“I’ll do my best, sir, if that’s what you want,” Varus said. Gods! How will I tell Claudia? he wondered. The fit she’d throw would make facing overgrown blond savages seem delightful. It also made him give evasion another try: “Shouldn’t you perhaps think of someone with, ah, more military experience?”

“I’d send Tiberius, but he’s busy putting down the uprising in Pannonia,” Augustus replied. “He’s finally getting somewhere, too. Why the Pannonians couldn’t see they’d be better off under Roman rule… But they couldn’t, and so he has to show them.”

“I’m glad to hear he’s doing well,” Varus said. He wished Tiberius were doing better still, so he could deal with the Germans. Plainly, though, that wouldn’t happen. Which meant Varus was stuck with it. Which meant he had to make the best of it. If there was any best to be made.

“When my father conquered Gaul, he did it in one campaign, and the conquest stuck,” Augustus said fretfully. He was Julius Caesar’s sister’s grandson. But he was also Caesar’s heir and adopted son, and he’d taken advantage of that for more than half a century now. The comparison still had to weigh on him, though, for he went on, “I’ve been sending armies into Germany the past twenty years. They mostly win when they fight the Germans, but the country isn’t subdued yet. And it needs to be. A frontier that runs from the Elbe to the Danube is much shorter and easier to garrison and cheaper to maintain than the one we’ve got now, on the Rhine and the Danube. I could hold it with far fewer soldiers.”

“Yes, sir.” Varus suspected Augustus had got to the root of things right there. Augustus had been cutting the army down to size ever since winning supreme power. Paying soldiers was the most expensive thing the Roman government did. A shorter frontier would mean he didn’t have to pay so many of them.