Original subtitles

Previously on "Rome: Rise and fall of an empire..."

The Democratic Roman republic is no more.

After a relentless drive to seize absolute power, Julius Caesar is assassinated by aristocrats

hoping to maintain the senate as the center of Rome's political authority.

But the effort fails, and the age of emperors begins with the reign of Caesar Augustus.

Now:

In the first century B.C., under the reign of the new emperor Augustus,

a new Roman empire is on a mission of rapid expansion

and sets its sights on the savage land beyond the Rhine.

But the latest and greatest conquest collapses into a bloodbath.

Germanic tribes spurn the imperial yoke and defy Roman authority, hobbling imperial ambitions,

redrawing history, and jeopardizing the empire.

ROME, RISE AND FALL OF AN EMPIRE

THE FOREST OF DEATH

Gaul, first century B.C.

Rome takes its first steps to world domination.

Spurred on by unprecedented growth,

the empire believes the rest of the world will eagerly bask in its civilizing light.

Emperor Augustus consolidates power after the murder of his great uncle Julius Caesar,

and Rome rises and spreads its influence across the known world.

Augustus was Julius Caesar's relative who became, in our terms, the first Roman emperor.

Augustus saved the republic in a way that Julius Caesar had been unable to do.

This was the beginning of the real peak of Roman power.

It was rapidly expanding its imperial frontiers and had had a series of stunning military victories.

Many in Rome felt that the state was invincible.

The beloved Augustus has triumphed in his difficult task of melding

the democratic values of the old republic under the power and leadership of an emperor.

Augustus saved the republic by becoming its number-one and sole leader in fact,

but by saying and convincing other people that the republic was still what it had always been

- a cooperation among people up and down the social ladder for the good of all.

After 35 years of successful rule,

Augustus sees his greatest achievement as the massive expansion of Roman territory.

To him, it is more than simple military conquest. There is a higher mission as well.

Romans, after all, are superior.

The romans also felt that they had a mission to take Roman civilization to other people who didn't have it.

So they thought that they had a cultural mission to bring law and, as they saw it,

justice to people who were living without it, the people they called barbarians.

With Gaul successfully becoming a Roman province, the newborn Roman empire eyes land beyond the Rhine

in an area that will come to be called Germania.

The tribes beyond the Rhine lived precariously, vying for power or turf through bloody raids against each other.

Some tribes even extend their raiding into Roman territory, which Rome will not tolerate.

The empire sees these barbarians as savage, unpredictable, dangerous, and worth conquering.

There has been much debate about what Rome was doing east of the Rhine.

The big question is, was Rome trying to establish a new province between the Rhine and the Elba,

or was Rome simply conducting punitive raids

to try to stop incursions that had been coming across the Rhine from the east?

Most scholarly opinion now suggests that Rome was really trying to establish a new province.

By 9 B.C., emperor Augustus sends general Tiberius on a campaign across the Rhine.

The relationship between the romans and Germans is very problematic.

You have people who are willing to work with the romans and people who hate the romans.

And what this goes back to at times, no doubt, is a jockeying for power

among the German tribes within ancient Germany, Germania itself.

Tiberius, a well-connected and effective soldier, is heir apparent to the imperial throne.

In Germania, he courts a leader of the cheruscian tribe, seeing a potential ally.

The romans became allies of some of these barbarian groups

because those groups wanted Roman help against their fellow barbarian enemies.

And the romans wanted to expand their territorial control and also their, as they saw it, civilizing mission farther north.

The cheruscian chieftain welcomes an alliance with Rome.

Though his people have no interest in Roman ways, they crave the empire's protection and prestige.

They had a lot to gain from the relationship with Rome, particularly their ruling elite.

Economically, there is access to Roman products.

What's more important is that Roman products enable a person to show status.

The young germanic prince, happily playing Roman soldier, will learn to be a shrewd player of Roman politics.

Raised in two worlds under the proud traditions of his people and the might and glory of the empire,

he will become a Roman officer and a germanic king.

His name is Arminius.

For more than a decade, the empire has enjoyed relative peace with the tribes across the Rhine,

thanks to the strong military of emperor Augustus.

Augustus is a military dictator who is going to have to fight constantly

in order to establish an empire that's actually going to be stable for a full two centuries.

Arminius, the young germanic prince now in his twenties, has become an auxiliary commander in the empire's service.

These auxiliary troops recruited from Rome's provinces are a crucial supplement to the Roman army's 28 official legions.

Augustus had to make sure that people understood

that he was doing what traditional Roman leaders had always done-

lead Rome to glorious and profitable conquests in war.

In 6 A.D., Roman general Tiberius travels from Germania

to quell a violent revolt in the volatile Roman province of Pannonia, roughly modern Hungary and Austria.

Tiberius directs all his forces in Germany against the insurgents,

who are rejecting Rome's taxation and intrusion into their way of life.

When the romans tried to push romanization of the barbarians, to make them live more like romans,

at a pace faster than the barbarians wanted to go, then the barbarians said, "we won't go there."

The revolt against Rome will last 3 grueling years, stretching the Roman army thin.

Emperor Augustus sends in auxiliary troops.

Arminius fights in this campaign, mastering the techniques of Roman warfare

and distinguishing himself to his Roman superiors.

First-century Roman historian Velleius Paterculus:

Brave in action and sharp in mind, Arminius had an intelligence quite beyond the ordinary barbarian,

and he showed in his manner and in his eyes the fire of the mind within.

Arminius is also sharp enough to see how brutally Rome can treat its provinces, crushing their autonomy.

I think he might have seen many of the native pannonians

in very much the same position as his people's back in northern Germany,

and he may well have seen a reflection of his own community in some of those places in Pannonia.

Still, in service to the empire, Arminius fights on, mustering his auxiliary forces alongside the Roman troops of general Tiberius.

As Rome fights to keep Pannonia in line, back in Germania, the empire-building progresses smoothly.

Arminius' people, constructing roads and other civil projects under Roman watch, are beginning to see the benefit of Rome's intrusion.

For the barbarians, especially those against the Rhine, who really weren't living in a Roman world,

they could still see the attractions of what we call romanization, developing a life more based on trade and commerce,

building larger communities as opposed to very small, separate communities, the way they had traditionally lived.

Third-century historian Cassius Dio:

"The barbarians were adapting themselves to Roman ways,

were becoming accustomed to holding markets, and were meeting peaceably.

They were becoming different without knowing it."

In 7 A.D., emperor Augustus appoints his close friend Quintilius Varus to govern the land east of the Rhine.

Varus is a relatively capable commander in a pinch,

but there's also an intimation we get from our sources that he's not the best character in the world.

His description by historian Velleius Paterculus is less than flattering.

Quintilius Varus was a man of mild character and of a quiet disposition,

somewhat slow in mind as he was in body,

and more accustomed to the leisure of the camp than to actual service in war.

The peaceful situation in Germania suits his relaxed disposition.

Varus has befriended Arminius, who has returned to Germania and his people as a respected Roman citizen

In Arminius, Rome sees a strong ally and lasting peace.

The Germans play by Rome's rules but only to keep the romans off their backs.

The Germans weren't happy about being forced to go to Roman courts and let a Roman decide their disputes,

for which they had longstanding homegrown ways of solving their problems.

The resentment begins to build, even though the surface looks calm, according to Velleius.

The Germans are a race to lying born

By trumping up a series of fictitious lawsuits, provoking one another in disputes

and settling quarrels by law rather than arms,

they appeared to express their gratitude to Roman justice while pretending their own barbaric nature was being softened.

Varus had experience governing people who had been used to being governed.

Nothing could be further from the experience and the expectations of the germanic peoples.

The intrusion, according to historian Cassius Dio, pushes Arminius and the other tribal leaders to action.

Besides issuing orders to them as if they were actually slaves of the romans,

Varus extracted money as he would from subject nations.

To this, they were in no mood to submit, for the leaders longed for their former power,

and the masses preferred their former ways.

So when the germanic peoples along the Rhine decided they'd had enough of Varus and his haughty administration,

his imposition of Roman ways, especially in court, they decided to fool Varus, to get rid of him.

And no one is in a better position to do that than Arminius.

For 3 years, Roman general Tiberius has been struggling to crush a violent rebellion in the province of Pannonia.

At last, in 9 A.D., he is seeing his efforts rewarded.

As the insurgents are defeated or surrender, victory is within his grasp.

But as order is restored in Pannonia, unknown to the romans, the situation in Germania is about to explode into chaos.

In this supposedly peaceful province,

Roman governor general Varus has pushed to establish Roman rule and pushed the Germans too far.

The proud German barbarians, under their leader Arminius,

have grown tired of paying Roman taxes and being treated as slaves on their own lands.

Refusing subservience to Rome, they decide to take up arms against the most powerful army in the world.

Not all of the German chieftains are convinced by the plan.

One, a man named Segestes, fears the risks are too great.

But Arminius sways the others.

For a man like Arminius, at this point in his career,

he's acknowledged as the dominant person among his people, this is a great honor for him,

To become just a client in some kind of provincial structure, an unclear category, is something he just didn't want to do.

Arminius has fought alongside the romans, and he knows the Roman army is an army of power, not stealth.

So he had the opportunity to learn Roman tactics and to learn how the Roman army operated

and what it could and could not do, what its capacities and capabilities were, how it deployed, how it fought.

Arminius knows about Rome, and he knows the romans underestimate germanic resolve.

He tells general Varus everything he wants to hear.

Historian Velleius Paterculus.

Arminius used the negligence of general Varus as an opportunity for treachery,

wisely seeing that no one could be more quickly overpowered than the man who feared nothing.

He knew that the most common beginning of disaster was a sense of security.

Part of the problem was Rome's bias, Rome's overconfidence that it could defeat anybody,

that nobody up in these northern regions far from the Mediterranean could possibly mount a successful defense against Rome.

If the Germans are to strike, they must do it soon.

Their enemy is stretched thin by other battles and completely unsuspecting.

The Germans set their trap in the soggy, tree-clogged Teutoberg forest in Northwestern Germany.

And what Arminius had done was...it must have taken several weeks and several hundred men.

They actually constructed a 5-foot-high, 15-foot-wide wall complete with fences and presumably some camouflage as well.

For Roman general Varus, it's business as usual.

Unaware, he and his troops of the 17th, 18th, and 19th legions prepare to pull up stakes

and make their seasonal move to their encampment to the west.

Third-century chronicler Cassius Dio:

They had with them many wagons and beasts of burden as in times of peace.

Also many women, children, and servants were following them."

Their armor and their equipment is probably being carried in a wagon or by pack animals,

because nobody could carry 70 pounds of armor and 40 pounds of pack day after day.

They're chatting with their common-law wives or arranging for somebody to come and polish their armor that night

or thinking about the evening they're going to have drinking with the prostitutes.

The last thing on their mind is immediately forming up into battle formation.

In the midst of his preparations, Varus receives a visitor.

His old friend Arminius, now in service to Rome, has just returned with news of a tribal conflict to the west.

Arminius tells Varus his presence there is needed to restore order.

The supposed uprising is in an unfamiliar territory called Kalkriese,

but it's only a short detour from the Roman fort at Haltern, varus' intended destination.

Varus mobilizes the entire camp for the journey.

So here's varus, having been drawn into German territory through his own pride,

but coming, he thinks, on a civilizing, lawgiving mission.

He's not ready to fight these barbarians so skilled at ambush and the kind of tactics

that could throw a Roman army into complete disarray.

The long line of soldiers, civilians, and provisions lumbers through the Woody German countryside.

Varus expects no trouble, but this is foreign soil, so he remains cautious.

He moves his entourage as quietly as possible.

Archaeologically, one of the things that has been found in these recent excavations

is a cowbell, and the cowbell has been packed with straw, and the straw is still in the cowbell.

With the cowbells silenced, the line proceeds, keeping military formation

as the romans head unknowingly toward the camouflaged walls of the trap.

The germanic chieftain Segestes, still dreading the deadly plan,

tries to warn varus about the treachery of Arminius, but he is ridiculed and driven away.

First-century historian Velleius Paterculus.

"Segestes demanded that the conspirators be put in chains,

but fate now dominated the plans of Varus and clouded his mind."

Even though Varus had been told by other barbarians, "don't trust those guys. They're going to betray you."

But Varus thought he was a judge of character and he could tell who was his friend and who wasn't.

While Varus leads his legions into the trap, general Tiberius returns to Rome from his hard-won success in Pannonia.

For emperor Augustus, the victory of tiberius proves the supreme might and power of his empire,

an empire believed to be invulnerable.

As the Roman governor general Varus moves his troops westward to their fortress,

he makes a detour to settle an uprising his friend Arminius reported to him.

In truth, Varus is being led into a trap deep in the Teutoberg forest in an area known as the Kalkriese woods.

They had to stay on a very narrow track of sand bars

with on either side of them, marshy forested environment, very difficult places of passage.

It seems that the Roman column had to become narrower.

Roman soldiers were accustomed to marching 6 or 8 abreast.

They probably had to change and march maybe 4 or 2 abreast here.

The soldiers are further hindered by the burdens of their wives and families,

who are making the march with them to the new fortress.

They would have had very difficult going, as the passageway became muddier, it became wetter.

This landscape is penetrated by a series of deep ravines,

streams flowing from the kalkriese berg down into the swamp to the north.

Varus walked through the worst possible territory a commander could have walked through.

On one side, he has a swamp. On the other side, he has hills.

He followed the road because romans couldn't carry all this armor they wore.

On the long haul, it simply wore too heavily.

The German tribesmen had lured the romans into the perfect trap- difficult to move forward, impossible to move back.

Arminius knew he had Varus in his hands.

It was just how and when. It's not if. And it happened.

And it happened in a really complete fashion.

Third-century chronicler Cassius Dio describes the moment of ambush.

The Germans came upon Varus in the midst of forests, by this time almost impenetrable.

"And there, at the very moment of revealing themselves as enemies instead of subjects,

they wrought great and dire havoc."

The trap is sprung. The romans have no way out as the barbarians surround them on all sides.

So you're bare out there. You have just your armor on, if that,

and you are going to quickly be decimated in terms of your ranks,

and the romans had no room because the path was too narrow to deploy.

The line of troops and their entourage could have stretched 2 miles long.

Varus, hemmed in at the middle of the formation, is unaware of the devastation at the front.

All he knows is the line has suddenly stopped moving, and there is no place to go.

The front of the line is going to be the first to get it,

and there isn't much communication, as far as we can tell, on this path,

or there couldn't be much communication between the front of the line and the rear of the line.

So that's going to render the army more vulnerable and create a deadly situation as well.

By the time Varus learns of the attack, it is far too late.

No time to prepare. No place to escape.

The exact chain of events is lost to history.

My guess is this was a battle that the main engagement took less than an hour,

but the mopping-up operation probably took the rest of the afternoon.

Each man had to reconcile to the inevitable,

and I don't know how a Roman would have done that any better than an American.

Very hard to watch your friends die.

"As the Roman soldiers die like animals, more German warriors join the fray."

writes Cassius Dio.

The enemy's forces greatly increased as many of those who had at first wavered now joined them,

largely in the hope of plunder.

In an indignity worse than death, 2 of the legions lose their eagle standards to the barbarians.

The eagle was seen as a religious symbol by the soldiers.

It was literally the religious spirit and power that kept them safe and made them victorious.

To have the eagle fall in battle or to be taken by the enemy was literally like having your spirit ripped out,

and without your spirit, you were going to be defeated.

But worst of all was the disgrace, the loss of honor.

To have the symbol of your fighting spirit literally taken by the enemy

was the ultimate in dishonor and disgrace.

Under Varus' watch, the standards and the battle are lost in the Kalkriese woods.

The dishonored general knows what he has to do.

Varus had been fooled so badly by the barbarians.

He knew he was responsible for this defeat because he had marched a Roman army in and not prepared it.

So Rome was going to blame varus for this defeat, Varus blamed Varus,

and for him, the only way out was suicide, even though this was a disgraceful suicide.

The Germans, under Arminius' leadership,

have recaptured their land and in the process, defeated the mightiest army in the world.

Now it's time to torment their captives.

Second-century Latin writer Florus recounts the horror.

"Never was there slaughter more cruel than there, in the marshes and woods.

"Never were more intolerable insults inflicted by barbarians, especially those directed against the lawyers.

They put out the eyes of some of them and cut off the hands of others.

They sewed up the mouth of one of them after first cutting out his tongue."

As Germania celebrates the defeat of Varus,

a victorious general Tiberius returns to Rome from his battles in Pannonia.

And in Rome, emperor Augustus joyfully makes the final preparations to celebrate Tiberius' triumph.

But all that planning will go to waste.

When news arrives in Rome, Augustus is told of the loss of his 3 legions in the north, he is horrified,

and supposedly he screams repeatedly after this, "Varus, give me back my legions!"

This was a shock because Rome had had a whole series of military successes.

Rome believed these people in the north could be easily defeated,

yet here comes this news that 3 entire legions,

15,000, 20,000 men were destroyed in one fell swoop in a totally unexpected disaster.

And now that the cherusci and other barbarian tribes have slipped their leash, what can stop them from destroying Rome?

As Varus' Roman legions are destroyed in the north,

general Tiberius returns to Rome to celebrate his victory in Pannonia,

but instead, he finds emperor Augustus shattered at the news of the terrible loss in the north.

Barbarians across the Rhine have massacred 3 entire Roman legions under governor general Varus.

Varus' disaster meant to Augustus

that Augustus' plan to push the northern frontier of the Roman empire farther had failed

and that they were always going to have to deal with these ferocious peoples

on their frontiers who at any time might want to come into the Roman empire, either to live or to raid.

The blow to Rome is a severe one, and it cannot go unanswered.

Arminius had struck a significant blow to Roman morale and Roman pride and Roman honor,

and that had to be avenged.

Losing 15,000 to 18,000 men from a strike force of 150,000...

It's similar, I think, to the United States army today losing 60,000 men.

We have about 600,000 men under arms.

If we lost a tenth of them, we'd lost 60,000 men in one day, I think it would make the evening news.

To restore Rome, general Tiberius mobilizes his exhausted troops.

Tiberius is sent along with 8 legions and auxiliary armies to reinforce the Rhine frontier and Gaul.

Fortunately, Rome appears safe for now.

The Germans show no sign of hostility at the borders.

But the romans have learned how crafty the Germans can be, and so, they stay vigilant, even at home.

Guards are stationed throughout the city.

And it was a severe blow to Rome as a city, as a society,

to know that these peoples of the north whom it had regarded,

through the writings of Caesar and Tacitus and others,

as being far inferior to Rome militarily were able to deal this devastating blow.

Mighty Rome, the apex of western civilization, suddenly feels vulnerable.

Every foreign citizen or visitor is now suspect, a potential terrorist.

Augustus, fearing a sympathetic uprising among the Germans in Rome, expels them.

While all of Rome quakes with fear, the Germans beyond the Rhine are jubilant.

Arminius celebrates his victory over Rome by taking a bride, Thusnelda.

She is the daughter of rival chieftain Segestes, who had tried to warn Varus of Arminius' treachery.

Very much against her father's wishes, she allowed herself to be kidnapped by Arminius.

Because German women were strong, they would kill their men if they were retreating from battle.

They saw themselves as worthwhile.

They wanted to be allied with the best possible man.

Thusnelda-that was Arminius' wife's name- saw Arminius as the very best man among the Germans,

and she wanted nothing less for herself.

The victory against the Roman legions has earned Arminius tremendous clout.

Now, as king of the cheruscian people, he forms a coalition of tribal leaders.

Arminius thought that this this spectacular defeat would give him the purchase,

the fame to be what the Germans had never had, a king over everyone.

The site of the massacre becomes a holy place,

left untouched to commemorate the victory over the romans and to please the germanic gods that granted it.

The Germans worshiped in groves as far as we know.

They kept images and various statues and animal totems in their forests,

and actually this idea of totenism appears to have been something fairly important for the romans, too,

but more so perhaps for the Germans.

And so as Rome staggers, the Germans revel in their barbaric success,

keeping the Roman weapons as a sacred reward.

Things like swords and spearheads and shields took a lot of time and a lot of material to make.

Economically, they were very precious, but it does seem that in many of these circumstances,

their ritual value was more important.

And for that reason, these were deposited sometimes by the thousands.

And we even find weapons with ornamentation in silver and gold on them, indicating officer status.

Through violence and cunning, the Germans have snatched their land back from the Roman intruders...

At least for now.

But Rome is not giving up.

The romans realized they had a big problem along the Rhine.

And after they were able to regroup, which meant finding more soldiers,

trying to build new alliances with the barbarians,

they begin, after some time, to send expeditions across the Rhine,

both to try to pacify the area, but also to regain their lost honor.

Because the defeat of Varus had been so disgraceful.

And so, for posterity and for the empire's self-esteem, Rome must somehow turn this dire situation around.

13 A.D., 4 years after the massacre,

emperor Augustus sends the aptly named general Germanicus and his troops

to engage Arminius and the cherusci barbarians.

It takes a long time to restore a strike force so that Germanicus has troops to deal with this problem.

There was no question it had to be done, or the whole idea of the emperor's honor

and perhaps even the emperor himself was in harm's way.

This was a disgrace that could not be allowed to go unchallenged.

The ethos for the romans is revenge, hatred, anger.

There's no idea of compassion, of overarching compassion for humanity.

These are very, very ruthless people.

Ordering Germanicus to Germany is one of Augustus' final acts.

The next year, at age 77, he lies dying,

broken by the consequences of Rome's defeat, his dream of empire unfulfilled.

With no sons of his own, Augustus names Tiberius as his successor.

Tiberius will take his place as emperor and try to win back honor for Rome and Augustus.

Augustus had gloried in a whole series of successful military campaigns.

He never recovered psychologically from this blow.

He died a few years later.

And this, in many ways, seems to have destroyed what he felt was his legacy.

Augustus, who devoted his life to romanizing the world, dies of failure.

What was lost in Germania can never be recaptured, but still the Germans must pay for this humiliation.

A bloody and humiliating defeat beyond the Rhine has brought glory to the germanic chieftain arminius and his barbarians

and has undermined Roman confidence, but Rome is not finished yet.

Roman general Germanicus marches to Germania in a mission of vengeance,

attacking any tribe sympathetic to Arminius.

In defiance, these tribes burn their own villages to deprive the romans of anything useful.

These northern barbarians, at least across the Rhine, didn't have big cities to plunder.

They had increasingly growing settlements,

but they could just fade away and come to fight another day and leave you,

having spent a lot of money on a campaign that didn't return anything to you.

So war was becoming a negative cash flow instead of a positive cash flow.

First-century historian Tacitus...

"Germanicus dispatched one of his generals to rout the bructeri tribe as they were burning their possessions,

and amid the carnage and plunder, found the eagle of the 19th legion, which has been lost with Varus.

The troops were then marched to the farthest frontier of bructeri, ravaging all the country in between.

On their campaign, the romans rescue Segestes, the rival chieftain imprisoned by Arminius, but the humiliation doesn't stop there.

Most devastating, the romans seized Segeste's daughter, Thusnelda, now pregnant with Arminius' child.

She was captured by the romans and taken to the capital as proof of how successful the romans had been

at defeating Arminius and making his life miserable

even though he had been the one who had destroyed Varus and his 3 legions.

In 15 A.D., 6 years after the ambush,

the Roman army comes to the Kalkriese woods massacre site, now a sacred germanic monument to their victory.

They found the actual site of Varus' defeat,

at least the ultimate moment, because there were still broken weapons scattered around.

There were skulls nailed to the trees.

The scene was awful.

It was virtually a plain full of white bones except for most likely the officers,

who would have been, if they were captured, sacrificed by the Germans,

who did practice human sacrifice by, you know, hanging or slitting the throat.

First-century historian Tacitus describes what the romans encounter.

"In the field were whitening bones scattered where the men had fled and heaped in piles where they had stood.

Lying nearby were broken weapons and limbs of horses, while the skulls of men were nailed to tree trunks.

Not far away stood the barbarian altars, where they had sacrificed the tribunes or senior centurions."

So the scene was pretty emotional, certainly for Germanicus' men.

Some realized that "these could be relatives, these could be friends, these could be comrades in arms that I'm burying."

And burial of the dead in antiquity and doing rights by them is extremely important to keep the dead in their place,

to make sure they don't come back to haunt you.

First-century historian Tacitus:

"The Roman army buried the bones of the 3 legions,

no man knowing whether he laid to rest the remains of a stranger or a kinsman.

But with anger rising against the enemy, all simultaneously mourned and hated."

Symbolically, it was really important for Rome to show that it remembered its fallen veterans

and that it was never going to give up trying to reclaim the honor that had been taken from them

by the incompetence and arrogance of their commander.

To the Germans who see the killing field as a holy memorial, the burial is a desecration.

As soon as the soldiers leave, the Germans exhume the Roman bones and resanctify the site of the massacre.

Arminius, believing he had soundly defeated Rome 6 years ago

is livid that the romans have come back and confounded by the sudden turn of events.

Tacitus recounts his rage.

"Arminius, with his naturally furious temper, was driven to frenzy by the seizure of his wife

and the foredooming to slavery of his unborn child.

He flew into a rage, demanding war against Augustus, war against the empire."

And war did come.

Once again, Arminius' stealthy forces, familiar with the landscape,

exploit their advantage over the unwieldy Roman troops.

A legion is overwhelming where you can choose the battlefield-

flat and expansive, room to maneuver in tightly packed units.

This was none of those things.

It wasn't flat.

There was no room to maneuver.

And you couldn't even assemble your units in full strength.

But Germanicus sets a trap, luring the enemy into the open and then pouncing.

The romans win the battle, but not the war.

The incompatible fighting styles, the expense of the campaigns,

and the tenacity of the germanic barbarians rob Rome of any hope of lasting victory.

There were several years of punitive raids by the romans east of the Rhine,

in which they actually tried to capture Arminius, they tried to defeat his people.

These were not successful.

Neither Arminius, nor Germanicus will live long enough to see where their historic efforts would lead.

3 years later, in 19 A.D., both die unheroically.

Germanicus succumbs to illness, though some say he is poisoned by a rival

in the bitter political jungle Rome has become.

That same year, Arminius is killed by his own people when he oversteps his authority.

Arminius was really devoted to both German liberty and his own self-advancement.

Arminius wanted to be the king of the germanic barbarian tribes.

They didn't want a king.

They wanted autonomy, and Arminius had given them that, and in the process, changed the shape of Rome.

We could think of this battle as being the battle that truly stopped Roman expansion at that point.

Had the battle not happened, who knows how far eastward Rome might have conquered?

Through all of Germany, into Poland, possibly even eastward into Russia. We just don't know.

After Teutoberg, Rome deems the risks of expansion too high,

the benefits hardly worth it,

but soon enough, the lure of foreign conquest becomes too seductive to ignore.

Next on "Rome: Rise and fall of an empire,"

In 47 A.D., emperor Claudius leads a campaign to the edge of the known world,

the mysterious island of Britain,

but the inhabitants violently reject Rome's domination, drawing the empire into a savage war.