Thus the opponents as well as the rivals of Arminius had become refugees, and the Germanic nation looked to none else than to him. But this greatness was his danger and his destruction. His own countrymen, especially his own clan, accused him of going the way of Maroboduus and of desiring to be not merely the first, but also the lord and the king of the Germans--whether with reason or not, and whether, if he wished this, he did not perhaps wish what was right, who can say? The result was a civil war between him and these representatives of popular freedom; two years after the banishment of Maroboduus he too, like Caesar, fell by the dagger of nobles of republican sentiments near to his person. His wife Thusnelda and his son born in captivity, Thumelicus, on whom he had never set eyes, marched at the triumph of Germanicus (26th May, 17) among the other Germans of rank, in chains to the Capitol; the old Segestes was for his fidelity to the Romans provided with a place of honour, whence he might look on at the public entry of his daughter and his grandson. They all died within the Roman empire; with Maroboduus the wife and son of his antagonist met in the exile of Ravenna. When Tiberius remarked at the recall of Germanicus that there was no need to wage war against the Germans, and that they would of themselves take care to do what was requisite for Rome, he knew his adversaries; in this, at all events, history has pronounced him right. But to the high-spirited man who, at the age of six-and-twenty, had released his Saxon home from the Italian foreign rule, who thereafter had been general as well as soldier in a seven years' struggle for that freedom regained, who had staked not merely person and life, but also wife and child for his nation, to fall at the age of thirty-seven by an assassin's hand--to this man his people gave, what it was in their power to give, an eternal monument in heroic song. Footnotes. [1: Dio, li. 23, expressly says this as to the year 725: τέως μὲν οὖν ταῦτ᾿ ἐποίουν (_i.e._ so long as the Bastarnae attacked only the Triballi--near Oescus in Lower Moesia, and the Dardani in Upper Moesia), οὐδὲν σφίσι πρᾶγμα πρὸς τοὺς Ῥωμαίους ἦν· ἐπεὶ δὲ τόν τε Αἷμον ὑπερέβησαν καὶ τὴν Θρᾴκην τὴν Δενθελητῶν ἔνσπονδον αὐτοῖς οὖσαν κατέδραμον κ. τ. λ. The allies in Moesia, of whom Dio, xxxviii. 10 speaks, are the coast towns.] [2: When Dio says (li. 23): τὴν Σεγετικὴν καλουμένην προσεποίησατο καὶ ἐς τὴν Μυσίδα ἐνέβαλε, the town spoken of, doubtless, can only be Serdica, the modern Sofia, on the upper Oescus, the key to the Moesian country.]