Vengeance did not even respect the dead. The corpse of Varus, which his soldiers had piously buried, was torn from its grave and the severed head sent as a trophy to Marboduus, who subsequently delivered it up to the emperor at Rome. So perished miserably this splendid army of nearly fifty thousand men. Well might Augustus bewail himself at the news of the disaster in the Teutoburg forest and cry aloud in his despair: “Varus, give me back my legions!” Many families of long descent had to mourn the loss of kinsmen or connections. The feasts and games stopped, the German bodyguard was dismissed to the islands, Rome, usually so noisy, was still and dumb. Sentinels patrolled the streets at night, vows to the gods and recruiting on a great scale gave evidence of the dread that was in men’s hearts. They feared that the terrible days of the Cimbrians and Teutons might come again. [Sidenote: [9-14 A.D.]] The conquest of the Roman castella between the Rhine and the Visurgis followed close on the heels of the defeat of Varus. Aliso held out longest; thither the Romans had carried their women and children and there the scattered and fugitive remnants of the army had taken refuge. When their provisions came to an end the besieged tried to slip through the sentries of the besiegers under cover of a stormy night. But only the armed men succeeded in cutting their way through to the Rhine, the greater number of the helpless fell into the hands of the victors and shared the fate of other prisoners, and the fortress of Aliso was destroyed. Asprenas, who was guarding the bank of the Rhine with his two legions lest the revolt should spread to the excitable Gauls, was powerless to lay the tempest. Thus was Roman supremacy broken down on the right bank of the Rhine. The dwellers on the north coast, the Chauci, Frisii, and some other tribes, alone adhered to the alliance with Rome. Tiberius, who had hastened up with his freshly enlisted troops, confined his efforts to the strengthening and safeguarding of the Rhine frontier and to watching over Gaul, and deferred to the future his revenge for the tarnished glory of the Roman arms. He did, indeed, cross the Rhine next year to show the Germans that the might of Rome was still unbroken; but he did not go far from the river bank, and the strict discipline which he observed and the hard camp life which he imposed on the legions and enforced by his own example, bore witness that the Romans were alive to the danger that menaced their dominion from the Germans and had learned a lesson from bitter experience.