“but evermore Came out by the same door where in I went.”
The campaigns of Domitius and of Tiberius are of exactly the same character, a rally, a raid, and a relapse. Regarded as attempts at conquest these operations represented from the political point of view sheer folly, from the military point of view a sequence of grandiose fiascos; considered as a prolonged series of demonstrations intended to establish a line of buffer states in the form of friendly, allied tribes as a further protection of a naturally weak frontier against the barbaric hordes of the remote swamps and forests, they were sagaciously conceived and to the highest degree successful.
Our argument has thus far followed the process of exclusion. The Roman operations in Germany were either those of permanent conquest or of demonstration; there is no _tertium quid_. If not conquest, and we have endeavored to refute that view at every point, it must have been demonstration. The nature of our sources does not permit a positive and detailed proof of our new interpretation; that, properly interpreted, however, they are in harmony with it, we have been at pains to show. By way of conclusion we shall undertake to strengthen our position by pointing out analogies and parallels, not merely in the general course of ancient history, but in the foreign policy of Augustus himself.
Punitive and monitory raids were frequently undertaken in antiquity without any attempt whatsoever at making permanent conquest. Such were the oft repeated _razzias_ into Nubia made by the Pharaohs, the countless raids of Assyrian monarchs into the mountains to the east and north, especially the great campaign of Darius among the Scythians in 512 B. C.[40] Of the same sort were the frequent campaigns of the Macedonian kings against the Paeonians and Thracians, though no serious attempt was made to extend their dominion greatly in this direction. A typical example of such chronic punitive campaigning was the service of Clearchus in the Chersonese, who used that peninsula as his base of operations while raiding the Thracians above the Hellespont.[41] The whole history of the more powerful Greek colonies is filled with the record of such punitive expeditions intended to keep the restless barbarians at peace. Of this identical nature were Caesar’s demonstrations across the Rhine in Germany, and beyond the channel in Britain. He had surely no thought of making a permanent conquest, at least at that time, but desired merely to make a display of Roman power to the barbarians who were, or might be, interfering with the security of his conquests in Gaul.[42] It is true that the Romans were not generally in the habit of keeping a foe off at arm’s length in this fashion, but preferred to close with and destroy him once for all, but the time was bound to come soon or late when even the amazing vitality of the Romans would reach its limit, and when they must content themselves with defense instead of new conquest. And this limit was first reached along the Rhine, where an effort at further advance would have involved endless difficulties.