It is not incumbent upon us to believe that after this disaster the aged Emperor acquired a habit of dashing his head against the wall, and crying, “Varus, Varus, give me back my legions!” but that the calamity was a sufficient one to disturb his equanimity seriously is self-evident. Soldiers had been found only with great difficulty for the Pannonian war, as we have seen; the recall of veterans to the standards was always considered a desperate measure, and still more desperate was the employment of slaves as soldiers; the absolute destruction of two whole legions and six cohorts along with their cavalry meant a loss of 17,300 men, as large a force as the permanent garrison of Italy. It imposed upon Tiberius the necessity of husbanding his men, even if he had not been naturally disposed to circumspection, for nearly a tenth part of the whole Roman army had been wiped out. Tiberius quickly avenged the army of Varus; he swept through the country, leaving devastation behind him, but he failed to capture the ringleaders of the revolt. During this campaign, in which he was soon joined by Germanicus, he abandoned his ordinary policy of acting entirely on his own initiative and without consultation with his staff; he carefully explained to them the reason of all his movements. In fact, he now set to work to educate his successors, for he saw that other duties would shortly prevent his personal activity in the field. Both Augustus and Tiberius have been reproached with an unadventurous policy on the German frontier. Augustus discouraged the distant expeditions of Drusus into the heart of Germany, and Tiberius was to be accused of jealousy in the near future in similarly restraining the ardour of Germanicus, but those who lightly make these charges overlook the difficulties of the problem. The conquest of the basin of the Mediterranean had been a conquest of civilized peoples, who knew when they were beaten, and who once having accepted the arbitrament of the Roman arms found acquiescence in the Roman domination the best security for civilization. But the conquest of Central Europe was another matter; in one sense there was nothing to be gained by it. When Tiberius met his fleet upon the Elbe, he had traversed many miles of that desolate flat of Northern Europe which has only been gradually reclaimed from the wilderness and rendered fertile by the patient labour of many centuries. There was no trade. There were, so far as he knew, no minerals, there was nothing to invite settlers in the endless marshes, and to an Italian the climate was detestable. If, on the other hand, he turned his attention to the hill country, there was the same absence of attractions; even if the valleys were cultivated they were too far off, and the climate was too severe to enable them to compete with the more accessible territory of Gaul; the mineral treasures of the hills were as yet undiscovered, and even if they had been discovered, they were practically inaccessible. It