Germanicus's Rhine Campaigns — Vengeance and Retreat
Germanicus campaigned across the Rhine from 14 to 16 and recovered two of the three eagles lost in the Teutoburg Forest. The disaster of the year 9 had cost Rome three legions under Varus, ambushed over four days in wooded country by Arminius, a Cherusci noble who had served as a Roman auxiliary officer and held Roman citizenship. Augustus was reported to have beaten his head against a door frame and called for Varus to give him back his legions, and the province of Germania beyond the Rhine was abandoned. Germanicus took the command in 13 and used it hard. He suppressed a mutiny of the Rhine legions in the first weeks after Augustus's death, partly by producing his infant son in miniature military boots, and then took the armies across the river repeatedly. He reached the battlefield in 15 and buried the remains, which Tiberius disapproved of on the grounds that the sight was bad for the soldiers. He fought Arminius at Idistaviso in 16 and won, without ever bringing the war to a conclusion, since the Germans withdrew rather than be destroyed and returned when he left. His fleet was wrecked on the North Sea coast on the way home. Tiberius recalled him in 16, reasonably enough — the campaigns cost enormously and gained nothing permanent — and sent him east, where he died at Antioch in 19 believing he had been poisoned. The Rhine remained the frontier for four centuries. Arminius was killed by his own relatives a few years later, and the tribal coalition he had built came apart without a Roman army to hold it together. A colossal statue of him was raised in the Teutoburg hills in 1875, which says more about the century that built it than about the first.
- Year: 14 CE
- Category: Military
