great movement of offence, which, beginning with the Raetian war in 739 {15.}, led on to the campaigns of Tiberius in Illyricum and of Drusus in Germany. [Sidenote: German war of Drusus.] Nero Claudius Drusus, born in 716 {38.} by Livia in the house of her new husband, afterwards Augustus, and loved and treated by the latter like a son--evil tongues said, as his son--the very image of manly beauty and of winning grace in converse, a brave soldier and an able general, a pronounced panegyrist, moreover, of the old republican system, and in every respect the most popular prince of the imperial house, took up, on the return of Augustus to Italy (741) {13.}, the administration of Gaul and the chief command against the Germans, whose subjugation was now contemplated in earnest. We have no adequate means of knowing either the strength of the army then stationed on the Rhine, or how matters stood with the Germans; this much only is clear that the latter were not in a position suitably to meet the compact attack. The region of the Neckar formerly possessed by the Helvetii (iii. 182) {iii. 173.}, then for long a debateable border-land between them and the Germans, lay desolate and dominated on the one side by the recently subdued district of the Vindelici, on the other side by the Germans friendly to Rome about Strassburg, Spires, and Worms. Farther northward, in the region of the upper Main, were settled the Marcomani, perhaps the most powerful of the Suebian tribes, but from of old at enmity with the Germans of the middle Rhine. Northward of the Main followed first in the Taunus the Chatti, farther down the Rhine the already named Tencteri, Sugambri, and Usipes; behind them the powerful Cherusci on the Weser, besides a number of tribes of secondary rank. As it was these tribes on the middle Rhine, with the Sugambri at their head, that had carried out that attack on Roman Gaul, the retaliatory expedition of Drusus was directed mainly against them, and they too combined for joint resistance to Drusus and for the institution of a national army to be formed from the contingents of all these cantons. The Frisian tribes, however, on the coast of the North Sea did not join the movement, but persevered in their peculiar isolation.