However much Velleius[e] may vaunt his hero, when the commander left the Rhine in the year 12 to celebrate at Rome his triumph over pacified Germany, he could boast of no achievement which obliterated the disgrace inflicted in the Teutoburg forest. This was left for his nephew Germanicus, the gallant son of Drusus, on whom the governorship of Gaul and the supreme command over all the military forces on the Rhine was conferred after the withdrawal of Tiberius. [Tiberius had, nevertheless, proved himself an able commander.] THE CAMPAIGNS OF GERMANICUS[3] About the time that Augustus departed this life at Nola, Germanicus was startled by the news that a mutiny had broken out among the soldiers at the “Old Camp” (Vetera). The change of monarchs and the mourning feasts which were the consequence had interrupted military exercises, discipline had grown slack, and the minds of the soldiery were filled and inflamed with all sorts of hopes and desires. Hence threatening agitations and mutinies took place almost simultaneously among the Pannonian and German legions. Germanicus hurried to the lower Rhine from Gaul, where he had been busy with the taxation, to find there a refractory army which had cast away all bonds of obedience and discipline, which complained of its long and arduous service, demanded higher pay and presents of money, offered the sovereignty to him with boisterous clamour, and maltreated at the altars the emissaries of the senate who brought the news of the change of government. The commander-in-chief succeeded in restoring quiet and order, though with great difficulty, and not until a schism had arisen among the rioters themselves and the ringleaders and most audacious spirits had been hideously murdered by their fellow soldiers. [Illustration: ROMAN EMPEROR IN THE DRESS OF A GENERAL (After De Montfaucon)] The Illyrian revolt was put down by Drusus, the emperor’s son. To expiate the crimes they had committed the German legions demanded to be led against the enemy; they believed that there was no way of appeasing the spirits of their murdered brothers in arms but by covering their own guilty breasts with honourable wounds. And Germanicus willingly gratified their lust of battle by a campaign in the regions beyond the Rhine.