For diplomatic reasons of his own

The historians still argue about the exact whereabouts of the ensuing massacre, and over the last several hundred years they have deployed the meager literary and archeological remains - old manuscripts, gold and silver coins found buried in peat moss, shards of Roman armor, the local place names of Knochenbahn (Bone Lange) and Mordkessel (The Kettle of Death) - to suggest as many as 700 theories about the likely point of attack. Some historians place Varus's column among the upper tributaries of the Ems River, others place it nearer the rivers Lippe or Weser, but all the authorities agree that the Romans died like penned cattle. ...

Varus committed suicide. So did every other officer who knew it was the practice of the Cherusci to nail their vanquished but still living enemies to the trunks of sacred oak trees.

Arminius sent Varus's head to Maroboduus, a barbarian king in Bohemia on whom he wished to make a favorable impression, and Maroboduus, for diplomatic reasons of his own, forwarded the head to Rome. Dio Cassius reports the effect as memorable, Augustus so shocked by the utter destruction that he "rent his garments and was in great affliction," and Gibbon remarks on the emperor's consternation with his familiar irony, "...Augusts did not receive the melancholy news with all the temper and firmness that might have been expected from his character."

...

The Treaty of Versailles returned the administration of Illyricum to the incompetence of the Balkan tribes, and I can imagine both Gibbon and Augustus comparing the foolishness of Woodrow Wilson to the stupidity of Publius Quictilius Varus. ... Confronted with the chaos of unregulated capital markets - also with rogue states and renegade ideologies, with war in Africa, civil unrest in Judea, tyrants in Parthia and Leptis Minor, too much cocaine crossing the frontier near Chalcedon, too many poisons in the Mediterranean sea - the would-be makers of a postmodern peace dream of Gibbon's "supreme magistrate, who by the progress of knowledge and flattery was gradually invested with the sublime perfections of an Eternal Parent and an Omnipotent Monarch." Augustus would have been pleased to grant them an audience.

- from "Furor Teutonicus: the Teutoburg Forest, AD 9" by Lewis Lapham