who had beaten the successors of Alexander; but when military operations were transferred to the frontiers, when the enemies to be subdued were poor and half civilized, when there were no longer gorgeous robes, graceful statues, piles of treasure to be exhibited in the triumphal procession of the victorious general, war lost its prestige; and the steady progress of the civilian administration is, in fact, the special feature of the reigns of the Cæsars. Augustus was no soldier; Tiberius never commanded an army after his succession; the expedition of Caligula to the shore of the English Channel was a madman’s freak; Claudius had but little share in the conquest of Britain; Nero’s morbid vanity preferred the triumphs of the stage to those of the camp. A state in which the military element is predominant does not put up with rulers such as these.
The Romans in the reign of Augustus were, so far as military matters are concerned, and indeed, in most other respects, very much in our own position at the present day. Just as we thoughtlessly and unjustly estimate the exploits of our soldiers in the Soudan, on the North-West frontier of India, on the West Coast of Africa, and even in South Africa, rather cheaply, and disparage their achievements in comparison with those of Marlborough and Wellington, so the contemporaries of Augustus looked back with regret to the heroes of the Punic Wars and the conquerors of Greece; they did not realize that the work which was to be done in their own time was far more difficult than the work which had been done. We too forget that to win the Battle of Waterloo was a trifle compared with the operations which led up to the victory of Omdurman, and the double march into the Transvaal. The exploits of Wellington in the Peninsula were splendid, impeded as they were by opposition from England; but in the conquest of South Africa England has grappled with far more serious difficulties, and her generals have shown themselves at least as resourceful as Wellington.
The generals of the Augustan age are hardly known to us. Few class Agrippa with the leading generals of the world, but the man who for the first time organized the navy of the Roman Empire, who maintained the organization of the army on such a footing that the enormous frontier was never without its defenders, who was himself never beaten in the field, and who trained a succession of capable officers to follow in his footsteps, was no mean general. Similarly Tiberius and his brother, along with many capable subordinates, waged successful campaigns under conditions of peculiar difficulty for many years; but we never think of them as great soldiers, because their exploits did not stir the imagination of their contemporaries.
Vast though the Roman Empire was, its vulnerable frontiers were of relatively small extent in the reign of Augustus; there was a weak place at the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates; the Upper Nile had its Soudanese difficulty then as now, but the whole of the North Coast of Africa was protected by the desert, and the Mauretanian tribes were not numerous enough really to imperil the strip of civilization along the Mediterranean. Spain was all Roman and nearly all civilized, so was Gaul; but between the mouths of the Rhine and the Bosphorus there was a vast unsettled region, reaching down in one place to a point within ten days’ journey of Rome itself, and along an unbroken line of many hundred miles, threatening the cities of Macedonia and Greece. The problem before Augustus and his generals was to form a frontier which should permanently secure Gaul, Italy, and the Balkan Peninsula from the adventurous races of central and East Central Europe.
The weakest point in the chain of defence was the Northern corner of the Adriatic, and the increasing prosperity of the great plains of the Po after they had become a Roman province naturally attracted the attention of the semi-civilized tribes who lived in the hills along the Dalmatian coast. Not only was there danger from the East, but the valley of the Adige formed a gateway through which Central Europe could pour its restless multitudes upon the Cis-Alpine Province. The geographical configuration of the regions south of the plains of the Eastern Danube has always impeded their progress, and to this very day a patch of backward nationalities remains there in close proximity to the most elaborately civilized states of Europe.
The other weak spot was the course of the Rhine, and especially the country below the Drakensberg; that noble river for many miles from the Lake of Constance formed a natural defence against the Germanic hordes, but on reaching the flat land below Cologne it spread into marshes and split into smaller channels, in which flotillas of boats could be prepared without attracting notice, as was necessarily the case where the river ran in a single stream. In fact it was practically found that in places the Rhine was no barrier, and that the tribes on its Eastern bank must be rolled back from the river, if Gaul was to enjoy her new prosperity in peace.
It was in the defence of these two weak spots that Tiberius was to fight his chief campaigns. In both regions security demanded that the operations should be conducted far beyond the frontier, in country difficult at the present day, and tenfold more difficult then, when extensive forests and marshes were added to the impediments offered by ravines and mountains.
It is not easy to estimate the degree of civilization reached by the Pannonians and Dalmatians or the Germanic tribes, when they made war upon the Roman legions. To the ancients all men living under tribal or national institutions were barbarians; they restricted the honour of civilization to those whose political constitution was based upon the city, and though the Græco-Roman city organization practically covered the two peninsulas, which we call Greece and Italy, it did not elsewhere extend far inland; the outer fringe of cities was in close contact with populations living under a clan system, whose chiefs or kings adopted many of the luxuries and some of the institutions of their neighbours; behind these again were less advanced nations and less civilized rulers, gradually merging into real barbarism. The Gallic chieftains had already been in frequent communication with Rome for a century before Cæsar conquered Gaul, and the influence of the Roman traders upon the general standard of civilization was perceptible in his time even among the German tribes nearest to the Rhine. Arminius had had a Roman education, Maroboduus was brought up by Augustus, adopted the Roman military system and welcomed refugees who could train his troops; Latin was already spoken by the Dalmatian tribes when they were eventually conquered by Tiberius. Though the greater part of Central Europe was under forest the valleys were cultivated, as they were in Britain at the time of Cæsar’s invasions, but the forest was always near enough to receive fugitives, and to give cover to an attacking party. There were no large aggregations of human beings in towns, but there were areas sufficiently thickly populated, and their population was sufficiently well organized to bring formidable armies into the field, whose operations were skilfully conducted. The men were no more savages than the Boers are savages; their civilization was a different civilization from the Græco-Roman, but it was a civilization. The occurrences of the Highland Line were anticipated in the foothills of the Alps; sometimes there was a mere cattle-lifting raid, when a predecessor of Rob Roy swooped down upon the farms round Mantua or Cremona, sometimes a combination of clans under a capable chieftain waged a formidable war, whose object was less plunder than the preservation of their independence; sometimes the pressure of real savagery from behind urged the more civilized races forward till the ultimate wave fell upon the Roman frontier.
Far in the East round the mouths of the Danube the predecessors of the Cossacks on their little horses kept the Roman outposts in a state of terror. Ovid tells us how they swooped down upon the labourers in the fields round the camp at Tomi, how their arrows fell into its very centre, how they galloped round its walls, picked up some unfortunate straggler, and were off with him before pursuit could be organized. Reading such a description as this we realize the true significance of the two Roman walls in England, and the wall from the Main to the Danube in Germany. They were not defences against systematic war; they were too long to be defended against an organized invasion, but they effectually prevented raiding. Cattle cannot be lifted over a wall twelve feet high. The difference between our frontier wars and the Roman frontier wars lies in the proximity of the Roman frontiers to the heart of the Empire; but in spite of the perpetual imminence of the danger, the Romans did not pay a sufficient tribute of gratitude to the generals who secured their safety, and were inclined to underestimate their services.
Even such a clear-sighted historian as Merivale, in speaking of the military operations of Tiberius and Drusus in Germany, adopts the attitude of Tacitus, and disparages the cautious policy of Augustus, which discouraged schemes of boundless conquest in Central Europe. Tacitus wrote, when Trajan was engaged in rectifying the frontier of the Lower Danube, new dangers threatened the Empire and new measures seemed advisable. The men of his day might be pardoned for thinking that they were called upon to do what Augustus had unwisely left undone. Possibly they were right, but they omitted from their calculations a fact which was of the first importance, and of itself imposed prudence. The fighting strength of the Empire was not adequate for a policy of indefinite expansion at the end of the reign of Augustus, nor even in its middle period. It was difficult to steer between the two extremes. Augustus had seen the evils of a rampant military policy in the careers of his uncle and Antonius; he had known what it was to be the puppet of his own soldiers; he had fought in the Civil Wars, and he rightly inferred that there could be no settled government so long as the sword outbalanced the gown. Quite apart from any personal ambition or mean motive, he shrank from creating fresh military heroes, who might be tempted to overthrow the carefully balanced fabric of the State, and renew the Marian and Sullan episodes, or the hateful reign of the Triumvirate in which he had himself taken an unwilling part. On the other hand, a certain strength was necessary to police the Empire and guard its frontiers. In the encouragement which he gave to civilians in the public service, in the revival of commerce, and the abundance of employment secured by the internal peace of the Empire, Augustus cut off his supply of recruits; the army no longer competed favourably with other employments, and year by year the number of homeless and ruined men, to whom military service had opened an opportunity, was reduced. Men were too precious to be lightly ventured on interminable expeditions in the Hercynian forest, where the elk, and possibly even the mammoth, still tested the ingenuity of the hunter.
At the age of seventeen Tiberius accompanied Augustus and Agrippa to Spain, where a campaign was conducted in the mountainous regions occupied by the Cantabrians. Augustus soon fell ill and returned home, but Tiberius remained to take his first lessons in war under the able and ingenious Agrippa. The Romans wisely flung their young men into active life at a very early age, and those who had it in them to learn, had every opportunity of learning. Four years later Tiberius, barely of age to manage his own affairs according to our ideas, was put in command of the expedition which penetrated Armenia, and awed the Parthians into a surrender of the captured standards. We are not told that there was any serious fighting on this occasion; the triumph was one of diplomacy rather than of arms, and the expedition itself took the form of an armed demonstration strong enough to determine the course of the negotiations rather than of a campaign. Doubtless Tiberius was attended by capable advisers in addition to those splendid centurions, the link between the commissioned and non-commissioned officers, who formed the backbone of the Roman armies; but in any case the experience was a valuable one. It was necessary that the army should be conducted through a difficult and mountainous country, far from its base; any negligence, any want of foresight, might have brought on a disaster which, even if only temporary, would have spoiled the effect contemplated, and weakened the Roman Plenipotentiaries. The expedition was a better training than even a long course of autumn manœuvres, and Tiberius returned from it with a full knowledge of military problems.
The extraordinary indifference of the historians Paterculus and Suetonius to chronology, and their absolutely casual use of such connectives as “hereupon,” “soon afterwards,” and the like, makes it difficult to be certain of the real sequence of events. It is, however, certain that Tiberius was Governor of Transalpine Gaul for a year at some period between B.C. 20 and B.C. 16, that he was harassed during the term of his Governorship by sporadic invasions of German tribes, and was able to measure their importance as affecting the peace of his Province, and form plans for permanently checking them. He came to the conclusion that the whole middle and eastern Alpine region was a centre of disturbance, and that it could not be dealt with alone, seeing that the tribes who lived on the Dalmatian coast and at the sources of the Save were always ready to create a diversion when the Roman armies were occupied in the valleys to the south or north-west of the Alps. Cæsar had more than once been called back from the conquest of Gaul to deal with the Pirustæ in the same quarter.
In B.C. 16 the ill-omened Marcus Lollius sustained a serious defeat at the hands of the German tribes, while Gaul itself had been rendered unquiet by the exactions of Licinus, himself a Gaul employed by Augustus as Governor in the Southern Province. Augustus himself went to Gaul to set straight the civilian administration, Agrippa was sent to the Illyrian regions, Drusus to the passes leading from Lombardy to the Upper Rhine, while Tiberius took charge of an expedition directed upon the same region from Basle by the Lake of Constance. This was the first of the great combined movements originated by Tiberius; their conception, but even more their success, mark him out as a general of genius. Given a mobile enemy able to live on the country, and provided with an interminable area at his rear into which he can retreat, the only hope of dealing with him successfully is to cut off his retreat. This was the strategy of Tiberius.
The army of Agrippa in Illyria protected the rear of Drusus, who was able to drive the Alpine tribes back through the passes to the Northern face of the Alps, where they found the army of Tiberius ready for them. The victory was so complete that the very names of these tribes disappear from history; squeezed between two Roman armies they were doubtless exterminated. Horace wrote an official ode on the occasion, comparing Drusus to a young eagle or lion; and in a complimentary ode to Augustus on another occasion, compared the charge of Tiberius to the impetuous floods of the Aufidus, his native river. The northern slopes of the Western Alps were now secured to Rome; there was no longer any danger of Gallic intrigues stimulated by the restless Helvetii, but the work was by no means done. Augustus seems to have remained for some time in Gaul studying its social conditions, Agrippa remained in the Illyrian district, Drusus was sent to the lower Rhine, and Tiberius, as far as we can gather, remained at Rome.
Profiting by the experience gained in the recent war, Drusus determined to repeat the strategy of Tiberius, and again to hem in an elusive enemy between two Roman armies; he himself marched up the Lippe, making a point on the Weser, somewhere near Paderborn, his objective, and at the same time he sent a flotilla down the Rhine, with instructions to ascend the mouth of the Weser, and thus cut off the flight of the Germans. The first attempt failed, the fleet being dispersed by storms; it was reserved for Tiberius himself to succeed at a later date in this combined movement. In the following year Drusus advanced to the Weser, and on his return established a permanent outpost at Aliso, fifty miles up the Lippe; this was the period of the death of Agrippa, whose command in Pannonia was taken over by Tiberius. We know but little of the operations of Tiberius in Pannonia at this time, except that they were successful, and that the ring of Roman provinces was now completed along the East coast of the Adriatic, uniting Greece and Macedonia with Italy.
In B.C. 10 Augustus returned to Gaul; Drusus consecrated a temple in his honour at Lyons, and the worship of the Roman Empire personified in Augustus was officially substituted for the Druidical religion, in whose priesthood Augustus saw the irreconcilable enemy of Rome. After this ceremony Drusus again crossed the Rhine and penetrated as far as the Elbe; on his return he met with the accident which caused his death, and elicited that touching illustration of affection on the part of Tiberius, to which reference has already been made.
Tiberius took up his brother’s work on the Rhine and remained there for two years; he has disappointed the historians by doing nothing sensational, but when at the end of the two years Augustus called him back to Rome to take the place of Imperial Colleague, he left the Roman frontier extended, and the German terror pushed back from the immediate vicinity of the river. He had created a Roman party among the German chiefs, as Cæsar had created a Roman party among the Gallic chiefs; partly as hostages, partly as friends, the young German nobles were tempted to Rome to learn her civilization and form estimates of her weakness; the Eastern bank of the river was sufficiently Romanized to tempt Varus to treat it fifteen years later as a Roman province. Tiberius did more than this: he began that policy which was eventually to substitute for the magnificent conception of the all-embracing Roman Empire the map of Europe; he transferred 40,000 Germans to the left bank of the Rhine; they accepted the lands assigned to them, coupled with the obligation to service in the armies of their conquerors. It was a perilous policy, but no one could have foreseen its results in the distant future, and even if its tendencies had been suspected at the time, the pressing needs of the Empire would have silenced the voice of a too clear-sighted critic. The Empire was short of soldiers; men evaded military service by all possible means. Even the dreaded slavery of the ergastula seemed to them less terrible than the army; pay could not be found to make the soldier’s career sufficiently attractive, now that the chances of loot and liberal donatives were of the smallest. The finances of the Empire were straitened; Augustus had had difficulty in adding a death duty of five per cent. to his resources. The suggestion of Tiberius must have seemed a stroke of genius: to protect the frontiers by civilizing the enemies of the Empire, to find a cheap supply of soldiers by imposing military service on the hardy Germans, gradually to relieve the manufacturer and the merchant of the burden of finding men and taxes; no words could praise too highly the man who had suggested a means by which these desirable objects could be secured. We ourselves are treading in the same path; we congratulate ourselves on the wisdom which made English soldiers of Highland clansmen and Irish rapparees, which has arrayed against Russia the tribes of the North-West frontier, which fights the barbarians of Central Africa with the trained barbarians of its coasts; but we too shall have to pay the price which the Roman paid, if we neglect the military training of the centre of the Empire, and allow its population to expand unexercised in arms, incapable of fighting. If ever the day comes when the Sikhs and Goorkhas or even our own children beyond the seas learn by experience that preponderant force is in their own hands, and that the breed of fighting men is not ready for action in Great Britain, the Empire of England will be broken up, as the Empire of Rome was broken up; not by any sudden cataclysm, but by the gradual intrusion of the less civilized and less trained components of the Empire upon the central administration.
The end of the government of Tiberius upon the Rhine was also the beginning of his retirement; his resumption of public work was almost immediately followed by a fresh outbreak in the Pannonian region, and then came a terrible disaster to the Roman arms in the district of the Rhine. Of the campaigns which followed we fortunately have a fairly clear account given us by an eyewitness, Paterculus.
Unfortunately the only work from the pen of Paterculus that has come down to our times, perhaps the only work that he completed, is a short epitome of Roman history from the beginning to A.D. 30, which seems to have been written as an introduction to a work of considerable detail dealing with the campaigns in which the author and the relatives of his friend Marcus Vinicius, to whom the work is dedicated, took part. Paterculus belonged to the class of professional soldiers and administrators whom the Empire called into being, or to whom at least it gave a position which they had not hitherto enjoyed. In his eyes the Empire was good, and its rulers were good; and while he is profuse in his admiration of the heroes of the old Republic, and can pay as high a tribute to Cicero as to any supporter of the Empire, he is no less commendatory of the men who were brought to the front by the new order of things. He does not single out Tiberius as alone worthy of praise; such men as Marcus Lepidus, the son of the triumvir, and others who were in a position to excite the jealousy of a suspicious tyrant, enjoy a full share of his somewhat exuberant laudation. We may admit that Paterculus was uncritical without accusing him of deliberate dishonesty; he was a successful man; he was in the swim; he had no reason for nicely adjusting praise and censure to meet the merits of the men with whom he worked; he was not a frequenter of the Legitimist drawing rooms, but an active capable official, bluff, hearty, with an unfortunate propensity to consider himself a stylist. His grandfather was, as we have seen, an intimate friend and fellow soldier of the father of Tiberius; his father was also a soldier; he himself followed the family profession; he served under Caius Cæsar in Armenia, under Agrippa in Pannonia, under Tiberius both in Germany and Pannonia; he was honoured with civil magistracies at Rome, and eventually became a Senator; his brother was similarly successful. His value to us lies in the fact that he was an eyewitness of the events which he describes, and we may be sure that the few details which he thought worthy of mention in his rapid summary are actual facts. M. Vinicius was Consul in A.D. 30, and the honour enjoyed by his friend prompted Paterculus to write and dedicate this little work. In the following year the events took place which brought about the fall of Sejanus, whom Paterculus praises highly; possibly he was one of those upon whom the wrath of the Senate fell; in any case we hear nothing more of him, and his proposed work was never written, or never published; he died, or at any rate ceased to speak, before the reign of terror which accompanied the fall of Sejanus had cast its shadow upon Tiberius, before the reigns of Caligula and Nero had made it possible to believe every evil of a Roman Emperor, before the novelty of the Empire had worn off; there was no reason for adopting any but an optimistic tone.
Tiberius left Rome for Germany in A.D. 4; war had been going on there for three years, the Roman general being then a Marcus Vinicius, grandfather of the Consul to whom Paterculus dedicated his book. Paterculus accompanied Tiberius, and was generally with him during the nine years of his campaigns; he seems to have been a member of the headquarters staff, succeeding his father as commander of the cavalry. He says: “For nine years in succession, either as cavalry commander or staff officer, I was a spectator of his most heavenly operations, and assisted him in the measure permitted by my own mediocrity.” The epithet strikes us as exuberant, but it is frequently used by Paterculus, and not reserved for Tiberius; he employs it in speaking of the eloquence of Cicero. The historian tells us of the incidents of the journey through the most populous regions of Italy and the provinces of Gaul; he describes the joy with which the inhabitants welcomed their former governor, while the soldiers pressed to seize his hand, and shouted, “Do we really see you, General? Have we got you safe again? I served with you in Armenia, I in Rhætia, I was rewarded by you in Vindelicia, I in Pannonia, I in Germany.”
The first year’s campaign extended to the Weser, and was continued to 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.