The battle of Varus is an enigma, not in a military but in a political point of view--not in its course, but in its consequences. Augustus was not wrong when he demanded back his lost legions, not from the enemy nor from fate, but from the general; it was a disaster such as unskilled leaders of division from time to time bring about for every state. We have difficulty in conceiving that the destruction of an army of 20,000 men without further direct military consequences should have given a decisive turn to the policy at large of a judiciously governed universal empire. And yet the two rulers bore that defeat with a patience as unexampled as it was critical and hazardous for the position of the government in relation to the army and to its neighbours; they allowed the conclusion of peace with Maroboduus, which, beyond doubt, was meant to be in strictness a mere armistice, to become withal definitive, and made no further attempt to get the upper valley of the Elbe into their hands. It must have been no easy thing for Tiberius to see the collapse of the great structure begun in concert with his brother, and after the latter's death almost completed by himself; the energetic zeal with which, as soon as he had again entered on the government, he took up the Germanic war which he had begun ten years ago, enables us to measure what this self-denial must have cost him. If, nevertheless, the self-denial was persevered in not merely by Augustus, but also after his death by Tiberius himself, there is no other reason to be found for it than that they recognised the plans pursued by them for twenty years for the changing of the boundary to the north as incapable of execution, and the subjugation and mastery of the region between the Rhine and the Elbe appeared to them to transcend the resources of the empire. [Sidenote: The Elbe frontier.]