It is in the period of Roman attack that we meet for the first time a great royal character, a tragic type of a historical German woman: Thusnelda, the wife of Arminius (Hermann), prince of the Cherusci, the liberator of Germania from a foreign yoke. Her history is the oldest Teutonic love story. History, legend, and poetry have vied in idealizing and immortalizing her. Betrothed to another man, she is by force carried away by Arminius from her father Segestes, Arminius's political adversary, the friend of the Romans. Betrayed to the latter under Drusus Germanicus, she is captured. "Inspired more by the spirit of her husband than by that of her father no tear, no complaint or entreaty came from Thusnelda's lips at her capture; with her hands clasped over her bosom, she looked down silently at her pregnant body. The news of the capture of his wife and of her slavery exasperated Arminius to mad rage. But in vain he flew to her rescue. She was carried to Rome and there bore Thumelicus. With her son and her brother Segimunt she adorned the triumph of Drusus, while the traitor Segestes looked on, as son, daughter, and grandson walked in chains before the carriage of the triumphator." Indeed, Strabo, the celebrated Greek geographer, confirms the story in his _Geographica_ (vii, i, 4): "To them, conquerors of Varus in the Teutoburg forest, Drusus Germanicus owed a splendid triumph at which the foremost enemies were carried personally in triumph: Segimuntos, son of Segestes, chieftain of the Cherusci, and his sister Thusnelda, with Thumelicus, her three years' old son. Segestes, however, who from the beginning had not shared his son's policy, but had rather passed to our side, overwhelmed with honors, beheld how those who ought to have been dearest to him, walked in chains." Here Johannes Scherr makes the pertinent remark that, eighteen centuries before Napoleon had founded the Rhenish Confederacy, there were already in existence princes of that Confederacy; that is, traitors to the German cause. How long Thusnelda outlived the disgrace is unknown. It is reported, however, that, to accomplish the revenge of the Romans, Thumelicus was trained to be a gladiator at Ravenna, if nothing worse. Gottling, in _Thusnelda and Thumelicus, in Contemporaneous Pictures_, 1856, seems to have proved that the beautiful marble statue of a German woman in the Loggia de' Lanzi at Florence represents Arminius's wife bearing herself with a wonderful majesty to impress the Romans with her regality.