Part 16

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.