The Historians' History of the World 06

The hardihood of the enterprise, unsuccessful as it was, seems to have alarmed the Germans. The tribes between the Rhine and Weser therefore entered into an alliance for the defence of their country against the enemy who menaced it. The Chatti refused to join this league, and their neighbours the Sugambri consequently went to war with them, just as Drusus, who had spent the winter in Rome, reappeared on the Rhine and crossed the boundary stream at the “Old Standing Camp” (at Xanten). He subjugated the Usipetes, and having made a bridge over the Lupia (Lippe), he traversed unopposed the country of the Sigambri, which was denuded of its fighting men, and attacked the Cherusci on the left bank of the Weser. Scarcity of provisions and the approach of winter forced him, however, to retreat. On his return march the Germans attacked him fiercely on all sides. Pent in a narrow gorge and hard beset, he and his army would have been irretrievably lost had not the Germans, thinking the enemy already vanquished, ventured upon the final massacre with savage eagerness and without any order or method. The victory of which they thought themselves certain passed over to Roman strategy. The Germans were beaten and had to look on while the Romans built the castellum of Aliso which they garrisoned and used as a point d’appui for later undertakings. The emperor refused the title of imperator, by which the army hailed their general, but granted his victorious son an ovation and triumphal honours.

Drusus

(From a bronze in the Louvre Museum)

[11-9 B.C.]

To secure a strong base for his campaigns of conquest Drusus, after a personal interview with his imperial father, had great fortifications constructed the next year on the German river. The banks of the Rhine were lined with more than fifty castella, of which the most important, situated opposite the standing camp of Mogontiacum (Mainz), grew into a town in course of time; Bonn was connected by a bridge with the right bank of the royal stream, the high angle between the Rhine, the Main, and the Lahn was guarded by a series of lines on the Taunus which still proclaim their first framer in their name of “Drususgraben.” They formed the basis of that great frontier rampart which in later days divided Roman territory from free Germania.

After these preparations Drusus undertook his third campaign against middle Germany. Assisted by the warlike Nervii and other Gallic auxiliaries and allied with the Frisians, who supplied him with necessaries, the bold leader advanced northeastwards along the right bank of the Main, defeated the Chatti in a sanguinary pitched battle, penetrated across the Werra and through the Hercynian forest (Thüringerwald) into the country of the Cherusci, and reached the western bank of the Elbe, passing through tracts which no Roman had ever trod, to tribes which had never heard the Roman name. Dion repeats a legend of how, when Drusus was preparing to cross this distant stream, he was met by a woman of superhuman stature, who addressed him in Latin, saying: “Whither, O Drusus, thou insatiable one? It is not allotted to thee by fate to see all this; turn back, already thou standest at the term of thy life and of thy deeds!” He hastened back on account of the approach of winter, but he was never to see the Rhine again. He died on the way back; of sickness according to some, according to others from the results of a fracture of the leg caused by the fall of his horse. He died in the thirtieth year of his age, in the arms of his brother Tiberius, who had hastened to meet him. His body was borne with great pomp and mourning through Gaul and Italy to Rome, where it was committed to a funeral pyre on the Field of Mars and the ashes interred in the imperial vault. An altar in the neighbourhood of the Lippe, a statue in military attire, together with an empty sepulchral monument at Mainz (the remains of which are said still to be preserved in the “Eichelstein”) around which the legions every year celebrated the anniversary of his death with funeral games, and a triumphal arch on the Appian way, were intended to preserve for all time the memory of the brave and beloved prince who was the first of all the Romans to press forward to the Elbe. The title of “Germanicus” Conqueror of the Germans, which Augustus had bestowed upon him, passed over to his son.

[9 B.C.-5 A.D.]