During the battle of the Teutoburg Forest, or clades Variana (9 AD), an alliance of Germanic tribes led by the German "hero" Arminius defeated three Roman legions and their auxiliaries led by Publius Quinctilius Varus. Despite numerous campaigns and raids by the Roman army over the Rhine in the years after the battle, the Romans were to make no more concerted attempts to conquer and hold Germania beyond the river.

On the occasion of the two-thousandth anniversary of the clades Variana in 2009, the Academia Latinitati Fovendae (Rome) organized a congress in Regensburg, Germany. This...