The mutiny on the Rhine was of a more serious character; not only was the number of legions implicated far larger, more than double that of the Pannonian legions, but the ambition of the mutineers was not confined to obtaining a redress of grievances; they proposed to annex the Empire. “The State is in our hands,” they said; “it is increased by our victories; the Emperor takes his title from his armies.” A vision of plundering Gaul, marching upon Rome, and setting up an Emperor of their own, floated before the eyes of the ringleaders. On the Rhine, as in Pannonia, the agitation was engineered by the recruits, chiefly enfranchized slaves recently drawn from the capital. The men who had fought under Drusus and Tiberius were hardly conscious of their own grievances; military discipline had numbed their intelligence; they knew of nothing else, and they were well content to exchange the peaceful but laborious routine of the camp for the hardships of campaigns among the forests and morasses of Germany, where the enemy was less terrible than the gloom of primeval trees and the treachery of bogs and estuaries. They were, however, only too willing to listen when cleverer men than themselves told them they had grievances. The fidelity of the most loyal troops and of the most trusted servants can seldom long resist the voice of the tempter, who deplores the injustice with which they are treated. The idlers of Rome, swept into the ranks from the street corners and the open air amusements of the great city, awoke from dreams of plunder and licence to the stern realities of the centurion’s stick and the heavy fatigue of a Roman camp. They had no fighting, but they had drill, and digging and building in plenty; few of them had ever before done an honest stroke of work. To the veterans, life on the frontier had become somewhat dull, and though they would quickly have discovered the worthlessness of their new associates on active service, they could not resist the fascinations of jokes and stories and songs picked up from the professional buffoons of the Roman theatres. There were two armies on the Rhine frontier: the Lower Army, under Aulus Cæcina, quartered between the region of the Lippe and the neighbourhood of Cologne, the Upper Army, under Silius, about the gorge of the Rhine. The mutiny broke out in the Lower Army; the Upper Army waited to see the result before moving on its own account. Germanicus, as proconsul, was at the time conducting the census of Gaul in the regions of the Meuse and Moselle. Fortunately, the lower army was divided; it was composed of four legions, the twenty-first, the fifth, the first, and the twentieth; the two former began the mutiny. Cæcina was with them when it broke out.