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News that something terrible had happened percolated through the region, and all but one of the Roman fortresses on the eastern side of the Rhine were hastily evacuated. The “province” of Germania was lost.

Augustus was in his early seventies. He had been working at full stretch for fifty years and the last decade had been crammed with personal disappointment and political trouble. He no longer dealt with individual petitions, although with the help of assistants he still investigated legal suits and passed judgment, seated on a tribunal at his headquarters on the Palatine Hill. He gave up attending Senate meetings or people’s assemblies, and entrusted the reception of foreign delegations to a trio of former consuls.

Like the outbreak of the Pannonian rebellion, the Varus disaster (in Latin, Variana clades) seemed to make the princeps briefly panic. He tore his clothes, as was the Roman custom when a man was facing shame and catastrophe, and did not shave for months. He was so upset that he would beat his head against a door, crying out: “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!” He kept the anniversary as a day of deep mourning.

A record survives of an aged diva being brought back to the stage in A.D. 9 during celebrations to congratulate the princeps on “his recovery”; this reveals that he had been ill, although we know nothing about the nature of his condition or its gravity. It could have been a reaction to the loss of his legions.

Augustus sent Tiberius to take over the Rhine command, to counter any German invasion of Gaul or even Italy, and to demonstrate that Rome’s military power was undiminished. At home he feared a popular uprising and sent military patrols around the city at night. Not trusting the Germans in his bodyguard, he sent them to various islands; he also deported the large Gallic and German community from the city. The terms of service of provincial governors were extended so that experienced men were in place to cope with any trouble.

The emergency exposed a serious potential weakness of Augustus’ military strategy. Ever since his victory over Antony and Cleopatra, he had set the empire’s military strength at twenty-eight legions, but this was only just sufficient to man the frontiers. There were no soldiers left over to form a mobile field army that could move quickly to a crisis point.

But the emergency soon passed. Arminius did not invade Gaul; Rome and the provinces remained tranquil. The indispensable Tiberius did what was required on the northeastern frontier, where he campaigned for three more years. However, he made no attempt to recover Germania as a Roman province, and the empire was never again to reach beyond the Rhine.

Had the regime really been at risk? Augustus’ alarm reflected an innate caution. But also, for all the sonorous rhetoric about the restored Republic, his power essentially depended not on constitutional legality but on the support of the army and the people. If that was withdrawn, his day would soon be done. And imperial success was essential to the regime’s popularity; indeed, the only event likely to shake the loyalty of either constituency was a major military defeat.

So it was reasonable to predict that the loss of three legions would entail serious political consequences. That it did not do so may owe something to the security measures that the princeps took, but is better seen as evidence that Augustus’ constitutional settlement was firmly established. No oppositional grouping existed that was ready and able to exploit the situation.

For all that, the Variana clades was a real and substantial setback, which provoked a strategic review behind closed doors on the Palatine. The aggressive plan to settle Germania up to the Elbe, which we may guess Agrippa and Augustus to have devised twenty years previously, was revoked. From now on the Rhine was to be the permanent boundary between Romanized Gaul and the barbarians of central Europe.

The change was rational, based on close observation of the realities in both Rome and Germany. Arminius’ failure to exploit his victory suggested that the Germans no longer presented a serious threat to the stability of Gaul, if they ever really had. As always, they were unable to combine in an alliance for any length of time. It simply was not worth going to the trouble and expense of reinstalling the province of Germania. Reconnoitering and occasional punitive expeditions would be enough to ward off any risk of attack.

In A.D. 12, the twenty-seven-year-old Germanicus held the consulship, but if there were expectations of a return to optimism they were disappointed. Although he was busy in the law courts, he achieved nothing of importance.