Page:Charactersevents00ferriala.djvu/184

166 Senate, inert as usual, gave it not a thought. So Germany remained an uncertainty, neither a province nor independent, for fifteen years, a fact wherein is perhaps to be found the real cause of the catastrophe of Varus, which ruined the whole German policy of Rome.

Furthermore, in Pannonia and Dalmatia, when it was known that the most valiant general of Rome was in disgrace at Rodi, the malcontents took fresh courage, reopened an agitation that could but terminate in a revolt, much more dangerous than any preceding. In the Orient, Palestine arose in 4, on the death of Herod the Great, against his son, Archelaus, and against the Hellenised monarchy, demanding to be made a Roman province like Syria, and a frightful civil war illumined with its sinister glare the cradle of Jesus. The governor of Syria, Quintilius Varus, threw himself into Judea and succeeded in crushing the revolt; but Augustus, unable to bring himself either to give full satisfaction to the Hebrew people or to execute entirely the testament of Herod, decided as usual on a compromise: he divided the ancient kingdom of Herod the Great among three of his sons, and changed Archelaus's title of king to the more modest one of ethnarch. Then new difficulties arose with the