A complete panic seized the exhausted and disheartened Roman troops, and the fight soon became a slaughter. Varus, wounded, threw himself upon his sword: the wooded passes, below, were occupied in advance by the Germans, and hardly enough escaped to carry the news of the terrible defeat to the Roman frontier on the Rhine. Those who escaped death were sacrificed upon the altars of the gods, and the fiercest revenge was visited upon the Roman judges, lawyers and civil officers, who had trampled upon all the hallowed laws and customs of the people. The news of this great German victory reached Rome in the midst of the rejoicings over the suppression of the insurrection in Dalmatia and Pannonia, and turned the triumph into mourning. The aged Augustus feared the overthrow of his power. He was unable to comprehend such a sudden and terrible disaster: he let his hair and beard grow for months, as a sign of his trouble, and was often heard to cry aloud: "O, Varus, Varus, give me back my legions!" The location of the battle-field where Hermann defeated Varus has been preserved by tradition. The long southern slope of the mountain, near Detmold, now bare, but surrounded by forests, is called to this day the _Winfield_. Around the summit of the mountain there is a ring of huge stones, showing that it was originally consecrated to the worship of the ancient pagan deities. Here a pedestal of granite, in the form of a temple, has been built, and upon it has been placed a colossal statue of Hermann in bronze, 90 feet high, and visible at a distance of fifty miles. [Sidenote: 14 A. D.] Hermann's deeds were afterwards celebrated in the songs of his people, as they have been in modern German literature; but, like many other great men, the best results of his victory were cast away by the people whom he had liberated. It was now possible to organize into a nation the tribes which had united to overthrow the Romans, and such seems to have been his intention. He sent the head of Varus to Marbod, Chief of the Marcomanni, whose power he had secured by carrying out his original design; but he failed to secure the friendship, or even the neutrality, of the rival leader. At home his own family--bitterest among them all his father-in-law, Segestes--opposed his plans, and the Cherusci were soon divided into two parties,--that of the people, headed by Hermann, and that of the nobility, headed by Segestes. When Tiberius, therefore, hastily collected a new army and marched into Germany the following year, he encountered no serious opposition. The union of the tribes had been dissolved, and each avoided an encounter with the Romans. The country was apparently subjugated for the second time. The Emperor Augustus died, A. D. 14: Tiberius succeeded to the purple, and the command in Germany then devolved upon his nephew, Germanicus, the son of Drusus.