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containing little but savages, swamps, and dark woods hardly attractive to a Mediterranean people. The prospective province laid out by Tiberius and Drusus held within it some of the most difficult terrain in western Europe, and potential revenue for the Imperial treasury was small.

There were no known deposits of gold or silver (they obviously didn't know about the Joachimsthal) and, unlike the more-favored Gaul, no vast tracts of agricultural land. Farming equipment of the time was ill-suited for the sticky soil of northern Europe; An adequate plow would not be invented for centuries after the Germans themselves began to adopt more settled ways, and needed effective tools to increase crop production. Tiberius' realistic appraisal (the decision was his, Augustus having turned into a god in AD 14) was to punish the Germans for the defeat inflicted on Varus, regain the eagles that had been lost and abandon the place to the savages. The numbers XVII, XVIII and XIX were never again used to designate any legion.

Future policy was dictated by the desire to shorten the salient between the Rhine and the Danube in order to secure the borders of the Empire. This required establishing the longest artificial border in Europe, the Limes. It was characterized by small outposts on the frontier staffed with border troops, Limitanei, and larger military installations behind the lines, with garrison troops, Comitatenses, near the cities on the interior lines of communication ready to move in whatever direction danger threatened. It was not until the reign of Marcus Aurelius (born AD 111, emperor AD 161, died AD 180) that Rome was to have a larger vision concerning Germania, by which time she lacked the ability to sustain a campaign that could take generations.

The Empire dropped the practice of absorption through conquest and occupation, and adopted a policy of "build it and they will come." The strategy was now to welcome barbarian settlers into the Empire on a limited basis, which in later centuries was to become a flood of immigration. These would provide critically needed manpower for the legions, gain Roman citizenship and, after their term of service was up, a grant of land in a colonia on which to settle their families and relatives as Roman fderati. In the end, although the intent was to Romanize the Germani, what resulted in many respects was a Germanization of the Romans.

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