How the smaller and smarter Romans won

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The Romans were smaller than the Ancient Germans but their tactics and discipline were superior. I visited the battlefield in Provence where Marius killed 100,000 Germans in southern France. He wiped out the entire army.

He had ordered the legions to discard their long swords. They were slashing too much, and thus merely wounding. A few days later, the German warrior was back in battle.

The short sword forced the Romans to close with the enemy, chin to chin, which was scary for the shorter Italians, and then stab and kill their enemies.

The Germans drank milk and ate meat — a high-protein diet — and were 3-4 inches taller than most Romans, and probably very blond and blue-eyed (as Tacitus described them), unmixed back then, unlike today.

Without expensive armor, every man could fight, and they were lighter and faster than the Romans.

But the Romans regularly defeated them for 500 years.

Also, they bribed various egotistic Germans and got infighting among the Germans going.

Otherwise the Germans would have conquered Rome much sooner.

Arminius (in German, “Hermann”) was a young German noble who had once served with the Roman legions, then changed sides and helped out his own German fellow countrymen against Rome. Knowing Roman tactics and weaknesses, he lured the overconfident Varus into a long, narrow forest path and then wiped out Varus and three entire legions, and thus saved Germany.

But then Hermann was murdered by his own jealous uncle!

The first emperor, Augustus was no pussy, obviously…..and like other Roman aristocrats was as nordic as any German… (note the nose and forehead shape; he had sandy blond hair)

…was frankly terrified of the Germans after the Varus disaster, when three legions were destroyed.
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He ruled that no further major attempt should be made to conquer them, just use the Rhine as a natural border, and otherwise build huge Roman walls, the “limites.”