r terror respecting the Germans and the Gauls. And his
chief alarm was that he expected them to push on against Italy and Rome;
and there remained no Roman youth fit for military duty that were worth
speaking of, and the allied populations, that were at all serviceable,
had been wasted away. Yet he prepared for the emergency as well as his
means allowed; and when none of the citizens of military age were
willing to enlist, he made them cast lots, and punished, by confiscation
of goods and disfranchisement, every fifth man among those under
thirty-five and every tenth man of those above that age. At last, when
he found that not even thus could he make many come forward, he put some
of them to death. So he made a conscription of discharged veterans and
of emancipated slaves, and, collecting as large a force as he could,
sent it, under Tiberius, with all speed into Germany."

[Footnote 83: It is clear that the Romans followed the policy of
fomenting dissensions and wars of the Germans among themselves.]

Dion mentions also a number of terrific portents that were believed to
have occurred at the time, and the narration of which is not immaterial,
as it shows the state of the public mind when such things were so
believed in and so interpreted. The summits of the Alps were said to
have fallen, and three columns of fire to have blazed up from them. In
the Campus Martius, the temple of the war-god, from whom the founder of
Rome had sprung, was struck by a thunderbolt. The nightly heavens glowed
several times as if on fire. Many comets blazed forth together; and
fiery meteors, shaped like spears, had shot from the northern quarter of
the sky down into the Roman camps. It was said, too, that a statue of
Victory, which had stood at a place on the frontier, pointing the way
toward Germany, had of its own accord turned round, and now pointed to
Italy. These and other prodigies were believed by the multitude to
accompany the slaughter of Varus' legions and to manifest the anger of
the gods against Rome.

Augustus himself was not free from superstition; but on this occasion no
supernatural terrors were needed to increase the alarm and grief that he
felt, and which made him, even months after the news of the battle had
arrived, often beat his head against the wall and exclaim, "Quintilius
Varus, give me back my legions." We learn this from his biographer
Suetonius; and, indeed, every ancient writer who alludes to the
overthrow of Var