After these preparations Drusus undertook his third campaign against middle Germany. Assisted by the warlike Nervii and other Gallic auxiliaries and allied with the Frisians, who supplied him with necessaries, the bold leader advanced northeastwards along the right bank of the Main, defeated the Chatti in a sanguinary pitched battle, penetrated across the Werra and through the Hercynian forest (Thüringerwald) into the country of the Cherusci, and reached the western bank of the Elbe, passing through tracts which no Roman had ever trod, to tribes which had never heard the Roman name. Dion repeats a legend of how, when Drusus was preparing to cross this distant stream, he was met by a woman of superhuman stature, who addressed him in Latin, saying: “Whither, O Drusus, thou insatiable one? It is not allotted to thee by fate to see all this; turn back, already thou standest at the term of thy life and of thy deeds!” He hastened back on account of the approach of winter, but he was never to see the Rhine again. He died on the way back; of sickness according to some, according to others from the results of a fracture of the leg caused by the fall of his horse. He died in the thirtieth year of his age, in the arms of his brother Tiberius, who had hastened to meet him. His body was borne with great pomp and mourning through Gaul and Italy to Rome, where it was committed to a funeral pyre on the Field of Mars and the ashes interred in the imperial vault. An altar in the neighbourhood of the Lippe, a statue in military attire, together with an empty sepulchral monument at Mainz (the remains of which are said still to be preserved in the “Eichelstein”) around which the legions every year celebrated the anniversary of his death with funeral games, and a triumphal arch on the Appian way, were intended to preserve for all time the memory of the brave and beloved prince who was the first of all the Romans to press forward to the Elbe. The title of “Germanicus” Conqueror of the Germans, which Augustus had bestowed upon him, passed over to his son. [Sidenote: [9 B.C.-5 A.D.]]