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Through various stratagems that should have been transparent to Varus had he been less fatuous with a fatal susceptibility to flattery, Arminius maneuvered Varus into a disastrously bad tactical position, with his three legions strung out for miles in the dense Teutoburgerwald and burdened with baggage and their families. In a three day running battle in heavy rain, the three legions and their barbarian support troops were wiped out. Details of the battle are scarce, but all surviving accounts agree that, despite the individual heroism shown by many Romans and barbarian support troops, nothing could overcome the total surprise of Arminius' attack combined with the virtual impossibility of putting up an adequate defense in the thick woods and heavy downpour.

While devastating, the defeat in the Teutoburgerwald did not, however, have exactly the effect that succeeding generations of German Romantics imputed to the disaster. Germanicus Caesar was sent north to quell the rebellion and defeated Arminius. Although successful, and one of the more popular and well-loved members of the imperial family, Germanicus met an untimely death in Antioch in AD 19, presumably by poison. This was blamed by contemporaries on Tiberius out of jealousy for his adopted son and heir, but may have been the more usual instance of accidental food poisoning, commonly attributed to design in earlier times.

Arminius himself, although he regained the territory after the recall of Germanicus and rose to the position of chieftain of the Cherusci, became involved in the constant inter-tribal warfare that was one of the ostensible justifications for the imperial program of conquer, occupy and civilize. He was killed a few years later by his own relatives. The Germans mutilated the body of Varus, but cut off the head and sent it to Augustus who, after a while, gave it burial in Varus' family vault.

Teutonophiles point with pride to the fact that Rome never again succeeded in making any great additional territorial expansion in Germania. This is generally attributed to the virility and strength of the pure Aryan strain opposed to the decadent and degenerate Romans and those weak enough to succumb to civilization.

True, the Cherusci were the most intractable of tribesmen, but there were additional reasons why Rome halted its program of expansion in that direction. A glance into Tacitus' Germania reveals that, as far as the Romans were concerned, the country east of the Rhine was a vast wasteland

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