Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/493

Rh tr- ninius. Maro- boduas. ROMAN P1-:IuoD.] immediately following years he found other native allies, and with their help mastered so many positions that the conquest of the whole country must have seemed quite certain. After the death of Drusus in 9 13.0., Tiberius conquered the Tencteri and Usipetes; and at a later time he not only subdued the Sicambri, but settled -10,000 of them at the mouth of the Rhine, where they lived under Roman rule. A good many of the Istzevones were now overcome, while others entered into a 1nore or less com- pulsory alliance with Rome; and it is probable that, if great generals had represented the empire, Germany would soon have shared the fate of Gaul. Quinctilins Varus, who, in 6 -.D., was placed at the head of the Roman troops in Germany, lost all the advantages gained by his prede- cessors. He had held office in Syria, where he had ruled with great harshness; and fancying that he might act in the same way towards the ﬁerce tribes of the north, he roused among them a bitter hatred of the Romans. They found in Arminius, a son of the chief of the Cherusci, a leader of extraordinary bravery and resource. He had been a Roman soldier, and had so distinguished himself—— perhaps in wars against his countrymen—— that he was made a citizen and knight. He formed the design of freeing his people, and soon came to a secret understanding with in- ﬂuential Cheruscan and other chiefs. In the year 9, in the month of September, Varus, who had been told that a northern tribe was in revolt, was led at the head of his legions into the Teutoburg Forest. Here the Germans were lying in wait for him ; and everything was in their favour, the narrow deﬁles having caused disorder among the troops, and the ground having been made muddy by heavy rains. The battle which ensued lasted three days, during which the Romans were altogether destroyed. and Varus, in despair, killed himself by falling upon his sword. The despairing cry of Augustus—“Varus, Varus, give me back my legions !”——testities to the consternation which this defeat caused at Rome, where it was expectecl that the barbarians would take a terrible revenge for the wrongs they supposed themselves to have suffered. The Germans, however, were too much occupied with internal disputes to think of any enterprise beyond their own country ; and in the year 14, after Tiberius had become emperor, Rome again assumed the offensive. Germanicus, the son of Drusus, crossed the Rhine, and defeated the Marsi. He returned in the year 15, when he was joined by the Chauci and other tribes, who fought for him as zealously as his own soldiers. Thusnelda, the wife of Arminius, fell into the hands of Germanicus, and was sent as a prisoner to Rome. This intensiﬁed the hostility of the young chief, who now exerted to the utmost his vast inﬂuence to stir up against the invaders his tribe and its allies. The Teutoburg Forest was again selected as the scene of an attack ; and although Arminius was not vic- torious, he so far injured his enemy that Germanicus was forced to retreat. The struggle was resumed in the year 16, when Germanicus gained two victories. He gained them, however, at so great a cost that he and his army had to take refuge in their ships, the greater number. of which were lost in a storm. No sooner had the Romans been driven off than Arminius had to protect his people against an internal danger. Maroboduus, the chief of the Marcomanni, a man of great ambition, had by treachery or by open ﬁghting n1ade him- self master of several neighbouring tribes. Arminius began to fear his designs, and after the defeat of Yarus warned him of his peril by sending him the Roman general’s head. When Germanicus ﬁnally left the country, Arminius dc- clared war against lIaroboduus, broke up his kingdom, and drove him from Germany. It is possible that Arminius himself may afterwards havedwished to found a great state. GERMANY 475 At any rate, a number of chiefs combined against him, and in the year 21, at the age of thirty-seven, he was killed. Although the Romans did not again attempt on a large scale the conquest of Germany, they acquired great inﬂu- ence throughout the country, and they gradually obtained considerable possessions to the east of the Rhine and to the south of the .Iain. Among the tribes whom they forced to become their allies were the Frisians and the Batavians; and in the year (39 a formidable conspiracy against them was headed by a Batavian chief, Claudius Civilis, who, like c1au.1iu_ Having been em— Civil'L.. Arminius, had been a Roman soldier. bittered by ill-usage from the emperor Nero, he stirred up his countrymen, and he found a large number of allies on both banks of the Rhine. He struggled valiantly for a time, supported by the mysterious utterances of Velleda, a prophetess who lived in a tower in the land of the Bruetcri, and excited popular enthusiasm on behalf of the enemy of Rome. At last he was overcome by the Roman general Cerealis, and the Batavians were thenceforth com- pelled to send recruits to the Roman army. About a hundred years after this time the relations of the Romans and the Germans began to be reversed, the latter being the aggressors. In the Marcomannie war Marcus Aurelius opposed for thirteen years a vast host of Germans who sought to push southward into Roman territory. Mean- while the Romans had profoundly inﬂuenced large parts of the country. They built many fortresses along their frontier, and some of these were connected bya great wall, of which there are still remnants in southern Germany. Around. the fortresses grew up towns, which became the Roman In towns in Rhaetia, which reached from the Lake of Constance along Gel“ centres of civilization over pretty wide districts. the Danube as far as the Inn, there were important settle- ments at Augsburg and Regensburg (Ratisbon); N oricum, which stretched far to the east of Rlnetia, possessed, among other towns, Vienna, Salzburg, and Vels. Germania Superior and Germania Inferior, on the left bank of the Rhine, included Strasburg, Mainz (Mayence), Vorms, Cologne, and Bonn. In the province of Belgium, which was at least partly German, was the great city of Treves, one of the most splendid in the Roman empire, and often the residence of the emperors. Clonfederatiovzs of Tribes. The experience of the Germans in contending with the Romans taught them the necessity of some measure of union ; and from the third century we hear no longer of the individual tribes which had before been famous, but of groups or confederations, each forming, for purposes of attack and defence, a single state. The Goths were one of the most important of these groups. They included many of the tribes in the eastern and north-eastern parts of Germany, such as the Vandals, the Burgundians, and the Heruli. Next to them, in the order in which they appear in history, were the Alemanni, a confederation made up of several Suevic tribes. They held the Rhine country in the neighbourhood of the Main, and were continually pushing southwards and eastwards in the hope of securing Roman lands and towns. To the north of them, on both banks of the Rhine as far as the sea, were the Franks; and to the east of the Franks, the Frisians and Saxons. The Thur- ingians, descendants of the Hermunduri, inhabited the Thuringian Forest and the surrounding country. The Goths were the ﬁrst of these confederations to found .Iigra- a great kingdom ; in the 4th century their lands stretched H0113- from the Baltic to the Black Sea. This vast state was broken up by the Huns, who poured in immense hordes from the Asiatic steppes into Europe. Urged forward by so tremendous a force, the Burgundians, the Vandals, and many of the Sucvi wandered westwards early 1n the 5th