The first foreign war which he waged, happened between the peace of Brundusium and the battle of Actium. It was a campaign against the Dalmatians, and he displayed in it considerable activity, and personal courage, being wounded himself. The task of subduing these countries was exceedingly difficult; but he broke the power of the Dalmatians who dwelt on the coast. Soon after the battle of Actium, the Cantabrian war began. Very nearly the same countries which afterwards held out against the Moors, Biscay, Asturias, the north of Gallicia, and the confines of Leon, held out also then. Augustus set himself the task of extending the Roman empire as far as the sea, the Rhine, and the Danube. During the first year, he was, partly by illness, and partly by business, kept in Gaul, where he settled the affairs of the province; in Tarragona also, he fell sick once more, and was thus delayed in his campaigns. We have no details of these wars: Appian became tired here, and perhaps he did not find them in any Greek writer. Augustus’ memoirs must have had very little value, as hardly any notice is taken of them: he also tried poetry; but as far as we may judge from his letters, he was a tasteless and worthless writer. In the third year, the Asturians and Cantabrians made their submission, and gave hostages. The Basques maintain that they still have a poem on this war in their own language; and Wilhelm Von Humboldt possesses a copy of it, which I only know from his translation.[37] I hold it to be as little genuine as the poems of Ossian; Humboldt is of a different opinion, yet he decides nothing. How should anything have been preserved among the Cantabrians about this war, which after all was of no importance whatever to them? On the Moorish wars, which must have been much more important to them, nothing whatever remains. Nowhere else, either among Germans or other nations, have accounts of the Roman wars been preserved: when Wittekind of Corvey wrote, all memory of them had entirely vanished, and this was certainly the case there as well. The Cantabrians, goaded by the ill treatment of the Roman governors, revolted again; thus it took some more campaigns before they were altogether subdued. Augustus founded several colonies,—Cæsar Augusta (Saragossa), Julia Emerita (Merida, down to the Arabian times a first-rate town), Pax Augusta (Badajoz), Pax Julia (Beja), Legio (Leon).
About the time of this war, Tiberius, who was no longer a youth, carried on another in Dalmatia, which he reduced. Before that, a Roman governor named Crassus, had already made war in Mœsia, and had driven back the Sarmatians across the Danube, and extended the empire as far as that river. Pannonia likewise had submitted during the Dalmatian campaign of Tiberius.
It was between the Dalmatian and Cantabrian war, that Augustus shut the temple of Janus: according to Suetonius, he seems to have closed it thrice; yet this may have been a mistake. It had been done once before in the Mythic age of Numa; and again, between the first and second Punic wars, in the consulship of T. Manlius Torquatus, 517.
Augustus had before this already directed his attention to the Alpine races, such as the Salassians and all the tribes of Rhætia in the widest sense of the word,—even from the valley of Aosta, all through the Valais and the Tyrol, as far as Noricum, which had a king, and kept under Roman protection: they were mostly of Etruscan stock. It is my belief that the abodes of the Rhætians did not reach at farthest beyond the valley of the Upper Inn, whilst the Vindelicians dwelt on the northern slopes of the Tyrolese Alps, from the valley of the Lower Inn to the Danube. These last were of Liburnian race, as were also the Pannonians, who were neither Illyrians nor Gauls, and were called Pæonians by the Greeks, from whom we likewise learn that they had a language of their own. The Helvetians had submitted since the days of Julius Cæsar; of the subjugation of the Rhætians and Vindelicians under Drusus and Tiberius, we know but very little: the accounts which we have of it, are very vague and confused. Yet Von Hormayr has made up a romance from them, wishing to prove that Italian and German Tyrol ought to hold together: the notion is a correct one, but is not to be deduced by treating history in this way; nor did he do any good by it. It is evident that the war was carried on by the Romans according to a regular plan; and that the attacks were made from Italy, and on the other side from the Lake of Constance. The Romans everywhere penetrated by degrees through the inmost recesses of the Alps, where at that time there were no carriage roads, but only footpaths, as was likewise the case in the middle ages; and they so completely reduced those tribes, that they never made an attempt to raise their heads again. It was then that Augustus founded in Vindelicia the city of Augsburg, a colony of veterans, like all the colonies which he now established. At this time, they began to let the veterans settle where they had been encamped in war; and thus they gradually became peaceful citizens: afterwards their sons were liable to military service on better terms. As for the exact period when this new arrangement began, I do not think that any thing can be found about it in the ancient writers. Owing to these conquests in the Alps, there now arose the German wars in 740: now first the Romans could act on the offensive in Germany. The Sigambri, it is true, had made before that an inroad into the country beyond the Rhine, from whence they were driven back, but without any permanent result. Until then, the Romans had never reached farther than the Westerwald; new they attacked the Germans from the Lower Rhine and from the Danube: that they never came to the Upper Rhine, but went up no higher than the Lahn on the Lower Rhine, shows that Swabia was not as yet a German country, and that it was first made so by the Alemanni. These wars we would gladly detail more fully; but unfortunately Dio Cassius is mutilated here. In the Venetian manuscript, from which the rest are derived, the gaps have been disguised to take in the buyers, and this has been copied in all the others: the defective fragments discovered and edited by Morelli, but which are not found in the common editions, give one a little light, but only very little. In one of these campaigns, as Roth conjectures, Domitius Ahenobarbus may for the first time have crossed the Elbe in Bohemia; whereas formerly most of the expeditions were led from the Lower Rhine against the Elbe. Their wars were carried on by Nero Claudius Drusus (the younger brother of Tiberius), who made three campaigns: he crossed the Weser, and penetrated towards the Elbe. He reduced the Bructeri, the Sigambri who were then so renowned, the Cherusci and other tribes: this is all that we know of his wars. Nor in any of these accounts is there once the name of a locality given; for the enemy had no towns, and the villages were swept away, and are not mentioned by the Romans: the Germans did not possess any strong places in which they could hold out, and their only protection was the impassable nature of the country. Being unable to stand their ground against regular tactics, they were almost always beaten by the Romans in the field; whole districts were laid waste, the women and children dragged away into slavery, and the men hunted down and killed like wild beasts. Although Drusus is praised for his humanity,—and considering that he was a Roman, justly so,—yet he was ἀλιτήριος against Germany, and he may have done the people as much harm as Varus himself did. He died in his camp, Tiberius being strongly suspected of having been the instigator of his murder: but this after all may only have been believed on account of the hatred which he had against the family of his brother, especially against Germanicus. At most, Tiberius might have been afraid lest Drusus should dream de reddenda re publica, a fine day-dream which Germanicus really fostered. Drusus had a monument on the Rhine, which for generations was held sacred both by Romans and foreigners: where it was is now unknown.
After his death in 745, Tiberius took the command. But soon afterwards followed his absence of seven years, during which little happened except that the Bructeri defeated the legate M. Lollius, annihilated his legion, and took his eagles. When Tiberius returned from Rhodes, his stepfather bestowed upon him the command in Gaul, that he might complete the conquest of Germany. Tiberius subdued the Sigambri, Bructeri, and Cherusci, and penetrated as far as the Elbe: there he was joined by the Roman fleet, which had either been equipped in the Ems, or had come from the Rhine to the Ems. How far it went up the Elbe cannot be made out; it may be that it got as far as Magdeburg, yet the Roman galleys were not able, like steam-boats, to run against the stream. After these campaigns, Tiberius again left Germany, as his predecessor had done, and as many of his successors did after him. The Romans wished to crush the Germans; but it did not seem worth their while to keep the country.
Whilst the tribes about the Hartz, and in the Thuringian forest, had their country invaded by the Romans, there existed in Bohemia the great kingdom of Marbod, which is indeed a perplexing phenomenon: we read of a large city in this realm, of an army of seventy thousand men, and of a body guard. Moeser rightly observes, that one is not to believe the Germans of those days to have been less civilized than the peasantry of Westphalia and Lower Saxony are now; only they were wanting in the refinement of those who live in towns:—their houses were certainly built like the worse ones which we have; the dwellings of the princes were very much the same as the buildings of the middle ages. Nothing is more preposterous than to take them for rude savages, when they were merely rough country people. Venantius Fortunatus, in his poem to Radagunda, speaks of the fallen splendour of the kingdom of her house, and of the bronze covered palaces of her forefathers, the Thuringian kings. There were indeed some things different from what they are now: in winter, for instance, they had certainly to burn candles by day, and when it rained to shut up everything with boards, because they had no glass windows; yet this was the case in Rome itself where there are houses of this kind to this day. Marbod, however, must have really had a civilized kingdom. He had immigrated with his Sueves into Bohemia, and subdued the Celtic Boians there: his seventy thousand men betoken something feudal. Against Marbod, Tiberius now armed himself; he meant to attack him on two sides, himself advancing from Noricum and Vindelicia, and Sentius Saturninus from the Rhine through Northern Germany, the Hercynian, and the Thuringian Forests. The Romans made great preparations, laying down for many miles, across the Dutch and Westphalian fens, large wooden causeways and wooden bridges—the bridge over the Elbe near Hamburgh—of which remains are found even to this day: the wood has stood exceedingly well, except that it has become black in the bogs. It was then that the consequences of the dissensions among the Germans began to show themselves. The northern Germans did not trust Marbod, and were afraid of losing by him their freedom, like the Marcomanni: these he had once left in the lurch, and hence they were so broken down, that they could not now come to his help. But whilst Tiberius was preparing himself for the attack, Dalmatia and Pannonia revolted. During this insurrection which lasted for three years, Marbod remained inactive: the Getæ also, and the Dacians, who had formerly often crossed the Danube, and fallen upon the Roman frontiers, now kept still, luckily for Rome, which otherwise might have been brought into fearful trouble. Augustus, quite appalled, trembled at the danger: it was reckoned that there were two hundred thousand men able to bear arms among these tribes; two Dalmatians, both of them called Bato, and a Pannonian, Pinnes, were their leaders. Velleius, who served in this war, tells us of their high state of civilization, especially of the Pannonians, nearly all of whom had Roman manners and spoke Latin: they must have been very much akin to the Romans, otherwise this would be hardly conceivable, as the Roman dominion there was still so recent. In this war the rebels spread as far as Macedonia, once driving back a Roman army which had come from Asia; and it was only by the extraordinary bravery of their soldiers that the Romans gained the victory after all. At last the nations fell out, and one of the Batos treacherously gave up the Pannonian general Pinnes to the Romans. The Pannonians were the first who submitted, and the Romans seem to have granted them very favourable conditions. Tiberius was now free to go against Marbod, who would have thus met with his punishment for having kept aloof, had not another event taken place.
The whole of the country between the Rhine, the Westerwald, and the Elbe, was about the year 760 brought under the rule of Rome: the Chauci, who dwelt in East-Friesland and Oldenburg, and the other inhabitants of the marshes were quite as much subdued as the Bructeri and Cherusci in Westphalia Proper. Quintilius Varus, who was of an old and illustrious patrician house, and an able general, but had made himself notorious for his shameful rapacity, quite thought himself the governor of nations which only recked fear and force. For him Arminius—whom we generally call Hermann, but whose name was probably not this, but Armin—laid a trap most cleverly. As things then stood, it was very difficult for the Germans who had no towns, to make head against the Romans: the German cavalry was superior to that which the Romans had of their own; but the Gaulish cavalry, which had the advantage of better horses, and of more complete armour, thenceforth constituted the flower of the Roman army, in which it had such a preponderance, that the terms which belonged to the cavalry service, were almost all of them of Celtic origin: so paramount was Gallic influence on discipline! Cunning against tyranny is all fair; so that I cannot blame Arminius in the least for what he did: the Germans had been most unjustly made war upon by the Romans, whom they could not possibly meet with open force. Arminius had in many Roman campaigns served with German cavalry, and very likely had distinguished himself in the Pannonian war: he was a perfect master of the Latin tongue, had the Roman franchise, and the rank of a knight; and, by dint of the greatest perseverance, he, as well as his fellow conspirators, had gained the unbounded, and even childlike confidence of Varus. Varus had made for himself a stationary camp, where, as in a Roman province, he held a court of justice which was a means for enriching himself; like the law-courts of the oppressive high bailiffs in Switzerland. The Roman soldiers were wont to purchase leave of absence and discharge, as was formerly the custom in the German army; for just as it was in France before the revolution, they then only got part of their pay: thus there might have been many of them roving about the country. There seemed to be the most profound peace, and the Germans made Varus believe that they felt indeed quite happy in their growing civilization; but when he was thus off his guard, and a great part of the soldiers gone perhaps away on furlough, some tribes in Lower Saxony revolted, as it had been arranged; so that Varus was got to draw near those countries. The conspirators persuaded him to turn off from the highways (limites) which led from the Rhine to the Lippe, and through Westphalia as far as the Weser;—these were straight roads cut through the woods, not yet paved indeed, but laid with logs; and when he had ventured sufficiently deep into the impassable forests, the insurrection broke out on all sides. He then tried to get back to the limes, and above all, no doubt, to the chief Roman stronghold in that part of the country, Aliso on the Lippe, in the neighbourhood of Hamm. The spot where Arminius routed Varus is no more to be ascertained: the only sensible way of tracing it, is to find out the direction in which the roads may have been laid down from the principal posts; yet even thus much cannot be made out, as the difficulties were every where pretty nearly the same: we might, however, perhaps take Cologne as such a starting point. It is infinitely harder to give an opinion on this subject, than on Hannibal’s passage across the Alps. On the first day, Varus was attacked on all sides; he lost a good deal of baggage, and with much trouble entrenched himself in a strong position for the night. The following day, he continued his march; but his columns were already seized with panic, so that in the evening when they wanted to pitch their camp, they were scarcely able to make head against the enemy’s attack: Varus and several of his chief officers, overcome by their despair, now put an end to their lives, dreading the account which they would have to give. It was then perhaps that Numonius Vala—very likely the one to whom Horace addresses one of his Epistles[38]—and three alæ separated themselves from the infantry, and tried to cut their way out; but they also were overpowered, as they deserved to be for having deserted their own comrades. On the third day, the whole army was annihilated; three legions and as many alæ (the cavalry attached to a legion), together with ten cohorts, were cut to pieces: a legion consisted of six thousand foot, and three thousand horse. The Germans took an awful vengeance upon their oppressors, in which there was moreover a great deal of superstition, many of them being sacrificed to the gods.
Of this victory the Germans, owing to their want of union, could not make the use which would have been desirable, and which Armin wished. It is true that very many Roman forts were taken and destroyed, and much besides may have been done, as the Romans have undoubtedly left many disasters untold; yet notwithstanding all this, Nonius Asprenas kept the left banks of the Rhine with two legions: the everlasting lamentable dismemberment of Germany, checked in this case also its progress, although its peoples tried to rise. Cædicius held out in Aliso, until at last he found an opportunity, when the Germans were dispersed, of fighting his way out with the rest of his brave men to the Rhine, where he stopped the advance of the enemy. Owing to the victory not being followed up on the side of the Germans, Germanicus was afterwards enabled to wreak his vengeance in his unhallowed expeditions.
The news of the disaster of Varus came like a thunderbolt on Augustus, who was one of those men who are given to fear the worst. At Rome it was thought that the Germans would cross the river, and destroy the legions on the Lower Rhine, and that the Gauls would also take up arms and unite with the Germans; so that a war in the Alps seemed near at hand. No doubt Augustus expected also that Marbod would rise; but the latter, who had here an opportunity of gaining eternal glory, shamefully kept quiet, for which he afterwards ended his days a prisoner at Ravenna. Augustus wished to make a general levy; yet he met with great difficulty, owing to the inconceivable aversion to military service which had all at once arisen among the Italians: in Marius’ times one might have raised as many legions as one wanted. Fathers maimed the hands of their children, to make them unfit for service; soldiers were taken from the lowest ranks of society; attempts were made to enlist freedmen; patrons were induced to emancipate strong slaves on condition of their entering the army: whereas formerly slaves were punished with death, if they presumed to take unto themselves the honour of military service. Tiberius had orders to set out in all haste for Gaul: Nonius Asprenas has the merit of having checked the tide; Tiberius went on with the work. Afterwards, Germanicus, the son of Drusus, was sent in his stead, who at once took measures for an offensive war. But Augustus did not live to see it.
Augustus was now full of days, but his health had very much improved: he had in fact, during the last third of his life, little or no illness at all. Thus he had gently become an old man, and was quite under the thraldom of his wife, who grew worse as she grew older, and shut out from all access to him every one who was not subservient to her. Towards her own son Drusus, she may indeed have had the feelings of a step-mother; to Germanicus at least she bore a deadly hatred. Germanicus and Agrippina were patterns of domestic excellence; their married life, at a time when every trace of the virtues of home had been lost, when elsewhere marriage was merely a bond of indifference, and often even of hatred, was most remarkably beautiful:—it was because Germanicus was fondly attached to his wife and his children, that he became an object of hatred to his grandmother. Livia did not at all like Tiberius’ own son Drusus, as he was too friendly with his adopted brother Germanicus, though otherwise he had quite the character of his father. Augustus passed the last years of his life in the consciousness of being enthralled: he was unhappy in more than one respect, and in this life already he had to suffer for many of his misdeeds; the overthrow of Varus put him utterly beside himself. Tiberius was going to Illyricum, and Augustus wished to meet him at Beneventum: he had passed several summers at Capreæ in the bay of Naples, the most paradise-like spot in the world, thus to recover from his cares and troubles, while the mildness of the climate would prolong his life. Here he fell sick, and was brought to Nola where he died on the 19th of August 765, fourteen years after the birth of Christ. The Romans laid a great stress on his having died the self-same day as that on which he had got the consulship for the first time by force; and on his having had as many consulates as Marius and Valerius Corvus together: to take any such things, is silly. He died as sure in the possession of his rule as any king who was born to a throne, and he gave his ring to Tiberius, who already had the tribunician power: no sensible man could doubt that the latter would now take the government upon himself.
The corpse was buried with almost godlike honours. From Nola to Bovillæ, the decurions of the towns bore it on their shoulders; and the equites Romani, from Bovillæ to the city itself. Tiberius and his son Drusus spoke the funeral orations from the rostra vetera and nova, near the Curia Julia; and afterwards too, all such orations, and the proclamations of the emperors, were delivered from the new rostra.
The extent of the Roman empire when Augustus died, was as follows. He had once entertained the idea of conquering Britain; but he had given it up. The empire, however, was not bounded by the Rhine, but Holland and the adjoining Frisian countries were at that time under the power of the Romans; farther to the south indeed, as far as the Lake of Constance, the Rhine really formed the boundary, which from thence ran along the Danube to Lower Mœsia. But here the Romans were not masters of the river’s banks, as the Sarmatians often crossed it: the frontier was more to the south; Tomi (Kustendji) actually lay outside of the contiguous Roman empire. The so-called wall of Trajan,—it improperly bears that name,—along the old branch of the Danube, the salt water near Peuce, was very likely now built by Augustus; the country north of it, the Sarmatians overran without resistance: in Trajan’s days, even Moldavia and Wallachia, nay the whole range of land to the Dniester was subject to the Roman sway. In Asia, Cappadocia was still a kingdom under Roman supremacy; Armenia likewise in some measure acknowledged the majestas populi Romani; the Parthians had very much abated of their pride, and there were hostages of theirs among the Romans, whilst the standards of Crassus had been given back by Phraates; it is of this that Virgil and Horace speak: in a certain sense therefore, the dominion of Rome extended to the borders of India. The real boundary, however, in the East was the Euphrates: Syria, Egypt, Libya, and old Africa were Roman; and the eastern part of the Numidian coast, which had Cirta for its capital, was a Roman province. The Numidian kingdom had been overthrown by Cæsar; but the learned Juba had by way of compensation been presented by Augustus with western Algiers and Morocco, the realms of Bocchus. The rule of the Romans reached beyond Fezzan; they might easily have come as far as the negro countries. Those negro states on the rivers in the interior of Africa, may at different times have acknowledged Rome’s supremacy,—at least by embassies and tributes: we know of a caravan-road to Fezzan and Cydamus; the Garamantes are the inhabitants of Garama in Fezzan; (here there is a mistake in d’Anville’s map;) a short time ago, Roman ruins and inscriptions were found there by Ouseley. Once, the Romans had made an expedition against the Blemmyans in Dongola with success; another, under Ælius Gallus, against Yemen on the Arabian coast, was an utter failure.
The number of Roman citizens had very much increased in the western provinces, from which also the legions were principally recruited. There were in fact forty-seven legions, and a corresponding number of cohorts under arms. In Italy, there were only levies in cases of emergency; and, on the other hand, the army became more and more made up of the auxilia and cohorts. Far more than nine-tenths of it were certainly new citizens. The franchise, however, was now of little worth; nor was it even always attended with exemption from taxes.
As a civil law-giver, Augustus aimed at a different object from what Cæsar did, who had wished to bring within bounds the wide range of the Roman laws and to have them worked up into one grand whole; just as Peel wants to do with the common law of England. This undertaking was very praiseworthy, however perilous and thankless a task it may be to make new codes of laws; but it is quite a different thing to bring the existing laws into harmony with each other. Augustus’ legislation, on the other, hand, was a new and arbitrary one. The Lex Ælia Sentia is to be commended: in other enactments, he was wishing to struggle against the stream of custom and the monstrous immorality of the age. An aversion had sprung up against lawful wedlock, and the citizens lived in concubinage with their female slaves, whose children likewise became slaves, and mostly remained so; or at best, became freedmen: thus the free population had very considerably dwindled. One may say, that in the guilds of the different crafts, nineteen out of twenty were freedmen; this is shown by the names on the alba found at Pompeii. Augustus was quite right in setting his face against such a state of things; but the way in which he did it in the Lex Julia and the Lex Pupia Poppæa, was by most wretched make-shifts which only betrayed how helplessly he was striving against the stream: their definitions of honour, of the jus trium liberorum, and such like were of no use.[39]