included much of the southern and western part of today's
Federal Republic, the Low Countries south and west of the
Rhine, northwestern Switzerland, and segments of northern
and eastern France. Stretching eastward from the lower Rhine
lay barbarian Germany, Germania barbara, a land the Romans
tried to conquer. Between 12 B.C. and A.D. 16 they attempted to
incorporate Germania from the Rhine to the Elbe into the em-
pire as a great province adjoining Gaul, which comprised the
greater part of what is known today as modern France.

Germania had initially been subdued by Drusus, the
adopted son of Augustus (and father of the later emperor
Claudius). When Drusus died in the field, the Roman command
in Germania was assumed by his brother Tiberius, also adopted
by Augustus and named crown prince. Tiberius had all but
completed the conquest and consolidation of the new province
when diverted by a dangerous uprising in what is today Austria
and Yugoslavia. Germania was left under Quintilius Varus,
who recently had been governor of Syria. A laconic report on
his reputation there was given by Velleius Paterculus, a senior
officer under Tiberius: Varus had gone to that "rich province
poor and left the poor province rich." Theodor Mommsen, the
Nobel laureate historian of Rome, characterized Varus as "a
man of evilly acquired but princely wealth, and of princely
arrogance but lazy in body, dull in mind, and without the
slightest military ability or experience." ^*

His military incompetence was fatal, for under the Roman
system of the time, the governor was also military commander
in a province. Returning with the field army to winter quarters
in the latter part of A.D. 9, Varus let himself be duped into
making a detour off the military highway into the Teutoburg
Forest of modern Westphalia. Native insurgents led by the Ger-
manic prince Arminius, a Roman knight who had served as a
Roman auxiliary commander, ambushed and annihilated the
entire force of some twenty thousand, including Legions XVII,
XVIII, and XIX (which were never reconstituted). Aside from
a few individuals who managed to survive and escape, those

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