On the Early History of the Germans

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Engels’ works on the early history of the Germans relate to his study of the early stages in the development of society. They laid the basis for the historical materialist explanation of the origin of classes and the state and made a major contribution to the research into the history of the formation of European peoples.

These manuscripts were not published during the author’s lifetime. Engels used part of the material he had collected in the essay “The Mark” (see present edition, Vol. 24, pp. 439-56).

During his work on the manuscript Engels may have changed his initial plan. The material relating to point 2 (“The District and Army Structure”) of the draft plan, published here, is missing in the manuscript On the Early History of the Germans and is evidently used in the second chapter of The Frankish Period directly linked with the first manuscript. That Engels departed from his initial plan is also proved by the fact that The Franconian Dialect (see this volume, pp. 81-107), originally planned as a note, was transferred to The Frankish Period and elaborated as its component part.

The headings of the first three chapters of Engels’ manuscript On the Early History of the Germans (“Caesar and Tacitus”, “The First Battles Against Rome” and “Progress Until the Migration Period”) were supplied by the editors according to Engels’ draft plan; the heading of the fourth chapter (“Note: The German Peoples”) is given in the manuscript by Engels himself.

On the Early History of the Germans was first published in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XVI, Part I, Moscow, 1937 and in the language of the original in Friedrich Engels, Zur Geschichte und Sprache der deutschen Frühzeit. Ein Sammelband. Besorgt vom Marx-Engels-Lenin Institut beim ZK des SED, Berlin, 1952, S. 37-94.

Passages from this work were published in English for the first time in: Marx, Engels, On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976, pp. 187-88 and 212-14 and in full in Marx, Engels, Pre-Capitalist Socio-Economic Formations. A Collection, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1979, pp. 298-360.

The dating of the draft plan, as of the works themselves, is given according to MEGA2, Abt. I, Bd. 25, S. 988-89.

In this volume, these works have been arranged according to the dates on which Engels completed them.

CAESAR AND TACITUS

The Germans are by no means the first inhabitants of the country they now occupy. At least three races preceded them.

The oldest traces of man in Europe are found in certain strata of southern England, which it has not yet been possible to date with accuracy, but which probably fall between the two glacial periods of the so-called Ice Age.

After the second glacial period, as the climate gradually grew warmer, man appears all over Europe, North Africa and Anterior Asia up to India, together with the extinct great pachyderms (mammoth, straight-tusked elephant, woolly rhinoceros) and carnivores (cave lion, cave bear), and with still surviving animals (reindeer, horse, hyena, lion, bison, aurochs). The tools belonging to this period indicate a very primitive level of culture—crude stone knives, lozenge-shaped stone hatchets or axes, used without handles, scrapers for the preparation of animal skins, and borers, all made of flint—approximately corresponding to the stage of development of the present aborigines of Australia. The skeletal remains found so far do not enable us to form an idea of the physique of these men, from whose wide distribution and overall uniform culture it may be inferred that this period was of very long duration.

We do not know what became of these early palaeolithic people. In none of the countries where they appeared, including India, have races survived that could be considered their representatives in present-day mankind.

In the caves of England, France, Switzerland, Belgium and Southern Germany the tools of these extinct people are found for the most part in the lowest layers of stratified deposits. Above this lowest cultural stratum, and frequently separated from it by a more or less substantial layer of stalagmite, a second tool-bearing layer is found. These tools belong to a later period and are already much more skilfully made, and also of more varied material. Although the stone implements are not yet polished, they are designed and fashioned in a manner more suited to their purpose; with them are found arrow- and spear-points of stone, reindeer antler and bone; daggers and sewing needles of bone or antler, necklaces of pierced animal teeth, etc. Individual pieces are in part ornamented with very vivid drawings of animals, reindeer, mammoth, aurochs, seal, whale, and also hunting scenes with naked people; we find even beginnings of sculpture in horn.

If early palaeolithic people appeared in the company of animals of predominantly southern origin, animals of northern origin appear with the later palaeolithic people: two still surviving kinds of northern bear, the polar fox, the wolverine, the snowy owl. These people probably came in with these animals from the north-east, and the Eskimos would appear to be their last remaining descendants in the modern world. The tools of both correspond completely, not only in detail but in the ensemble. So do the drawings; the food of both is supplied by almost exactly the same animals. Their way of life, as far as we can reconstruct it for the extinct race, corresponds exactly.

These Eskimos, who so far have only been traced north of the Pyrenees and the Alps, have also disappeared from European soil. As the American Redskins even in the last century, by an inexorable war of extermination, pressed the Eskimos back to the extreme north, so in Europe the now appearing new race seems gradually to have driven them back and eventually exterminated them without mixing with them.

This new race came from the south, at least in Western Europe; it probably penetrated from Africa into Europe at a time when the two continents were still linked by land, both at Gibraltar and at Sicily. It stood on a considerably higher stage of culture than its predecessors. It knew agriculture; it had domestic animals (dogs, horses, sheep, goats, pigs and cattle). It knew hand pottery, spinning and weaving. Although its tools were still made of stone, they were already worked with great care and for the most part polished smooth (they are distinguished as neolithic from those of the earlier periods). The axes have handles and are thus for the first time usable for felling trees; it thus became possible to hollow out tree trunks for boats in which one could cross over to the British Isles, now separated from the continent by the gradual sinking of the ground.

In contrast to their predecessors they buried their dead with care; we therefore have sufficient skeletons and skulls to judge of their physique. The long skulls, small stature (average for women 1.46 metres, for men 1.65 metres), the low forehead, the aquiline nose, strong brows and weak cheekbones and moderately developed jaw bones indicate a race whose last modern representatives would seem to be the Basques. The neolithic inhabitants not only of Spain but of France, Britain and the whole region at least as far as the Rhine were in all probability of Iberian race. Before the arrival of the Aryans Italy also was inhabited by a similar small, dark-haired race, the closeness of whose relationship to the Basques is today difficult to judge.

Virchow traces these long Basque skulls deep into northern Germany and Denmark, and the oldest neolithic pile dwellings of the northern slopes of the Alps also belong to them. Schaaffhausen, on the other hand, declares a series of skulls found near the Rhine to be decidedly Finnish, in particular Lappish, and the oldest history knows only Finns as the northern neighbours of the Germans in Scandinavia, of the Lithuanians and Slavs in Russia. These two small, dark-haired races, one from beyond the Mediterranean, the other directly from Asia north of the Caspian Sea, appear to have run into one another in Germany. It remains totally obscure in what circumstances this took place.

These various immigrations were eventually followed, also still in prehistoric times, by that of the last great stock, the Aryans, the peoples whose languages are grouped around the most ancient of them, Sanscrit. The earliest immigrants were the Greeks and Latins, who took possession of the two south-eastern peninsulas of Europe; in addition probably also the now lost Scythians, inhabitants of the steppes north of the Black Sea, very likely most closely related to the tribes of the Medes and Persians. Then the Celts followed. We know of their migrations only that they took place north of the Black Sea and by way of Germany. Their vanguard pressed through to France, conquered the country to the Garonne and subjugated even a part of western and central Spain. They were brought to a halt, here by the sea, there by the resistance of the Iberians, while behind them other Celtic tribes from both sides of the Danube pressed after them. They are known to Herodotus here at the ocean coast and at the sources of the Danube. But they must have arrived much earlier. The graves and other finds from France and Belgium prove that the Celts did not know any metal tools when they took possession of the country; in Britain, however, they appear from the beginning with bronze tools. Between the conquest of Gaul and the move to Britain a certain time must have gone by, during which the Celts acquired the knowledge of bronze, through their trading connections with Italy and Marseilles, and introduced it at home.

In the meantime the Celtic peoples behind them, themselves pressed by the Germans, were pressing more and more strongly; before them the ways were barred, and thus a move in a south-easterly direction took place, as we find later also with the Germanic and Slav migrations. Celtic tribes crossed the Alps, moved through Italy, the Thracian Peninsula and Greece, and either met with destruction or found permanent settlement in the Po plain and in Asia Minor. The mass of the tribe is found about that time (—400 to —300) in Gaul, as far as the Garonne, in Britain and Ireland, and north of the Alps on both sides of the Danube, as far as the Main and the Riesengebirge, if not beyond. For, even if Celtic mountain and river names are less frequent and more disputed in North Germany than in the south, it is not to be assumed that the Celts only chose the more difficult way through mountainous South Germany without at the same time using the more convenient way through the open North German plain.

The Celtic immigration only partially displaced the existing inhabitants; especially in the south and west of Gaul these still formed the majority of the population, even if as an oppressed race, and the present population has inherited their physique. It is clear from the custom of bleaching the hair with soap existing among both Celts and Germans in their new places of settlement that both dominated over a pre-existing dark-haired population. Fair hair was a feature of the ruling race, and where this was lost through mixing of the races, soap had to’ come to the aid.

The Celts were followed by the Germans, and here we can determine the time of their immigration with some probability, at least approximately. It will hardly have begun long before —400 and was not yet quite completed in Caesar’s time.

About the year —325 Pytheas’ account of his voyage gives us the first authentic information on the Germans. He went from Marseilles to the Amber coast and there mentions Guttons and Teutons, without doubt German peoples. But where was the

Amber coast? It is true that we usually think only of the East Prussian one, and when Guttons are named as neighbours of that coast that certainly fits. However, the distances given by Pytheas do not fit this region but fit rather well the great bay of the North Sea between the North German coast and the Cimbric Peninsula. The Teutons, also named as neighbours, fit in there, too. There—on the western side of Schleswig and Jutland—is another Amber coast; Ringkjöbing to this day has a considerable trade in the amber found there. It also seems most improbable that Pytheas should so early have already penetrated so far into quite unknown waters, and still more so that the complicated voyage from the Kattegat to East Prussia should not only remain entirely without mention in his very careful statements, but not fit into them at all. One should therefore decidedly declare for the view, first pronounced by Lelewel, that Pytheas’ Amber coast must be sought on the North Sea, were it not for the name of Guttons, who can only belong to the Baltic. A step towards removing this last obstacle has been taken by Miillenhoff, who reads Guttons as a distortion of Teutons.

About 180 before our era the Bastarnae, undoubtedly Germans, appear on the lower Danube and a few years later are noted as soldiers in the army of the Macedonian King Perseus against the Romans—the first mercenaries. They are savage warriors:

“Men who do not know how to plough or sail the seas, who did not follow the life of herdsmen, but who were ever practising one business and one art, that of fighting and conquering their antagonists.”

It is Plutarch who gives us this first information of the way of life of a German people. Centuries later we find these same Bastarnae north of the Danube, although in a more westerly region. Fifty years later Cimbri and Teutons broke into the Celtic Danube region, were repelled by the Celtic Boii, living in Bohemia, moved in several bands to Gaul and into Spain, and defeated one Roman army after another until at last Marius put an end to their almost twenty years of migration by destroying their no doubt already greatly weakened troops, the Teutons at Aix-en-Provence (—102) and the Cimbri at Vercelli in Northern Italy (-101).

Half a century later Caesar met two new German armies in Gaul: first, on the Upper Rhine, that of Ariovistus in which seven different peoples were represented, including the Marcomanni and Suebi; soon afterwards, on the lower Rhine, that of the Usipetes and Tencteri, who, pressed by the Suebi, had left their former seats and reached the Rhine after wandering for three years. Both armies succumbed to orderly Roman warfare, the Usipetes and the Tencteri also to Roman breach of treaty. In the first years of Augustus, Dio Cassius reports an invasion of Thrace by the Bastarnae; Marcus Crassus defeated them on the Hebrus (the present-day Maritza). The same historian also mentions a move of the Hermunduri, who at the beginning of our era left their homeland for unknown reasons and were settled by the Roman general Domitius Ahenobarbus “in a part of the country of the Marcomanni”. These are the last migrations of that epoch. The consolidation of Roman rule on the Rhine and the Danube put a stop to them for quite a long time; but there are many signs which indicate that the peoples of the north-east, beyond the Elbe and the Riesengebirge, did not achieve permanent settlement for a long time.

These expeditions of Germans formed the first act of that migration of peoples which, halted for three centuries by Roman resistance, towards the end of the third century swept irresistibly across the two border rivers, flooded Southern Europe and Northern Africa and only came to an end with the conquest of Italy by the Langobardi in 568—an end in so far as the Germans took part in them, but not for the Slavs, who long remained in movement in their rear. These were literally migrations of peoples. Entire peoples, or at least large parts of them, went on the move with wife and child, with goods and chattels. Wagons covered in skins served as dwellings and for the transport of women and children as well as of the paltry household effects; the cattle were driven along with them. The men were armed and ready to overcome any resistance, to repel any attack; a military host by day, a military camp fortified by the wagons at night. The human losses during these moves, through constant fighting, through misery, hunger and sickness, must have been colossal. It was a life-and-death adventure. If the move succeeded, the survivors settled on foreign soil; if it failed, the migrating tribe disappeared from the earth. Those who were not killed in the slaughter of battle perished in slavery. The Helvetii and their allies, whose migration was halted by Caesar, started out with 368,000 head, including 92,000 fit to bear arms. After their defeat by the Romans only 110,000 were left, whom Caesar, exceptionally, sent back home, for political reasons. The Usipetes and Tencteri crossed the Rhine with 180,000 head; almost all of them perished in battle or fleeing from pursuit. No wonder that during this long period of migration entire tribes often disappeared without trace.

This migratory way of life of the Germans is fully matched by the conditions Caesar found on the Rhine. The Rhine was by no means a sharply defined border between Gauls and Germans. Belgic-Gallic Menapii had villages and fields on the right bank of the Rhine in the area of Wesel; on the other hand, the part of the Maas delta, on the left bank of the Rhine, was occupied by the German Batavi, and round Worms as far as Strassburg there lived German Vangiones, Tribocci and Nemetes, whether since Ariovistus or even earlier is uncertain. The Belgae made constant wars upon the Germans, everywhere territory was still disputed. As yet no Germans were living south of the Main and the Erzgebirge; only shortly before, the Helvetii had been driven by the Suebi from the region between Main, Rhine, Danube and the Bohemian Forest, as had the Boii from Bohemia (Boihemum), which bears their name to this day. The Suebi did not occupy the land, however; they transformed it into that wooded wilderness, 600 Roman (150 German) miles long, which was to protect them from the south. Further east Caesar indicated more Celts (Volcae Tectosages) north of the Danube, where Tacitus later places the German Quadi. Not until Augustus’ time did Maroboduus lead his Suebian Marcomanni to Bohemia, while the Romans cut off the angle between Rhine and Danube with entrenchments and peopled it with Gauls. The area beyond this fortified frontier seems to have been settled by Hermunduri. This shows conclusively that the Germans moved to Germany via the plains north of the Carpathians and the Bohemian border mountains; only after they had occupied the northern plains did they drive the Celts, who lived in the mountains more to the south, across the Danube.

The way of life of the Germans as described by Caesar also proves that they were by no means yet settled in their country. They lived in the main by raising cattle, on cheese, milk and meat, less on corn; the chief occupation of the men was hunting and military training. They tilled the soil a little, but only as a sideline and in the most primitive forest fashion. Caesar reports that they worked the fields for just one year, the next year always taking new land under the plough. It seems to have been slash-and-burn cultivation, as is still practised today in northern Scandinavia and Finland; the forest—and outside the forest there were only swamps and peet-bogs, in those days useless for agriculture—was burnt down, the roots superficially removed and also burnt, together with the turf; the corn was sown into the soil fertilised by the ash. But even in that case Caesar’s statement on the annual renewal of arable land is not to be taken literally and as a rule is to be understood as applying to a habitual passing on to new land after at least two or three harvests. The entire passage, the un-German distribution of land by princes and officials, and particularly the motivation attributed to the Germans for this rapid change, smacks of Roman concepts. This change of land was inexplicable to the Romans. To the Rhenish Germans, already in the process of transition to permanent settlement, it may already have appeared as an inherited custom, more and more losing purpose and meaning. To the Germans of the interior, the Suebi who were just arriving on the Rhine, and for whom it was mainly valid, it was still, however, an essential condition of a way of life by which the whole people moved slowly forward in whatever direction and at whatever pace the resistance they met permitted. Their constitution, too, was tailored to this way of life: the Suebi were divided into a hundred districts, every one of which supplied a thousand men annually to the army, while the rest of the men stayed at home, looking after cattle and fields and taking their turn in the army the second year. The mass of the people, with the women and children, only followed the army when it had conquered new territory. This is already an advance towards settlement compared with the migrating hosts of the time of the Cimbri.

Caesar speaks repeatedly of the custom of the Germans to make themselves secure on the side facing an enemy, that is any alien people, by deep forest wildernesses. This is the same custom which lasted into the late Middle Ages. The Saxons north of the Elbe were protected by the border forest between Eider and Schlei (Old Danish Jarnwidhr) against the Danes, by the Saxon forest between the Bay of Kiel and the Elbe against the Slavs, and the Slav name of Brandenburg, Branibor, is again only a designation of such a protective forest (Czech braniti—to defend, bor—pine and pinewood).

After all that there can be no doubt about the stage of civilisation of the Germans encountered by Caesar. They were far from being nomads in the sense of the contemporary Asiatic horse-riding peoples. Nomads need the steppe, and the Germans were living in the virgin forest. But they were equally far removed from the stage of settled peasant peoples. Strabo, sixty years later, still says of them:

“It is a common characteristic of all these” (Germanic) “peoples that they migrate with ease, because of their simple way of life, for they do not till the soil or accumulate wealth; they live in huts which they can build in one day; and they live for the most part off their livestock, as the nomads do, and like the nomads they load their belongings on their wagons and with their herds move whithersoever they think best.”

Comparative language studies prove that they had already brought with them from Asia a knowledge of agriculture; Caesar shows that they had not forgotten it. But it was the kind of agriculture that serves semi-nomadic warrior tribes, slowly proceeding through the wooded plains of central Europe, as a makeshift and subordinate source of livelihood.

It follows from the above that in Caesar’s time the immigration of the Germans into their new homeland between Danube, Rhine and North Sea was not yet completed or was at most in process of completion. That is by no means to say that at the time of Pytheas, Teutons, and perhaps also Cimbri, could not have reached the Jutland Peninsula, or the furthest advanced Germans the Rhine, as may be concluded from the absence of any signs of their arrival. A way of life compatible only with constant movement, repeated moves to the west and south and lastly the fact that Caesar encountered the largest mass known to him, the Suebi, still in full movement, admit only one conclusion: obviously, we have here glimpses of the last moments of the great Germanic immigration into their main European settlement area. It was the Roman resistance on the Rhine and later on the Danube which put an end to this movement, confined the Germans to the region they were then occupying, and thus forced them to adopt permanent habitation.

For the rest, our ancestors, as Caesar saw them, were proper barbarians. They only allowed merchants into the country to secure purchasers for their booty rather than to buy anything from them; for what need had they for foreign things, anyway? They even preferred their ill-favoured ponies to the fine, strong horses of the Gauls. The Suebi suffered no importation of wine whatever, believing the men were thereby rendered effeminate. In this respect their Bastarnae cousins were more civilised; on the occasion of their invasion of Thrace they sent envoys to Crassus, who made them drunk and elicited from them all he needed to know concerning the positions and intentions of the Bastarnae, whom he then lured into an ambush and destroyed. Even before the battle on the Idistavisus (16 of our era) Germanicus described the Germans to his soldiers as without armour or helmets, protected only by shields made of wicker or light boards, only the first rank having real lances, posterior ranks nothing but sharpened poles hardened by fire. Metal working was then therefore still scarcely known to the inhabitants of the Weser region, and the Romans will have taken good care not to let merchants carry arms into Germany.

Fully a century and a half after Caesar, Tacitus gives us his famous description of the Germans. Here much already looks quite different. As far as the Elbe and beyond, the migrating tribes had come to a halt and settled down permanently. To be sure, for a long time there was still no question of towns; settlement was made in villages consisting of individual farmsteads, either widely spaced or close together, but even in the latter case every house was free standing in its own space. Houses were built without quarry-stones or roof-tiles, roughly put together of untrimmed timber (materia informi must here mean this in contrast to caementa and tegulae); blockhouses, as still in northern Scandinavia, but no longer huts which can be built in one day, as with Strabo. We shall deal later with the agrarian constitution. The Germans also already had subterranean storage chambers, a kind of cellar where they dwelt in the winter for warmth and where the women practised weaving, according to Pliny. Agriculture is therefore already more important, but cattle is still the chief wealth; it is numerous, but of poor breed, the horses ugly and no runners, sheep and cattle small, the latter without horns. Under “nourishment” meat, milk and crab apples are listed, but no bread. Hunting was no longer much practised, hence the stock of game was already much reduced since Caesar. Clothing was also still very primitive, a rough blanket for the mass, otherwise naked (almost as among the Zulu Kaffirs), but the wealthiest already had closely fitting clothes; animal skins were also used; the women dressed much like the men, but already more often wore linen garments without sleeves. The children all ran about naked. Reading and writing were unknown, but one passage indicates that priests were already using runes, characters derived from the Latin, which they cut into wooden staves. Gold and silver were not treasured by the Germans of the interior, silver vessels presented by Romans to princes and envoys served the same common uses as earthenware. The insignificant trade was by simple barter.

The men still had the custom common to all primitive peoples of leaving the work in the home and field to the women, old people and children, as something unmanly. They had, however, adopted two civilised customs: drinking and gambling, and they practised both with all the abandon of untouched barbarians, gambling to the extreme of throwing dice for their own persons. In the interior their drink was barley or wheat beer; if schnapps had already been invented, world history might well have taken a different course.

At the borders of Roman territory further progress had been made: imported wine was drunk; to some extent people had become used to money, preference naturally being given to silver, as more handy for limited exchange, and, according to barbarian custom, to coin with a stamp well-known of old. We shall see that they had good cause for such precaution. Trade with the Germans was only conducted on the banks of the Rhine itself; only the Hermunduri, straddling the Limes Germanicus, went at this time in and out of Gaul and Rhaetia for trading purposes.

Hence the first great phase of German history, the final transition from a migratory life to permanent habitations, occurred in the period between Caesar and Tacitus, at least for the greater part of the people, from the Rhine to far beyond the Elbe. The names of the individual tribes begin more or less to coalesce with certain tracts of land. Information from ancient writers being contradictory, and names fluctuating and changing, it is, however, often impossible to assign a definite settlement area to every tribe. It would also lead us too far from our subject. A general statement found in Pliny must suffice here:

“There are five principal Germanic stocks: the Vindili, who include the Burgundiones, Varini, Carini and Guttons; the second stock consists of the Ingaevones, including the Cimbri, Teutons and the tribes of the Chauci. The Iscaevones, including the Sugambri, live close to the Rhine. The Hermiones, comprising the Suebi, Hermunduri, Chatti and Cherusci, occupy the middle of the country. The fifth stock comprises the Peucini, and the Bastarnae, whose neighbours are the Dacians.”

A sixth branch may be added to these: the Hilleviones, living in Scandinavia.

Of all the information we gather from the ancient writers this fits best with the later facts and with the preserved linguistic remains.

The Vindili comprise peoples of the Gothic tongue who occupied the Baltic coast between Elbe and Vistula and deep inland; the Guttons (Goths) were settled beyond the Vistula around the Frische Haff. The scarce linguistic remains which have been preserved leave not the slightest doubt that the Vandals (who must have formed part of Pliny’s Vindili, since he transfers their name to the whole main stock) and the Burgundians spoke Gothic dialects. Only the Warni (or Varini), who are usually, on the basis of information from the 5 and 6 centuries, reckoned among the Thuringians, can cause doubts; we know nothing of their language.

The second stock, the Ingaevones, first of all includes peoples speaking the Frisian tongues, inhabitants of the North Sea coast and the Cimbric Peninsula, and most probably also speakers of the Saxon tongue between Elbe and Weser, in which case the Cherusci must also be reckoned among them.

The Iscaevones are at once singled out by the Sugambri, who joined them, as the later Franks, the inhabitants of the right bank of the Rhine from the Taunus down to the sources of the Lahn, Sieg, Ruhr, Lippe and Ems, bordered on the north by Frisians and Chauci.

The Hermiones, or Herminones, as Tacitus calls them more correctly, are the later High Germans: the Hermunduri (Thuringians), Suebi (Swabians and Marcomanni-Bavarians), Chatti (Hessians), etc. The Cherusci are without doubt placed here in error. It is the only indubitable error in the whole of Pliny’s list.

The fifth stock, Peucini and Bastarnae, is lost. No doubt Jacob Grimm is right in reckoning it to the Gothic.

Finally, the sixth stock, the Hilleviones, comprises the inhabitants of the Danish islands and the great Scandinavian peninsula.

Hence the division of Pliny corresponds with surprising accuracy to the grouping of the German dialects which later actually appear. We know no dialects which do not belong to either Gothic, Frisian-Low Saxon, Franconian, High German or Scandinavian, and even today we can still acknowledge Pliny’s division as exemplary. I shall examine anything that might possibly be said against it in my note on the German peoples.

We must therefore conceive of the original immigration of the Germans into their new homeland approximately as follows: In the first instance the Iscaevones advanced into the middle of the North German plain, between the southern mountains and the Baltic and North seas; close after them, but nearer to the coast, the Ingaevones. These appear to have been followed by the Hilleviones, who turned off to the islands, however. They are followed by the Goths (Pliny’s Vindili), who left the Peucini and Bastarnae behind in the south-east; the Gothic name in Sweden testifies that individual sections joined the migrating Hilleviones. Finally, south of the Goths, the Herminones, who, at least for the greater part, moved only in Caesar’s and even Augustus’ time into their settlements, which they retained until the migration of peoples.

THE FIRST BATTLES AGAINST ROME

Since Caesar, Romans and Germans faced each other across the Rhine, and since the subjection of Rhaetia, Noricum and Pannonia by Augustus across the Danube. In the meantime Roman rule had been consolidated in Gaul; Agrippa had covered the whole country with a network of military roads, fortresses had been built, a new generation, born under the Roman yoke, had grown up. Brought into the most direct communication with Italy by the Alpine roads over the Little and Great St. Bernard, built by Augustus, Gaul could serve as the base for the conquest of Germania from the Rhine. Augustus entrusted his stepson (or real son?) Drusus with the accomplishment of this conquest with the eight legions stationed on the Rhine.

Pretexts were provided by constant friction among the borderdwellers, by German intrusions into Gaul and by an alleged or actual conspiracy of the disaffected Belgae with the Sugambri, according to which the latter were to cross the Rhine and effect a general rising. Drusus made sure of the Belgic leaders (—12), crossed the river close by the island of Batavia above the Rhine delta, devastated the country of the Usipetes and partly that of the Sugambri, sailed down the Rhine, forced the Frisians to supply him with auxiliary foot soldiers and sailed with the fleet along the coast and into the mouth of the Ems to make war on the Chauci. But here his Roman seamen, unaccustomed to the tides, grounded the fleet during the ebb; he got it free only with the help of the allied Frisian troops, who were better acquainted with the matter, and returned home.

This first campaign was only an extensive reconnaissance. In the following year (—11) he began the actual conquest. He crossed the Rhine again below the mouth of the Lippe, subjugated the Usipetes living there, threw a bridge across the Lippe and invaded the country of the Sugambri, who had just taken the field against the Chatti because these did not want to join the alliance against the Romans under the leadership of the Sugambri. On the confluence of the Lippe and the Eliso he then made a fortified camp (Aliso) and retreated again across the Rhine when winter approached. During this retreat he was ambushed in a narrow defile by the Germans, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that his army escaped annihilation. This year he also made another fortified camp “in the land of the Chatti, close to the Rhine”.

This second campaign of Drusus already contains the complete plan of conquest as it was afterwards consistently followed. The region immediately to be conquered was fairly sharply delimited: the Iscaevonian interior to the border with the Cherusci and Chatti and the coastal strip belonging to it as far as the Ems, if possible to the Weser. The main job of subjecting the coastlands was allotted to the fleet. In the south, the base of operations was Mainz, founded by Agrippa and extended by Drusus, in the neighbourhood of which we must look for the fort built “in the land of the Chatti” (nowadays it is being sought in the Saalburg at Homburg). From here the course of the lower Main leads into the open country of the Wetterau and the upper Lahn, the occupation of which would separate Iscaevones and Chatti. In the centre of the front of attack the flat country through which the Lippe flows and particularly the broad ridge of hills between the Lippe and the Ruhr offered the most convenient line of operations to the main Roman force; by its occupation it could divide the region to be conquered into two approximately equal areas and at the same time separate the Bructeri from the Sugambri. From this position it could coordinate its action with the fleet, on the left; together with the column debouching from the Wetterau isolate the Iscaevonian slate mountains on the right, and in front keep the Cherusci in check. The fort of Aliso formed the most advanced stronghold of this line of operations; it was situated near the sources of the Lippe, either at Elsen near Paderborn at the confluence of the Alme and the Lippe, or at Lippstadt, where a big Roman fort has recently been discovered.

In the following year (—10) the Chatti, realising the common danger, at last allied themselves to the Sugambri. But Drusus attacked and forced them into subjection, at least in part. This cannot have outlasted the winter, however, for in the next spring ( — 9) he attacked once more, advanced as far as the Suebi (i.e., probably Thuringians, according to Florus and Orosius also Marcomanni, who at that time still lived north of the Erzgebirge), then attacked the Cherusci, crossed the Weser arid only turned back at the Elbe. He devastated the whole land he moved through, but met everywhere with heavy resistance. On the way back he died, thirty years old, even before he reached the Rhine.

To the above account, taken from Dio Cassius, we add from Suetonius that Drusus had the canal dug from the Rhine to the Ijssel by which he led his fleet to the North Sea through Frisia and the Flevo (Vliestrom—the present fairway between Vlieland and Terschelling, out of the Zuider Zee); from Florus, that he erected over 50 forts along the Rhine and a bridge at Bonn and also fortified the line of the Maas, thus securing the position of the Rhenish legions both against risings of the Gauls and against incursions of the Germans. Florus’ fables of forts and earthworks on the Weser and Elbe are empty boasting; he [Drusus] may have thrown up entrenchments there during his marches, but he was too good a general to leave even a single man as garrison there. But there is surely no doubt that he had the line of operations along the Lippe provided with fortified bases. He also fortified the passes over the Taunus.

Tiberius, Drusus’ successor on the Rhine, crossed the river in the following year (—8); the Germans, except the Sugambri, sent peace negotiators; Augustus, who was in Gaul, refused all negotiations as long as the Sugambri were not represented. When at last they also sent envoys, “numerous and respected men”, says Dio, Augustus had them taken prisoner and interned them in various towns in the interior of the empire; “distressed at this, they took their own lives”. In the following year (—7), Tiberius went again with an army to Germania, where already nothing had any longer to be combated, except a few insignificant instances of unrest. Velleius says of this time:

“Tiberius so subdued the country (Germania) that it differed but little from a tributary province.”

This success will probably have to be attributed not only to Roman arms and to the much vaunted diplomatic “wisdom” of Tiberius, but in particular to the transplanting of Germans to the Roman bank of the Rhine. Already Agrippa had shifted the Ubii, who were always much attached to the Romans, to the left bank of the Rhine at Cologne, with their consent. Tiberius forced 40,000 Sugambri to go over and settle, and with that he broke this powerful people’s strength to resist for a considerable time.

Tiberius now retired for some time from all affairs of state and we learn nothing of what went on in Germany during several years. A fragment from Dio tells of a move of Domitius Ahenobarbus from the Danube to beyond the Elbe. Soon after that, however, about the first year of our era, the Germans rose. According to Velleius’ statements, Marcus Vinicius, the Roman supreme commander, fought on the whole with success and in recognition received rewards. Nevertheless, in the year 4, soon after his adoption by Augustus, Tiberius had to cross the Rhine once more to restore the shaken Roman power. He subjected first the Canninefates and Chattuari, living next to the river, then the Bructeri, and “won over” the Cherusci. Further details are not given by Velleius, who participated in this and the following campaigns. The mild winter allowed the legions to remain in movement until December; then they went into winter quarters in Germany itself, probably at the sources of the Lippe.

The campaign of the following year (5) was to complete the subjugation of western Germany. While Tiberius advanced from Aliso and defeated the Langobardi on the lower Elbe, the fleet sailed along the coast and “won over” the Chauci. On the lower Elbe the army met the fleet sailing up the river. With the success of this campaign the work of the Romans in the north appeared to be done, according to Velleius; in the following year Tiberius turned to the Danube, where the Marcomanni, who had recently moved to Bohemia under Maroboduus, were threatening the frontier. Educated in Rome and familiar with Roman tactics, Maroboduus had an army of 70,000 foot and 4,000 cavalry, organised on the Roman pattern. Tiberius attacked this army on the Danube in the front, while Sentius Saturninus was to lead the legions from the Rhine through the country of the Chatti into the rear and the flank of the enemy. Then the Pannonians rose in Tiberius’ own rear, and the army had to turn and reconquer its base of operations. The fighting lasted three years; but the Pannonians had only just been defeated when in northern Germany things also took such a turn that there could no longer be any question of conquests in the land of the Marcomanni.

Drusus’ plan of conquest had been fully retained; but to carry it out in security, campaigns by land and by sea had become necessary as far as the Elbe. In the plan of campaign against Maroboduus the idea transpired of shifting the border to the Little Carpathians, the Riesengebirge and the Elbe as far as its mouth; but for the time being that was still in the remote future and soon became quite impracticable. We do not know how far up the Wetterau Roman forts may have reached; to all appearances this line of operations was at the time neglected in favour of the more important line along the Lippe. There, however, the Romans appeared to have made themselves fairly well at home. The Rhine plain on the right bank from Bonn downwards belonged to them; the Westphalian lowland from the Ruhr northwards to beyond the Ems, to the borders of the Frisians and the Chauci, remained in military occupation. In the rear, Batavi and Frisians were at that time still reliable friends; further west the Chauci, Cherusci and Chatti could be held to be mastered sufficiently, after their repeated defeats and after the blow which had also struck the Langobardi. And in any case, in those three peoples a fairly powerful party existed at the time which saw salvation only in joining Rome. In the south, the power of the Sugambri was broken for the time being; part of their territory, between Lippe and Ruhr, and also in the Rhine plain, was occupied, the rest was surrounded on three sides by the Roman positions on the Rhine, the Ruhr and in the Wetterau, and certainly often enough traversed by Roman columns. In the direction of the Lippe sources, from Neuwied to the Sieg, from Deutz and Neuss to the Wupper, Roman roads leading over dominating mountain ridges have recently been traced at least as far as the border of Berg and Mark. Still further off the Hermunduri, in agreement with Domitius Ahenobarbus, occupied part of the area abandoned by the Marcomanni and were in peaceful intercourse with the Romans. And, finally, the wellknown disunity of the German peoples justified the expectation that the Romans would only have to conduct such minor wars as they themselves must have thought desirable for the purpose of gradually transforming their allies into subjects.

The core of the Roman position was the country on both sides of the Lippe as far as the Osning. Here Roman rule and Roman customs were made acceptable by the constant presence of the legions in fortified camps and “virtually transformed” the barbarians, according to Dio. Here, near the permanent army quarters, there arose those towns and markets of which the same historian writes and whose peaceful intercourse contributed most to the consolidation of the alien rule. Everything seemed to go splendidly. But it was to be otherwise.

Quintilius Varus was appointed supreme commander of the troops in Germany. A Roman of the beginning decline, phlegmatic and indolent, inclined to rest on the laurels of his predecessors, and still more to take advantage of these laurels for himself.

“That he was no despiser of money is demonstrated by his governorship of Syria: he entered the rich province a poor man, but left it a rich man and the province poor” (Velleius).

Otherwise he was “a man of mild character”; but this mild character must have been greatly upset by the transfer to a country where extortion was made so difficult for him because there was almost nothing to extort. Varus nevertheless tried, and that by the method which had long become customary with Roman proconsuls and propraetors. First of all it was necessary as quickly as possible to arrange the occupied part of Germany on the footing of a Roman province, to replace the indigenous public authority, which had hitherto continued to function under the military rule, by Roman authority and thus to turn the country into a source of revenue—both for the fisc and for the proconsul. Varus accordingly tried to “transform” the Germans “more rapidly and effectively”. He “issued orders to them as if they were slaves and exacted money as he would from subject nations” (Dio). And the main instrument of subjugation and extortion he used there was the well-tried one of the power of supreme judge exercised by Roman provincial governors, which he here arrogated to himself and on the strength of which he sought to force Roman law on the Germans.

Unfortunately Varus and his civilising mission were nearly one and a half thousand years in advance of history; for that was roughly how long it was before Germany was ready to “receive Roman law”. In fact, Roman law with its classical dissection of private property relations must have appeared as pure nonsense to the Germans, whose title to the little private property that had developed amongst them derived solely from their common property in land. Similarly the solemn forms and procedural challenges, the constant adjournments that are a feature of Roman legal proceedings, must have seemed to them, who were used to finding judgment and sentence themselves in open public court within a few hours according to inherited custom, as just so much denial of justice; just as the swarm of officials and legal sharks surrounding the proconsul must have seemed to them what they in fact were—nothing but cut-throats. And now the Germans were supposed to surrender their free Thing, where fellow tribesmen judged fellow tribesman, and submit to the peremptory sentence of a single man who conducted the proceedings in a foreign language, and who at best based himself on a law unknown and quite inapplicable to them—and who himself was an interested party. The free German, whom according to Tacitus only a priest could physically chastise in seldom cases, who could forfeit life and limb only through treason against his people, but could otherwise atone for every offence, even murder, by a fine {wergeld), and who was moreover used to exercising blood revenge for himself and his relations on his own—this free German was now supposed to submit to the scourge and the axe of the Roman lictor. And all for no other reason than to throw the doors wide open to the exchequer bleeding the land white through taxation, and to the extortion and corruption of the proconsul and his accomplices.

But Varus had miscalculated. The Germans were no Syrians. He impressed them with his enforced Roman civilisation only in one respect. He merely showed the neighbouring peoples pressed into alliance what an intolerable yoke awaited them also, and thus forced on them a unity which they had never before been able to achieve.

Varus stood in Germany with three legions, Asprenas with another two on Lower Rhine, only five or six marches from Aliso, the centre of the position. In the face of such a force only a long and carefully prepared, but then suddenly struck, decisive blow offered a prospect of success. Conspiracy was therefore imperative. Arminius undertook to organise it.

Arminius, of the Cheruscan nobility, son of Segimerus, who seems to have been a military leader of his people, had spent his early youth in Roman military service, mastered the Roman language and custom, and was a frequent and well received guest at the Roman headquarters, whose loyalty seemed beyond all doubt. Even on the eve of the surprise attack Varus relied on him as a rock. Velleius called him

“a young man of noble birth, brave in action and alert in mind, more so than barbarians usually are; a young man whose countenance and eyes shone with the fire of the mind. He had been our constant companion on previous campaigns,” (that is, against Germans) “and in addition to Roman citizenship, enjoyed the Roman dignity of equestrian rank”.

But Arminius was more than all that, he was a great statesman and a considerable general. Once resolved to put an end to Roman rule on the right bank of the Rhine, he took the necessary steps without hesitation. The Cheruscan military nobility, already much dominated by Roman influence, had to be won over at least in great part, and the Chatti and Chauci, and even more so the Bructeri and Sugambri, who were directly under Roman yoke, had to be drawn into the conspiracy. All that took time, even though Varus’ extortions had prepared the ground; and during this time it was necessary to lull Varus into security. This was done by taking him in with his hobby of dispensing justice and making a complete fool of him with it. Velleius tells us that the Germans,

“who with their extreme savagery combine great cunning, to an extent scarcely credible to one who has had no experience with them, and are a race of born liars, by trumping up a series of fictitious lawsuits, now suing one another without cause, and now thanking him for settling their disputes with Roman justice, so that their own barbarous nature was being softened down by this new and hitherto unknown discipline and order, and that quarrels which had usually been settled by arms were now being settled by law—the Germans brought him to such a complete degree of negligence, that he came to look upon himself as a city praetor, administering justice in the forum, and not a general in command of an army in the heart of Germany”

So passed the summer of the year 9. To make still more certain of success, Varus was induced to split up his troops by detaching them in various ways, which cannot have been difficult given the character of the man and the circumstances.

“Varus,” Dio says, “did not keep his troops properly together, as was necessary in a hostile country, but lent teams of soldiers to people who needed help and asked for it, either to guard a fortified place, to catch robbers, or to escort grain transports."

In the meantime the chief conspirators, in particular Arminius and Segimerus, were constantly round him and frequently at his table. According to Dio, Varus was now already warned, but his confidence knew no bounds. At length, in the autumn, when all was ready for striking the blow, and Varus with the bulk of his troops had been lured deep into the land of the Cherusci, as far as the Weser, a feigned rising at some distance gave the signal. Even as Varus received the news and gave orders for departure, he was warned by another leader of the Cherusci, Segestes, who seems to have maintained a sort of clan feud with the family of Arminius. Varus would not believe him. Segestes thereupon proposed that he himself, Arminius and the other leaders of the Cherusci should be put in chains before Varus marched off; success would show who was right. But Varus’ confidence was unshakeable, even when on his departure the conspirators stayed behind, under the pretext that they were gathering allies to join him with them.

This happened, indeed, though not as Varus expected. The troops of the Cherusci were already assembled. The first thing they did was to massacre the Roman detachments stationed with them at their own earlier request, and then to attack Varus on the flank while he was on the march. The latter was moving along bad forest paths, for here, in the land of the Cherusci, there were not yet any paved Roman military roads. Taken by surprise, he at last realised his situation, braced himself and from now on showed that he was a Roman general—but too late. He let his troops close up, had his large train of women, children, waggons, pack animals, etc., lined up in order and protected as well as was possible considering the narrow paths and dense woods, and turned towards his base of operations—which we must take to have been Aliso. Pouring rain softened the ground, hindered the march, constantly breaking up again the order of the ponderous train. With heavy losses Varus succeeded in reaching a densely wooded mountain, which, however, offered open space for a temporary camp. This was occupied and fortified still in fairly good order and according to regulations; the army of Germanicus, visiting the place six years later, still recognised there distinctly “the work of three legions”. With a resolve appropriate to the situation Varus here had all the not absolutely necessary waggons and baggage burnt. The next day he moved through open country, but again suffered so heavily that the troops were separated still more widely, and in the evening the camp could no longer be fortified according to regulations; Germanicus found only one half-ruined mound and a shallow ditch. On the third day the march led again through wooded mountains, and here Varus and most of the leaders lost heart. Varus killed himself, the legions were destroyed almost to the last man. Only the cavalry escaped under Vala Numonius; individual refugees from the infantry also appear to have managed to get to Aliso. Aliso itself held out at least for some time, since the Germans did not know the regular siege attack; later the garrison somehow fought its way through, wholly or in part. Asprenas, intimidated, appears to have confined himself to a short advance to receive them. Bructeri, Sugambri and all the lesser peoples rose, and Roman power was again thrown back across the Rhine.

The localities of this expedition have been much disputed. Most likely, before the battle Varus was stationed in the hollow of the Rinteln valley, somewhere between Hausberge and Hameln; the retreat decided upon after the first attack was in the direction of the Dören gap near Detmold, which forms a plain and broad pass through the Osning. This is the general view which has become traditional and fits in with the sources as well as the military exigencies of the war situation. Whether Varus reached the Dören gap remains uncertain; the breakthrough of the cavalry and perhaps the first ranks of the infantry would appear to show that he did.

The news of the annihilation of the three legions and the rising of the whole of western Germany struck Rome like a thunder clap. Some already saw Arminius marching across the Rhine and spreading insurrection in Gaul, Maroboduus on the other side crossing the Danube and carrying with him the barely subdued Pannonians on a march across the Alps. And Italy was already so exhausted that it could hardly supply men any longer. Dio reports that there were only few young men capable of bearing arms left among the citizenry, that the older men refused to join the army so that Augustus punished them with confiscation of their wealth, and some even with death; that the emperor eventually managed to raise a few troops for the protection of Rome from among freedmen and veterans, disarmed his German bodyguard and banned all Germans from the city.

Arminius did not cross the Rhine, however; Maroboduus was not thinking of any attack, and so Rome could indulge undisturbed in outbursts of fury at the “perfidious Germans”. We have already seen Velleius’ description of them as people who “with their extreme savagery combine great cunning ... and are a race of born liars”. Similarly Strabo. He knows nothing of “German loyalty” and “Celtic perfidy”; quite to the contrary. While he calls the Celts “simple and straightforward”, so simple-minded that they “gather for battle in full view of everybody and without any circumspection, thus making it easy for the enemy to carry the day”, he says of the Germans:

“In dealing with them it was always advisable not to trust them, those who have been trusted have done great harm as, for instance, the Cherusci, in whose country three legions, with their general Varus, were destroyed by an ambush in violation of the treaties.”

Not to speak of the indignant and vindictive verses of Ovid. One could imagine to be reading French authors of the most chauvinistic period, boiling with rage at Yorck’s breach of faith or the treachery of the Saxons at Leipzig. The Germans had become well acquainted with Roman loyalty to agreements and probity when Caesar attacked the Usipetes and Tencteri during the negotiations and the truce; they had become acquainted with it when Augustus had the envoys of the Sugambri taken prisoner, while before their arrival he had rejected any negotiations with the German peoples. All conquering nations have this in common that they will try to outwit their opponents by any means; and they find this quite in order; no sooner do their adversaries do the same thing, however, than they call this breach of faith and treachery. But the instruments of subjection must also be allowed to serve to throw off the yoke. So long as there are exploiting and ruling nations and classes on the one hand, and exploited and ruled ones on the other, so long the use of cunning side by side with force will for both sides be a necessity against which all moral preaching will be powerless.

However childish the fantastic statue of Arminius erected at Detmold may be—it had only one good side, that it induced Louis Napoleon to erect a similarly ridiculous, fantastic colossus of Vercingetorix on a mountain at Aliso [-Sainte-Reine]—it remains true that the Varus battle was one of the most decisive turning points in history. It decided Germany’s independence of Rome once and for all. One can argue at length to no purpose about whether or not this independence was such a great gain for the Germans themselves; it is certain that without it the whole of history would have taken a different course. And even if in fact all the subsequent history of the Germans has been almost nothing but a long series of national disasters, mostly through their own fault, so much so that even the most brilliant successes almost always turned out to the detriment of the people, one must nevertheless say that here, at the beginning of their history, the Germans were decidedly fortunate.

Caesar used the last vital forces of the dying Republic to subjugate Gaul. The legions, since Marius consisting of recruited mercenaries but still exclusively Italic men, since Caesar literally died out in the measure in which the Italic people themselves died out under the rapidly spreading latifundia and their slave economy. The 150,000 men who made up the compact infantry of the 25 legions could only be kept together by extreme measures. The 20-year service was not observed; veterans who had completed their service were forced to remain with the colours for an indefinite period. That was the chief reason for the mutiny of the Rhenish legions on the death of Augustus which Tacitus describes so imaginatively, and which with its extraordinary mixture of refractoriness and discipline recalls so vividly the mutinies of the Spanish soldiers of Philip II in the Netherlands, in both cases testifying to the solidity of the army at a time when the Prince had broken the word he had given it. We saw how vain Augustus’ attempt remained after the Varus battle to reinstate the old levy laws which had long gone out of use; how he had to fall back on veterans and even freedmen—he had used these once before, during the Pannonian insurrection. The reserve of free Italic peasants’ sons had disappeared with the free Italic peasants themselves. Every new reserve contingent introduced into the legions worsened the army’s quality. And since these legions, this core of the entire might of the army, which was difficult to maintain, had nevertheless to be spared as much as possible, the auxiliary troops came more and more to the fore and fought battles in which the legions only formed the reserve, so that already in Claudius’ time the Batavi could say: the provinces were being conquered with the blood of the provinces.

With such an army, more and more alienating itself from the ancient Roman discipline and solidity and therewith from the ancient Roman manner of fighting, increasingly composed of provincials and eventually of barbarians alien to the empire, almost no great aggressive wars could any longer be conducted— soon no great offensive battles could be fought. The deterioration of the army placed the state on the defensive, which was first fought aggressively, then more and more passively, until at length the weight of the attack, now shifted completely to the side of the Germans, broke through irresistibly across the Rhine and Danube along the whole line from the North Sea to the Black Sea.

In the meantime it was necessary, even to safeguard the line of the Rhine, to let the Germans feel once more, on their own territory, the superior strength of Roman arms. For this purpose Tiberius hastened to the Rhine, restored weakened discipline by his own example and strict punishment, limited the train of the mobile army to the absolutely necessary and marched through western Germany in two expeditions (years 10 and 11). The Germans did not present themselves for decisive battles, the Romans did not dare to occupy their winter camps on the right bank of the Rhine. There is no evidence that Aliso and the fort set up at the mouth of the Ems in the country of the Chauci retained their permanent garrison also in the winter, but it is probable.

In the year 14, in August, Augustus died. The Rhenish legions, who after completing their service were neither dismissed nor given their pay, refused to recognise Tiberius and proclaimed Germanicus, son of Drusus, emperor. He calmed the rising himself, returned the troops to obedience, and led them into Germany in three expeditions which have been described by Tacitus. Here Arminius confronted him and proved a general fully worthy of his opponent. He sought to avoid any decisive battles in open country, to hinder the Romans’ march as much as possible, and to attack them only in swamps and defiles where they could not deploy their forces. But the Germans did not always follow him. Pugnacity often carried them away into fighting in unfavourable circumstances; greed for booty more than once saved Romans who were already sitting firmly in a trap. So Germanicus gained the two fruitless victories on the Idistavisus and on the Angrivarian limes, barely escaped on the retreats through narrow swamp passes, lost ships and crews through storms and floods on the Frisian coast, and was eventually recalled by Tiberius after the expedition of the year 16. With that the Roman expeditions into the interior of Germany came to an end.

But the Romans knew only too well that a river line is only held if one also holds the crossings to the other bank. Far from retreating passively beyond the Rhine, the Romans transferred their defence to the right bank. The Roman fortifications which cover the regions of the lower Lippe, Ruhr and Wupper in big groups, at least in some cases corresponding to later districts, [and] the military roads built from the Rhine to the border of the Duchy of Mark, lead us to surmise here a system of defence works along a line from the Ijssel to the Sieg, corresponding to the present frontier line between Franks and Saxons, with occasional deviations of the border of the Rhine province in the direction of Westphalia. This system, which was probably still to some extent defensible in the 7th century, must then also have kept the Saxons, who were advancing at that time, from reaching the Rhine, and thereby fixed their present ethnic border against the Franks. The most interesting discoveries have been made here in recent years (by J. Schneider); we may well expect further discoveries.

Farther up the Rhine the great Roman Limes was gradually built up, especially under Domitian and Hadrian; it runs from below Neuwied over the heights of Montabaur to Ems, there crosses the Lahn, turns west at Adolfseck, following the northern slopes of the Taunus, envelopes Grüningen in the Wetterau as its northernmost point, and thence, running in a south-south-easterly direction, reaches the Main south of Hanau. From here the Limes runs on the left bank of the Main to Miltenberg; thence in an only once broken straight line to the Württemberg Rems, near the castle of Hohenstaufen. Here the line, built further at a later time, probably under Hadrian, turns eastward via Dinkelsbühl, Gunzenhausen, Ellingen and Kipfenberg, and reaches the Danube at Irnsing above Kehlheim. Smaller entrenchments lay behind the Limes, and larger forts as support points at a greater distance. Thus enclosed, the country to the right of the Rhine, which at least south of the Main had lain deserted since the Helvetii were driven out by the Suebi, was peopled by Gallic vagrants, stragglers of the troops, according to Tacitus.

Thus conditions gradually became calmer and safer on the Rhine, the Limes and the Danube. Fighting and expeditions continued, but the mutual borders remained unchanged for some centuries.

PROGRESS UNTIL THE MIGRATION PERIOD

Written sources on the situation and the events in the interior of Germany fail after Tacitus and Ptolemy. Instead a series of other, much more vivid sources is opening up for us: finds of antiquities in so far as they can be attributed to the period under discussion.

We have seen that at the time of Pliny and Tacitus Roman trade with the interior of Germany was virtually non-existent. But we find in Pliny an indication of an old trade route, which in his time was still used occasionally, from Carnuntum (opposite the confluence of the March with the Danube), along the March and the Oder to the Amber coast. This route, and also another, through Bohemia along the Elbe, was probably used at a very early period by the Etruscans, whose presence in the northern valleys of the Alps is documented by numerous finds, particularly the Hallstatt find. The invasion of the Gauls into northern Italy will have put an end to this trade (ca.—400) (Boyd Dawkins). If this view is confirmed, this Etruscan trade, especially the importation of bronze goods, must have been conducted with the peoples who occupied the land on the Vistula and the Elbe before the Germans, probably with Celts, and the immigration of the Germans would have had as much to do with its interruption as the backflow of the Celts into Italy. The more easterly trade route, from the Greek cities on the Black Sea along Dniester and Dnieper to the area of the Vistula mouth, would then appear to have come into use only after this interruption. The ancient Greek coins found near Bromberg, in the island of Oesel and elsewhere suggest this interpretation; among them are pieces of the fourth, possibly the fifth century before our era, coined in Greece, Italy, Sicily, Cyrene, etc.

The interrupted trade routes along the Oder and Elbe were bound to be restored again as soon as the migrating people came to a halt. At the time of Ptolemy not only these, but other roads of traffic through Germany seem to have come into use again, and where Ptolemy’s evidence fails, finds continue to bear witness.

C. F. Wiberg has clarified much here by careful compilation of the finds, and has provided the evidence that in the second century of our era the trade routes both through Silesia down the Oder and through Bohemia down the Elbe were used again. In Bohemia Tacitus already mentions

“traders in booty and merchants” (lixae ac negotiatores) “out of our provinces whom avarice and oblivion of their homes have led into enemy territory and to Maroboduus’ army camp”.

So also the Hermunduri, who, long since friends of the Romans, had, according to Tacitus, unhindered access to the Agri Decumates and Rhaetia as far as Augsburg, will surely have traded Roman goods and coins from the upper Main further to the Saale and Werra. Traces of a trade route into the interior have also been revealed further down the Roman Limes, on the Lahn.

The route through Moravia and Silesia appears to have remained the most important one. The only watershed that has to be crossed, that between the March, or Becva, and Oder, passes through open hill country and lies less than 325 metres above sea level; even now the railway passes along here. Beginning with Lower Silesia the north German lowlands open up, so that roads can branch out in all directions to the Vistula and the Elbe. Roman merchants must have resided in Silesia and Brandenburg in the second and third centuries. There we find not only urns of glass, tear bottles and burial urns with Latin inscriptions (Massel near Trebnitz in Silesia and elsewhere), but even complete Roman sepulchral vaults with recesses for urns (columbaria), (Nacheln near Glogau). Undoubted Roman graves have also been found at Warin in Mecklenburg. Similarly, finds of coins, Roman metal ware, clay lamps, etc., are evidence of trade along this route. Generally speaking, the whole of eastern Germany, although never entered by Roman armies, is studded with Roman coins and manufactures, the latter frequently documented by the same trade marks as occur on finds in the provinces of the Roman Empire. Clay lamps found in Silesia bear the same trade mark as others found in Dalmatia, Vienna, etc. The mark: Ti. Robilius Sitalces, for instance, is stamped on bronze vases of which one was found in Mecklenburg, another in Bohemia; this indicates a trade route along the Elbe.

Moreover, in the first centuries after Augustus Roman merchant vessels sailed on the North Sea. This is proved by the find in Neuhaus on the Oste (Elbe mouth) of 344 Roman silver coins from Nero to Marcus Aurelius with remains of a ship which probably foundered there. Shipping also went along the southern coast of the Baltic, reaching the Danish islands, Sweden and Gotland, and we shall have to study this more closely. The distances given by Ptolemy and Marcianus (about the year 400) between the various points on the coast can only have been derived from the reports of merchants who sailed along that coast. They are given from the coast of Mecklenburg to Danzig and thence to Scandia. Finally, this trade is proved by innumerable other finds of Roman origin in Holstein, Schleswig, Mecklenburg, Western Pomerania, the Danish islands and southern Sweden, on sites lying closest to each other near the coast.

How far this Roman traffic included the import of weapons into Germany is difficult to determine. The numerous Roman weapons found in Germany could equally well be booty, and the Roman border authorities naturally did everything to cut off supplies of arms to the Germans. Some could have come by sea, however, particularly to the more distant peoples such as those of the Cimbric peninsula.

The rest of the Roman products which came to Germany by these various routes consisted of household goods, jewellery, toilet articles, etc. Household goods include bowls, measures, tumblers, vessels, cooking pots, sieves, spoons, scissors, ladles, etc., of bronze; a few vessels of gold or silver; clay lamps, which are very widespread; jewellery made of bronze, silver or gold: necklaces, diadems, bracelets and rings, clips rather like our brooches; among the toilet articles we find combs, pincers, ear spoons, etc.—not to mention articles the use of which is disputable. Most of these manufactures, according to Worsaae, were made under the influence of the tastes dominant in Rome in the first century.

The difference between the Germans of Caesar, and even of Tacitus, and the people who used these wares is great, even if we admit that they were used only by the nobler and wealthier families. The “simple dishes without much preparation” (sine apparatu) “or condiments” with which the Germans, according to Tacitus, “banished their hunger” had given way to a cuisine which already used a fairly sophisticated apparatus and in addition probably also obtained the corresponding condiments from the Romans. Contempt for gold- and silver-ware had given way to the desire to adorn oneself with them; indifference to Roman money to its spread all over German territory. And especially the toilet articles—what a transformation of customs is revealed by their mere presence among a people which, as far as we know, invented soap, indeed, but used it only to bleach the hair!

Concerning the goods which the Germans provided to the Roman traders in exchange for all this cash and these wares we are in the first instance dependent on the information of the ancient writers, who, as we have said, leave us almost completely in the dark. Pliny mentions vegetables, goose quills, woollen stuffs and soap as articles which the empire imported from Germany. But this insipient trade at the border cannot be a standard for the later period. The chief article of trade of which we know was amber; it does not suffice, however, to explain a traffic which was spreading all over the country. Cattle, the chief wealth of the Germans, will also have been the most important export; the legions stationed at the border alone guaranteed a big demand for meat. Hides and furs, which in the time of Jornandes were sent from Scandinavia to the Vistula mouth, and thence into Roman territory, no doubt found their way there from the East German forests even in earlier periods. Wild beasts for the circus were brought in from the north by Roman seafarers, Wiberg thinks. But nothing could be got there save bears, wolves and possibly aurochs, and lions, leopards and even bears were easier to procure nearer home in Africa and Asia.—Slaves? asks Wiberg eventually, almost bashfully, and there he has probably got the right idea. Indeed, apart from cattle, slaves were the only article Germany could export in sufficient quantities to balance its trade with Rome. The cities and latifundia of Italy alone used up an enormous slave population, which propagated itself only to a very small extent. The entire Roman large landed property economy had as its precondition that colossal importation of traded prisoners of war which flooded into Italy in the ceaseless wars of conquest of the decaying Republic, and even of Augustus. That had now come to an end. The empire was on the defensive within fixed borders. Defeated enemies, from whom the bulk of the slaves were recruited, were being supplied in decreasing numbers by the Roman army. One had to buy them from the barbarians. And should not the Germans also have appeared on the market as sellers? The Germans who were already selling slaves according to Tacitus (Germania, 24), who were constantly at war with each other, who, like the Frisians, when money was scarce paid their tax to the Romans by giving their wives and children into slavery and who already in the third century, if not before, sailed on the Baltic Sea and whose maritime expeditions in the North Sea, from the Saxon voyages of the third century to the Norman voyages of the tenth, had as their main object, alongside other forms of piracy, the hunt for slaves—almost exclusively for the trade?—the same Germans who, a few centuries later, both during the migration of the peoples and in their wars against the Slavs acted as the prime slave hunters and slave traders of their time? Either we must assume that the Germans of the second and third centuries were quite different people from all the other neighbours of the Romans, and quite different from their own descendants of the third, fourth and fifth centuries and later, or we must admit that they also largely participated in the slave trade to Italy, which at the time was held to be quite decent and even honourable. And then the mysterious veil falls, which otherwise conceals the German export trade of that time.

Here we must return to the Baltic traffic of those times. While the coast of the Kattegat has almost no Roman finds to show, the southern coast of the Baltic as far as Livland, Schleswig-Holstein, the southern fringes and the interior of the Danish islands, the southern and south-eastern coasts of Sweden, Oeland and Gotland are very rich in them. By far the greater part of these finds belongs to the so-called denarius period, of which we shall have more to say later, and which lasted until the first years of the reign of Septimius Severus, i.e. to about 200. Tacitus already calls the Suiones strong by virtue of their rowing fleets and says that they honour wealth; hence they surely already practised maritime trade. Shipping, which first developed in the Belts and in the Oeresund and Oelandsund and in coastal navigation, had to dare on to the high seas to draw Bornholm and Gotland into its circle; it had to have acquired considerable assurance in the handling of vessels to develop the lively traffic the centre of which was the island of Gotland, farthest away from the continent. Here, indeed, more than 3,200 Roman silver denarii have been found up to 1873, against about 100 on Oeland, barely 50 on the Swedish mainland, 200 on Bornholm and 600 in Denmark and Schleswig (of these 428 in a single find, Slagelse on Zealand). An analysis of these finds shows that down to the year 161, when Marcus Aurelius became emperor, only a few, but from then on to the end of the century, masses of Roman denarii came to Gotland. In the last half of the second century shipping in the Baltic must already have achieved a considerable development; that it existed already earlier is shown by Ptolemy’s statement that the distance from the Vistula mouth to Scandia was 1,200 to 1,600 stadia (30 to 40 geographical miles). Both distances are about right for the eastern point of Blekinge as for the southern tip of Oeland or Gotland, depending on whether one measures from Rixhöft or Neufahrwasser and Pillau respectively. They can only rest on seamen’s reports, just like the other distance measurements along the German coast to the mouths of the Vistula.

That this sea traffic on the Baltic was not practised by the Romans is indicated, firstly, by their altogether nebulous concepts about Scandinavia and, secondly, by the absence of any finds of Roman coins on the Kattegat and in Norway. The Cimbric Cape (Skagen), which the Romans reached under Augustus, and from which they saw the endless sea spreading out, seems to have remained the limit of their direct sèa traffic. Hence the Germans themselves sailed on the Baltic and maintained the intercourse which brought Roman money and Roman manufactures to Scandinavia. Nor could it have been otherwise. Beginning with the second half of the third century the Saxon maritime expeditions appear quite suddenly on the coasts of Gaul and Britain, and that with a daring and assurance which they could not have acquired overnight, which rather presupposes long familiarity with navigation on the open sea. And the Saxons, by whom we must here also understand all the peoples of the Cimbric peninsula, hence also Frisians, Angles and Jutes, could only have acquired this familiarity on the Baltic. This big inland sea, without tides, where the Atlantic sou’westers only arrive having exhausted their fury in great part on the North Sea, this extensive, long basin with its many islands, its shallow, closed-in bays and straits, where on crossing from shore to shore one cannot see land only for short distances, was as if made to serve a newly developing navigation as training waters. Here the Swedish rock drawings, attributed to the bronze age, with their many representations of rowing boats, indicate a maritime traffic of great antiquity. Here the Nydam bog-find in Schleswig presents us with a boat made of oak timbers, 70 feet long and eight to nine feet wide, dated to the beginning of the third century, and quite suitable for voyaging on the high seas. Here that boat-building technique and sea-faring experience quietly grew which made possible the later conquering expeditions of Saxons and Normans on the high seas and laid the foundations which enabled the Germanic people to stand at the head of all sea-faring peoples of the world to this day.

Roman coins which reached Germany before the end of the second century were predominantly silver denarii (1 denarius = 1.06 mark). And moreover, as Tacitus informs us, the Germans preferred the old, well-known coins with serrated rim, the design including a team of two horses. Indeed, among the older coins many of these serrati bigatique have been found. These old coins only had some 5 to 10 per cent copper added to the silver; Trajan already ordered that 20 per cent copper be added to the silver and the Germans do not seem to have noticed this. But when Septimius Severus from 198 onwards raised the addition to 50-60 per cent, the Germans thought it too bad; these devalued later denarii occur in the finds only quite exceptionally, the importation of Roman money ceased. It only began again after Constantine, in the year 312, established the gold solidus as the monetary unit (72 solidi to the Roman pound of 327 g of fine gold, hence 1 solidus = 4.55 g fine = 12.70 marks) and then it was predominantly gold coins, solidi, which came to Germany, but even more so to Oeland and particularly Gotland. This second period of Roman money importation, the solidus period, lasted to the end of the Western Empire for West Roman coins, and for Byzantine coins up to Anastasius (died 518). Most of the finds have been made in Sweden, on the Danish islands, and a few on the German Baltic coast; in the German interior they are sporadic.

The counterfeiting of coins by Septimius Severus and his successors does not, however, suffice to explain the sudden cessation of trade relations between Germans and Romans. Other causes must have come into play. One is evidently to be sought in the political situation. In the beginning of the third century the aggressive war of the Germans against Rome started, and by 250 it had flared up all along the line from the Danube mouths to the Rhine delta. Of course, no regular trade could be conducted by the warring parties in these circumstances. But these sudden, general, persistent aggressive wars themselves require an explanation. Internal Roman conditions do not explain them; on the contrary, as yet the empire resisted everywhere successfully and between individual periods of wild anarchy strong emperors were still produced, particularly around this time. The attacks must therefore have been conditioned by changes among the Germans themselves. And here again the finds provide the explanation.

At the beginning of the sixties of our century finds of outstanding importance were made in two Schleswig peatbogs, which, carefully studied by Engelhardt in Copenhagen, have now, after various wanderings, been deposited in the Museum in Kiel. They are distinguished from other, similar finds by the coins belonging to them, which establish their age with fair certainty. One of these finds, from the Taschberg (Danish Thorsbjerg) moor near Süderbrarup, contains 37 coins from Nero to Septimius Severus; the other, from the Nydam moor, a peat-covered, silted-up sea bay, 34 coins from Tiberius to Macrinus (218). Hence the finds are without doubt from the period between 220 and 250. They contain not only objects of Roman origin but also numerous others, made in the country itself and which, being almost perfectly preserved thanks to the ferrous peat water, reveal with amazing clarity the state of the north German metal industry, weaving and shipbuilding, and through the runic letters even the writing in use in the first half of the third century.

Here we are even more struck by the level of the industry itself. The fine fabrics, the delicate sandals, and the neatly worked leather straps bear witness to a much higher stage of culture than that of the Germans of Tacitus; but what arouses particular amazement is the local metal work.

Linguistic comparisons show that the Germans brought the knowledge of metals and their uses with them from their Asiatic homeland. The art of smelting and working metal was perhaps also known to them, but they had barely retained it at the time when they came into collision with the Romans. At least the writers of the first century give no indication that iron or bronze were produced and worked between Rhine and Elbe; they rather suggest the opposite. Tacitus, it is true, says of the Gothines (in Upper Silesia?) that they were digging for iron, and Ptolemy attributes ironworks to the neighbouring Quadi; both may again have acquired a knowledge of smelting from the Danube area. Nor do the finds of the first century documented by coins contain any local metal products anywhere, but only Roman ones; and how could the masses of Roman metal ware have got to Germany if a home metalworking industry had existed there? Ancient casting moulds, incomplete castings and waste of bronze are indeed found there, but never with coins to document their age; in all probability these are traces of pre-Germanic times, the residue of the work of itinerant Etruscan bronze casters. In any case, the question whether the German immigrants had lost the art of metalworking completely is pointless; all the evidence goes to show that no, or hardly any, metalworking was practised in the first century.

Here now the Taschberg moor finds suddenly turn up and reveal to us an unexpectedly high level of the indigenous metal industry. Buckles, metal plates for mountings, decorated with animal and human heads; a silver helmet which completely frames the face, leaving only eyes, nose and mouth free; chain armour of wire netting, which presupposes very laborious operations, since the wire had first to be hammered (wire drawing was not invented until 1306), and a head ring of gold, not to mention other objects the indigenous origin of which might be disputed. These finds agree with others—those from the Nydam moor and bog finds from Fyn, and lastly a find from Bohemia (Hofovice), likewise discovered at the beginning of the sixties, which contains magnificent bronze disks with human heads, buckle clips, etc., quite in the manner of the Taschberg finds, hence probably also of the same period.

Beginning with the third century the metal industry will have spread over the whole German area, being increasingly perfected; by the time of the migration of the peoples, say by the end of the fifth century, it reached a relatively very high level. Not only iron and bronze, gold and silver also were worked regularly, Roman coins imitated in gold bracteates, the base metals gilded; inlaid work, enamel and filigree work occur; highly artistic ornaments in good taste, only in part imitating Roman work, are found on otherwise often crudely made pieces, especially on clips and buckles or fibulae, which have certain characteristic forms in common. Buckles from Kerch on the Sea of Azov are lying in the British Museum next to quite similar ones found in England; they could be from the same manufactory. The style of these pieces is basically the same, from Sweden to the Lower Danube and from the Black Sea to France and England, though often with quite clearly distinguishable local peculiarities. This first period of the German metal industry came to an end on the continent with the end of the migration of the peoples and the general acceptance of Christianity; in England and Scandinavia it lasted a little longer.

That this industry was widespread among the Germans in the 6th and 7th centuries and that it had already become a separate branch of industry is proved by local laws [Volksrechte]. Smiths, swordmakers, gold- and silversmiths are frequently mentioned, in the Alamannic law even smiths who have passed a public examination (publice probati). Bavarian law punishes theft from a church, a ducal court, a smithy or a mill with harsher penalties “because these four are public buildings and are always open”. In Frisian law the goldsmith has a higher wergeld by one fourth than other people of his estate; Salic law estimates the simple bondsman at 12 solidi, but one who is a smith (faber) at 35.

We have already mentioned shipbuilding. The Nydam boats are rowing boats, the bigger one, made of oak, for fourteen pairs of rowers; the smaller one is of pine. Oars, rudder and scoops were still lying inside. It was not until the Germans began to navigate the North Sea, too, that they seem to have adopted sails from the Romans and Celts.

They knew pottery already at the time of Tacitus, but probably only hand pottery. The Romans had large potteries on the borders, particularly inside the Limes in Swabia and Bavaria, which also employed Germans, as is proved by the workers’ names burnt into the pots. With these workers the knowledge of glazing and the potter’s wheel and also higher technical skill will have come to Germany. Glassmaking, too, was known to the Germans who broke in across the Danube; glass vessels, coloured glass beads and glass insets in metal ware, all of German origin, have often been found in Bavaria and Swabia.

Finally, we now find runic writing widely spread and generally used. The Taschberg find has a sword sheath and a shieldboss which are ornamented with runes. The same runes are found on a gold ring found in Walachia, on buckles from Bavaria and Burgundy, and lastly, on the oldest runic stones in Scandinavia. It is the more complete runic alphabet, the one from which the Anglo-Saxon runes were later derived; it contains seven more characters than the Norse runic writing which predominated later in Scandinavia and indicates also an older linguistic form than the one in which the oldest Norse has been preserved. It was, incidentally, an extremely clumsy system of writing, consisting of Roman and Greek letters so changed that they were easily scratched [eingeritzt = writan] on stone, metal and especially on wooden staves. The rounded forms had to give way to angular shapes; only vertical or inclined strokes were possible, not horizontal ones on account of the wood grain; this way, however, it became a very clumsy writing for parchment or paper. And indeed, as far as we can see, it has only served for religious and magic purposes and for inscriptions, perhaps also for other brief communications; as soon as the need for real literary writing was felt, as among the Goths and later the Anglo-Saxons, it was discarded and a new adaptation of the Greek or Roman alphabet made which preserved only individual runic characters.

Finally, the Germans will also have made considerable progress in tillage and cattle raising in the period here discussed. The restriction to permanent settlement forced them to it; the enormous population growth, which overflowed in the migration of the peoples, would have been impossible without it. Many a stretch of virgin forest must have been cleared, and most of the “Hochäcker”—stretches of wood which show traces of ancient cultivation—among them, in as far as they are situated on territory that was then German. Special proofs are here, of course, lacking. But if Probus already, towards the end of the third century, preferred German horses for his cavalry, and if the large white cattle, which replaced the small, black Celtic cattle in the Saxon areas of Britain, got here through the Anglo-Saxons, as is now assumed, this indicates a complete revolution also in the cattle raising, and consequently in the agriculture, of the Germans.

* * *

The result of our study is that the Germans made considerable progress in civilisation in the period from Caesar to Tacitus, but that they progressed even more rapidly from Tacitus to the migration of the peoples—about 400. Trade came to them, brought to them Roman industrial products and with these at least some Roman needs; it awakened an industry of their own, which leaned on Roman patterns, to be sure, but at the same time developed quite independently. The bog finds in Schleswig represent the first phase of this industry which can be dated; the finds of the time of the migration of the peoples represent the second phase, showing a higher development. Here it is remarkable that the more westerly peoples were decidedly more backward than those of the interior, and especially of the Baltic coasts. The Franks and Alamanni, and later still the Saxons, produced metal work of a quality inferior to that of the Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, and the peoples who had moved out from the interior—the Goths on the Black Sea and the Lower Danube, the Burgundians in France. The influence of the old trade routes from the Middle Danube along the Elbe and Oder is here not to be gainsaid. At the same time the inhabitants of the coast turned themselves into skilled shipbuilders and bold seafarers; everywhere population was rapidly growing; the territory restricted by the Romans no longer sufficed. New movements of landseeking peoples arose, at first far in the east, until finally the billowing masses irresistibly overflowed at every point, over land and sea, to new territories.

NOTE: THE GERMAN PEOPLES

Roman armies only reached the interior of Germany proper by a few routes of march and during a short period of time, and then only as far as the Elbe; nor did merchants and other travellers get there often, or far into it up to Tacitus’ time. Hence it is not surprising that intelligence on this country and its inhabitants is so meagre and contradictory; it is rather surprising that we learn as much for certain as we do.

Even the two Greek geographers among our sources can only be used without reservations where they find independent confirmation. Both had only book learning. They were collectors and in their own way and according to their resources also critical sifters of material now largely lost to us. They lacked personal knowledge of the country. Strabo makes the Lippe, so well known to the Romans, flow into the North Sea parallel with the Ems and Weser, instead of into the Rhine, and is honest enough to admit that the country beyond the Elbe is completely unknown. While he disposes of the contradictions in his sources and his own doubts by means of a naive rationalism which often recalls the beginning of our century, the scientific geographer Ptolemy attempts to allot to the individual German peoples mentioned in his sources mathematically determined locations in the inexorable grid of his map. Ptolemy’s geography of Germany is as misleading as his work as a whole is grandiose for his time. In the first place the material available to him is for the greater part vague and contradictory, often directly wrong. Secondly, however, his map is wrongly drawn, many rivers and mountain ranges are quite wrongly entered. It is as if an untravelled Berlin geographer, say about 1820, felt obliged to fill the empty spaces on the map of Africa by bringing into harmony the information of all sources since Leo Africanus and allotting to every river and every mountain range a definite location, to every people a precise seat. Such attempts to do the impossible can only worsen the errors of the sources used. Thus, Ptolemy entered many peoples twice, Laccobardi on the lower Elbe, Langobardi from the middle Rhine to the middle Elbe; he has two Bohemias, one inhabited by Marcomanni, the other by Bainochaimi, etc. While Tacitus says specifically that there are no cities in Germany, Ptolemy, barely 50 years later, already is able to name 96 places. Many of those names may well be true place names; Ptolemy seems to have gathered much intelligence from merchants, who at this time already visited the east of Germany in greater numbers and began to learn the names of the places they visited, which were gradually becoming fixed. The origin of certain others is shown by the example of the alleged town of Siatutanda, which our geographer thinks he reads in Tacitus, probably from a bad manuscript, who wrote: ad suatutanda. Side by side we find information of surprising accuracy and of the greatest historical value. Thus Ptolemy is the only ahcient writer who places the Langobardi, under the distorted name Laccobardi, it is true, exactly where to this day we find Bardengau and Bardenwik bear witness to them; similarly, Ingrioni in Engersgau where today we still find Engers on the Rhine at Neuwied. He, also alone, gives the names of the Lithuanian Galindi and Suditi which to this day continue in the East Prussian districts Galinden and Sudauen. But such cases only show his great scholarship, not the correctness of his other statements. Moreover, the text is terribly distorted, especially where the main thing, the names, are concerned.

The Romans remain the most direct sources, particularly those who visited the country themselves. Velleius was in Germany as a soldier and writes as a soldier, approximately in the manner of an officer of the grande armée writing of the expeditions of 1812 and 1813. His account does not enable us to establish the localities even for military events; not surprising in a country without towns. Pliny also served in Germany as a cavalry officer and visited the Chaucian coast among other places. He described all the wars conducted against the Germans in twenty books; this was Tacitus’ source. Moreover Pliny was the first Roman to take a more than military and political interest in the affairs of the barbarian land; his interest was theoretical. His information on the German peoples must therefore be of special importance as resting on the Roman scientific encyclopaedist’s own enquiries. It is traditionally maintained that Tacitus had been in Germany, but I cannot find the evidence. At all events, at that time he could have gathered direct information only from near the Rhine and Danube.

Two classical works have tried in vain to square the charts of peoples in the Germania [of Tacitus] and of Ptolemy with one another and with the chaos of other ancient information: Kaspar Zeuss’ Deutsche and Jacob Grimm’s Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. Where these two brilliant scholars did not succeed, nor anybody since, we will have to regard the task as insoluble with our present resources. The inadequacy of the resources is clear from the fact alone that both had to resort to the construction of false auxiliary theories; Zeuss thought that Ptolemy should have the last word in all disputed questions, although nobody has criticised Ptolemy’s fundamental errors more sharply than he did; Grimm believed that the might which overthrew the Roman world empire must have grown on more extensive ground than the area between Rhine, Danube and Vistula, and that therefore, with the Goths and Dacians, the greater part of the country in the north and north-east of the lower Danube should be taken as German, too. The assumptions of both Zeuss and Grimm are today obsolete.

Let us try to bring at least some clarity into the matter by limiting the subject. If we succeed in establishing a more general grouping of the peoples into a few principal branches, later investigations into detail will have gained firm ground. And here we are offered a point of departure by Pliny in a passage which has proved more and more reliable in the course of the enquiry and certainly leads to fewer difficulties and involves us in fewer contradictions than any other.

When we begin with Pliny we must indeed drop the unconditional validity of Tacitus’ triad and the old legend of Mannus and his three sons Ing, Isk and Ermin. But firstly, Tacitus himself is unable to do anything with his Ingaevones, Iscaevones, and Herminones. He makes not the least attempt to group the peoples he lists individually under these three principal branches, and secondly, no one else has succeeded in doing this. Zeuss makes a terrific effort to force the Gothic peoples, whom he conceives as ‘Tstaevones”, into the triad, and thereby only aggravates the confusion. As for the Scandinavians, he does not even attempt to bring them into it and construes them as a fourth principal branch. But with that the triad is destroyed quite as much as with the five principal branches of Pliny.

Now let us look at these five branches individually.

I. Vindili, quorum pars Burgundiones, Varini, Carini, Guttones. Here we have three peoples, the Vandals, Burgundians and the Goths themselves, of whom it is established, firstly, that they spoke Gothic dialects, and secondly that at that time they lived deep in the east of Germany: Goths at and beyond the Vistula mouth; Burgundians, placed by Ptolemy in the area of the Warta and as far as the Vistula and Vandals, placed in Silesia by Dio Cassius, who calls the Riesengebirge after them. We should surely also reckon to this Gothic main branch, to name it by the language, all those peoples whose dialects Grimm derives from the Gothic, that is, in the first place the areas to which Procopius directly ascribes the Gothic language, including the Vandals. We know nothing of their earlier domicile, nor of that of the Heruli, whom Grimm places among the Goths, side by side with Skiri and Rugii. Pliny names the Skiri on the Vistula, Tacitus the Rugii immediately next to the Goths on the coast. Hence the Gothic dialect occupied a fairly compact region between the Vandal mountains (Riesengebirge), the Oder and the Baltic up to and beyond the Vistula.

We do not know who the Carini were. Some difficulty is caused by the Varini. Tacitus lists them next to the Angles among the seven peoples who sacrifice to Nerthus, of whom Zeuss already remarked, rightly, that they look uncommonly like Ingaevones But the Angles are counted by Ptolemy among the Suebi, which is obviously wrong. Zeuss sees in one or two names distorted by the same geographer the Varini and accordingly he places them in the Havelland and counts them as Suebi. The heading of the ancient common law identifies Varini and Thuringians without qualification; but the law itself is common to Varini and Angles. After all this we must leave it in doubt whether the Varini are to be reckoned to the Gothic or the Ingaevonian branch; since they have completely disappeared the question is not of great importance.

II. Altera pars Ingaevones, quorum pars Cimbri, Teutoni ac Chaucorum gentes.

Pliny here allocates the Cimbric Peninsula and the coastal districts between Elbe and Ems to the Ingaevones as their domicile. Of the three peoples here named, the Chauci were surely very close relatives of the Frisians. To this day the Frisian language predominates along the North Sea, in Dutch West Friesland, in Oldenburg Saterland and in Schleswig North Friesland. During the Carolingian period Frisian was spoken almost exclusively along the whole coast, from the Sinkfal (the bay which today still forms the boundary between Belgian Flanders and Dutch Zeeland) to Sylt and Schleswig Widau, and probably still a good deal further north; the Saxon language only on both sides of the Elbe mouth, to the sea.

Pliny evidently understands by the Cimbri and Teutons the then inhabitants of the Cimbric Chersonesus, who therefore belonged to the Chauci-Frisian language branch. With Zeuss and Grimm we must therefore see in the North Frisians direct descendants of these oldest peninsular Germans.

It is true that Dahlmann (Geschichte von Dänemark) maintains that the north Frisians immigrated into the peninsula only in the fifth century, from the south-west. But he does not cite the smallest evidence for this statement which has rightly been left quite out of consideration in all later studies.

Ingaevonian would accordingly here be in the first place synonymous with Frisian, in the sense that we name the entire linguistic branch after the dialect of which alone older memorials and surviving dialects remain. But is the extent of the Ingaevonian branch thereby exhausted? Or is Grimm right when he comprises in it the totality of what he, not quite accurately, terms Low German, that is alongside the Frisians also the Saxons?

To begin with, we may admit that Pliny allots to the Saxons quite the wrong place when he reckons the Cherusci among the Herminones. We shall find later that indeed no option is left but to reckon the Saxons also among the Ingaevones and thus to understand this main branch as the Frisian-Saxon one.

Here it is in place to mention the Angles, whom Tacitus possibly, Ptolemy definitely reckons among the Suebi. The latter places them on the right bank of the Elbe, opposite the Langobardi, by whom he can only mean the true Langobardi on the lower Elbe if the statement is at all to be taken to imply anything reliable; hence the Angles must have come from Lauenburg approximately as far as the Prignitz. Later we find them in the peninsula itself, where their name has been preserved and whence they went to Britain together with the Saxons. Their language now appears as an element of Anglo-Saxon, in particular the decidedly Frisian element of this newly formed dialect. Whatever may have become of those Angles who either remained behind in the interior of Germany or strayed there, this fact alone compels us to reckon the Angles among the Ingaevones, in particular to their Frisian branch. To them is due the far more Frisian than Saxon vocalisation of Anglo-Saxon and the fact that the further development of this language in many cases proceeds strikingly in parallel with that of the Frisian dialects. Of all the continental dialects the Frisian are today closest to the English. Similarly, the change of guttural sounds into sibilants in English is not of French but of Frisian origin. English ch = c instead of k, English dz for g before soft vowels could certainly originate from Frisian tz, tj for k, dz for g, but never from French ch and g.

With the Angles we must also count the Jutes to the Frisian-Ingaevonian branch, whether they were already occupying the peninsula in the time of Pliny or Tacitus or did not immigrate there until later. Grimm finds their name in that of the Eudoses, one of Tacitus’ peoples who worshipped Nerthus; if the Angles are Ingaevonian, it becomes difficult to allot the remaining peoples of this group to another branch. In that case the Ingaevones would extend to the area of the Oder mouth, and the gap between them and the Gothic peoples is filled.

III. Proximi autem Rheno Iscaevones (alias Istaevones), quorum pars Sicambri.

Already Grimm, and others after him, Waitz for example, more or less identify the Iscaevones and Franks. But their language confuses Grimm. From the middle of the 9th century all German documents of the realm of the Franks were composed in a dialect which cannot be distinguished from Old High German; hence Grimm assumes that Old Franconian perished in the alien country and at home was replaced by High German, and so he eventually reckoned the Franks to the High Germans.

Grimm himself asserts as a result of his investigation of preserved linguistic remains that Old Franconian has the value of an independent dialect holding an intermediary position between Saxon and High German. This suffices here for the time being; a closer investigation of the Frankish linguistic situation, where much is still unclear, must be reserved for a special note.

True enough, the area allotted to the Iscaevonian branch is comparatively small for an entire main German branch, and moreover one which has played such a mighty role in history. From the Rheingau onwards it accompanies the Rhine, extending inland to the sources of the Dill, Sieg, Ruhr, Lippe and Ems, northwards cut off from the sea by the Frisians and Chauci, and at the mouth of the Rhine penetrated by splinters of other peoples, mostly of Chattish origin: Batavi, Chattuari, etc. The Germans settled on the left bank of the lower Rhine will then also belong to the Franks; but also the Tribocci, Vangiones and Nemetes? The small extent of this area is explained, however, by the resistance offered to the expansion of the Iscaevones on the Rhine by the Celts and since Caesar the Romans; while in their rear the Cherusci had already settled, and on their flank Suebi, particularly the Chatti, hemmed them in more and more, as Caesar attests. Here a dense population, for German conditions, was compressed into a small space, as is proved by the constant pressing across the Rhine: at first by conquering hordes, later by voluntary transfer to Roman territory, as with the Ubii. For the same reason the Romans easily succeeded here, and only here, in transferring considerable sections of Iscaevonian peoples to Roman territory already at an early period.

The investigation to be made in the note on the Franconian dialect will prove that the Franks form a separate group of Germans, composed of various branches, speaking a particular dialect divided into many subdialects, in short possessing all the marks of a main German branch, as is required if they are to be declared identical with the Iscaevones. On the individual peoples of this main branch J. Grimm has already said what is necessary. In addition to the Sugambri he reckons among them Ubii, Chamavi, Bructeri, Tencteri and Usipetes, that is the peoples who inhabited the area on the right bank of the Rhine which we have earlier designated as Iscaevonic.

IV.- Mediterranei Hermiones, quorum Suevi, Hermunduri, Chatti, Cherusci.

J. Grimm already identified the Herminones, to use the more correct spelling of Tacitus, with the High Germans. The name Suebi, which according to Caesar covered all High Germans as far as he knew them, is beginning to become differentiated. Thuringians (Hermunduri) and Hessians (Chatti) appear as separate peoples. The rest of the Suebi still remain undifferentiated. Leaving aside as inscrutable the many mysterious names which get lost already in the next centuries, we must, however, distinguish among these Suebi three great branches of High German tongue which later played their part in history: the Alamanni-Swabians, the Bavarians and the Langobardi. We know for certain that the Langobardi lived on the left bank of the lower Elbe, about the Bardengau, separated from their other branch comrades, advanced into the midst of Ingaevonian peoples. Tacitus describes this isolated position, which had to be maintained by prolonged fighting, excellently, without knowing its cause. We also know since Zeuss and Grimm that the Bavarians lived in Bohemia under the name of Marcomanni, the Hessians and Thuringians in their present abodes and in the neighbouring areas to the south. Since Roman territory began south of the Franks, Hessians and Thurihgians, no other space remained for the Swabians-Alamanni than that between Elbe and Oder, in the modern Mark Brandenburg and the Kingdom of Saxony; and here we find a Suebian people, the Semnones. Thus they were probably identical with these, bordering on Ingaevones in the north-west and on Gothic branches in the north-east and east.

So far everything seems to go fairly smoothly. But now Pliny reckons also the Cherusci among the Herminones, and here he decidedly makes a slip. Caesar already distinguishes them definitely from the Suebi, among whom he still reckons the Chatti. Nor does Tacitus know anything of Cherusci belonging to any High German branch. Neither does Ptolemy, who extends the name Suebi to the Angles. The mere fact that the Cherusci filled the space between Chatti and Hermunduri in the south and Langobardi in the north-east is not enough by a long way to conclude from that on any close branch kinship; although it may have been precisely that which misled Pliny here.

As far as I know, no scholar whose opinion matters counts the Cherusci among the High Germans. This only leaves the question whether they are to be reckoned among the Ingaevones or the Iscaevones. The few names which have come down to us show a Frankish stamp; ch instead of the later h in Cherusci, Chariomerus; e instead of i in Segestes, Segimerus, Segimundus. But almost all German names which came to the Romans from the banks of the Rhine seem to have been handed down to them by Franks in Frankish form. Moreover, we do not know whether the guttural aspirate of the first shift of the consonants, in the seventh century still ch with the Franks, did not sound ch with all West Germans in the first century and was only later weakened to the h common to them all. Nor do we otherwise find any branch kinship of the Cherusci with the Iscaevones, such as showed itself when the Sugambri took in the remaining Usipetes and Tencteri after they had escaped from Caesar. Moreover, the country on the right bank of the Rhine occupied at the time of Varus by the Romans and treated by them as a province coincides with IscaevonianFrankish territory. Here Aliso and the other Roman forts were situated; of the Cheruscan country at most only the strip between the Osning and the Weser seems to have been actually occupied. Beyond it, the Chatti, Cherusci, Chauci and Frisians were more or less uncertain allies, held in check by fear, but autonomous in their internal affairs and free of permanent Roman garrisons. In this area the Romans, when met with resistance of any strength, always made the branch boundary the limit of conquest for the time being. Thus Caesar had done in Gaul; at the border of the Belgae he halted and only crossed it when he thought that he had made sure of Gaul proper, so-called Celtic Gaul.

Nothing remains but to reckon the Cherusci and their nearest relatives among the smaller neighbouring peoples to the Saxon branch, and hence among the Ingaevones, after J. Grimm and the usual view. The fact that the old Saxon a is purest preserved just in the old Cheruscan area, against the o in the genitive plural and weak masculine which predominates in Westphalia, suggests the same thing. In this way all the difficulties disappear; the Ingaevonian branch, like the others, is given a fairly rounded territory into which only the Herminonian Langobardi penetrate a little. Of the two great divisions of the branch, the Frisian-AnglianJutish occupies the coast and at least the northern and western parts of the peninsula, the Saxon division the inner country and perhaps also now already a part of North Albingia, where soon afterwards Ptolemy first mentions the Saxones by name.

V. Quinta pars Peucini, Basternae contermini Dacis.

The little we know of these two peoples stamps them as branch relatives of the Goths, as does even the form of the name, Bastarnae. If Pliny lists them as a separate branch, this is probably due to the fact that he heard of them from fhe lower Danube, through Greek intermediaries, while his knowledge of the Gothic peoples on the Oder and Vistula had been gained on the Rhine and the North Sea, so that the connection between Goths and Bastarnae escaped him. Both Bastarnae and Peucini are German peoples who stayed behind at the Carpathians and the Danube mouths and continued migrating for some time, preparing the later great realm of the Goths, in which they became immersed.

VI. I mention the Hilleviones, the collective name under which Pliny lists the German Scandinavians, only for the sake of completeness and in order once more to establish that all the ancient authors allot to this main branch only the islands (which include Sweden and Norway), excluding them from the Cimbric peninsula.

Thus we have five main German branches with five principal dialects.

The Gothic, in the east and north-east, has -ê in the genitive plural of the masculine and neuter, -0 and -ê in the feminine; the weak masculine has -a. The inflected forms of the present tense (the indicative) are still close to those of the originally related languages, in particular Greek and Latin, if the shifting of the consonants is borne in mind.

The Ingaevonic, in the north-west, has -a in the genitive plural, and also for the weak masculine; in the present indicative all three persons in the plural end in -d or -dh, all nasal sounds being expunged. It is divided into the two main branches of the Saxon and Frisian, which merge again into one in the Anglo-Saxon. Close to the Frisian branch is

the Scandinavian; genitive plural ending in -a, weak masculine in -i, weakened from -a, as shown by the whole declension. In the present indicative the original -s of the second person singular passes into -r, the first person plural retains -m, the second -dh, the remaining persons are more or less mutilated.

These three face the two southern branches: the Iscaevonic and Herminonic, in the later mode of expression the Franconian and the High German. The two have in common the weak masculine ending -o; most probably also the genitive plural ending -o, although it is not substantiated in the Franconian, and in the oldest western (Salic) documents the accusative plural ends in -as. In the present tense the two dialects, as far as we can document this for the Franconian, are close and, in this respect like Gothic, closely correspond with the originally related languages. But the whole course of linguistic history, from the very significant, archaic peculiarities of the oldest Franconian to the great differences between the modern dialects of both, precludes us from throwing the two dialects together into one; just as the whole course of the history of the peoples themselves makes it impossible for us to put them both into one main branch.

If throughout this investigation I have considered only the forms of inflection and not the phonetic relations, this is to be explained from the considerable changes which have occurred in the latter—at least in many dialects—between the first century and the time when our oldest linguistic sources were drawn up. In Germany I need only recall the second shift of the consonants; in Scandinavia the alliterations of the oldest songs show how much the language altered between the time when they were composed and when they were written down. Whatever it may still be possible to do in this respect will most likely be done by competent German linguists; here it would only have made the investigation unnecessarily complicated.