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To general surprise, Claudius turned out to be rather a good emperor. He annexed the remote island of Britannia to the Roman empire. Despite the fact that the long dead Livia had made his early life a misery, he generously arranged for her deification.

Claudius had bad luck with his wives. The beautiful and wayward Messalina shared the elder Julia’s taste for lively parties in the Forum where she mixed sex with politics. Her cuckolded husband reluctantly put her to death.

Messalina was followed by Germanicus’ strong-minded daughter Agrippina, who persuaded Claudius to adopt her son Nero, and in A.D. 54 killed the gourmand emperor with a dish of delicious but poisoned (or perhaps poisonous) mushrooms.

In A.D. 15, Germanicus led an army across the Rhine and visited the battle sites where Varus lost his legions and his life. Tacitus gave an unforgettable description of the eerie scene:

On the open ground were whitening bones, scattered where men had fled, heaped up where they had stood and fought back. Fragments of spears and of horses’ limbs lay there—also human heads, fastened to tree-trunks. In groves nearby were the outlandish altars at which the Germans had massacred the Roman colonels and senior company-commanders.

The Romans never again attempted to expand their territory beyond the Rhine, and excitable historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have argued that we owe to the Variana clades the millennia-long division of Europe into two parts—one touched by Rome, the other not: Britain and the Romance countries, and the Teutonic peoples of central and northern Europe. If Augustus had had his way and brought the frontier of his empire to the Elbe, there would have been “no Charlemagne, no Louis XIV, no Napoleon, no Kaiser Wilhelm II, and no Hitler.”

This binary approach to European history oversimplifies a complicated story. The distance between the Rhine and the Elbe is not so great as to have brought about such dizzying consequences. Also, we must not forget that Roman culture spread its influence far beyond the imperial lands themselves. Rome’s true inheritor, the Roman Catholic Church, was able to create a unified Europe that stretched from the Atlantic to the Urals, the culture of Christendom.

That said, the massacre at Kalkriese did mark a turning point in the history of Rome. With a few exceptions, such as the ephemeral conquests of the emperor Trajan in the second century A.D., the empire had more or less reached its natural extent by the death of Augustus. Rome’s military and administrative capacity did not allow it to govern a larger territory.

There was much discussion at Rome about the late Augustus’ virtues and vices. It was elegantly summarized by Tacitus:

Intelligent people praised or criticized him in varying terms. One opinion was as follows. Filial duty and a national emergency, in which there was no place for law-abiding conduct, had driven him to civil war—and this can be neither initiated nor maintained by decent methods. He had made many concessions to Antony and to Lepidus for the sake of vengeance on his father’s murderers. When Lepidus grew old and lazy, and Antony’s self-indulgence got the better of him, the only possible cure for the distracted country had been government by one man. However, Augustus had put the state in order not by making himself king or dictator, but by creating the Principate. The empire’s frontiers were on the ocean, or distant rivers. Armies, provinces, fleets, the whole system was interrelated. Roman citizens were protected by the law. Provincials were decently treated. Rome itself had been lavishly beautified. Force had been sparingly used—merely to preserve peace for the majority.

According to a second and opposing opinion, “filial duty and national crisis had been merely pretexts. In actual fact, the motive of Octavian, the future Augustus, was lust for power…. There had certainly been peace, but it was a blood-stained peace of disasters and assassinations.”

Down the centuries, judgments