The decisions of Augustus and Tiberius not to attempt the conquest of Germany were among the pivotal events of European history. Had Germany been conquered and Romanized like Gaul, nearly all Europe west of Russia would have had one organization, one government, one classic culture, perhaps one tongue; and central Europe might have served as a buffer against those eastern hordes whose pressure upon the Germans caused the Germanic invasions of Italy.
We call them Germans, but they themselves have never used this name, and no one knows when it came.III They were in classic days a medley of independent tribes occupying Europe between the Rhine and the Vistula, between the Danube and the North and Baltic Seas. Gradually, in the two centuries from Augustus to Aurelius, they passed from migratory hunting and herding to agriculture and village life; but they were still so far nomadic that they rapidly exhausted the land they tilled and then moved on to conquer new acres by the sword. If we may believe Tacitus, war was the German’s meat and drink:
To cultivate the earth, and wait the regular produce of the seasons, is not the maxim of a German; you will more readily persuade him to attack the enemy and provoke honorable wounds on the field of battle. To earn by the sweat of your brow what you might gain at the price of your blood is in the opinion of a German a sluggish principle, unworthy of a soldier.53
The Roman historian, lamenting the deterioration of his own people under luxury and peace, described with the exaggeration of a moralist the martial qualities of the Germans, and the ardor with which the women spurred them into battle, often fighting by their side. Flight from the enemy meant lifelong disgrace, in many cases suicide. Strabo described the Germans as “wilder and taller than the Gauls,”54 and Seneca, as if he had read Tacitus, drew ominous conclusions: “To those vigorous bodies, to those souls unwitting of pleasures, luxury, and wealth, add but a little more tactical skill and discipline—I say no more; you [Romans] will only be able to hold your own against them by returning to the virtues of your sires.”55
In peace, Tacitus reports, these warriors were correspondingly indolent. The men spent their time (presumably after hunting or harvesting) in eating heavy meals of meat and drinking rivers of beer, while the women and children did the work of the home.56 The German bought his wife from her father by a gift of cattle or weapons; he had the power of life and death over her and their children, subject to the approval of the tribal assembly; nevertheless, women were held in high honor, were often asked to decide tribal disputes, and were as free to divorce their husbands as these were to divorce them.57 Some chieftains had several wives, but the usual German family was monogamous and maintained (we are assured) a lofty level of marital morality. Adultery was “seldom heard of” and was punished in the woman by cutting off her hair and driving her naked through the streets to be flogged as she fled. The wife was allowed to practice abortion if she wished,58 but normally she bore many children. A man without children was so rare that wills were not made; it was assumed that the property of the family would go down from father to son, generation after generation.59
Four classes composed the population: (1) bondsmen, some of them slaves, most of them serfs bound to the soil and obliged to pay the landowner in produce; (2) freedmen—unfranchised renters; (3) freemen—landowners and warriors; and (4) nobles—landowners who traced their pedigrees to the gods, but based their power upon substantial patrimonies and armed bodyguards (comites, companions, “counts”). The tribal assembly was composed of nobles, guards, and freemen; they came in arms, chose the chief or king, approved the proposals submitted to them by clashing their spears, or rejected them by a majority of grunts. The second and third classes were partly engaged in handicrafts and the metallurgical industries, in which the Germans excelled; the fourth provided the lords and knights and chivalry of feudal Germany.
Very little cultural superstructure was added to this simple social organization. Religion had at this time barely emerged from nature worship into the cult of anthropomorphic deities. Tacitus calls them Mars, Mercury, and Hercules—probably Tiu (Tyr), Wodin (Odin), and Donar (Tor); we still unwittingly commemorate them, and Freya, the goddess of love, on four days of every week. There was a virgin goddess Hertha (Mother Earth), impregnated by a sky-god; and every imagination and need was supplied by a varied population of fairies, elves, cobolds, nixes, giants, and dwarfs. Human sacrifice was offered to Wodin, perhaps tastier animals to other gods. Worship was conducted in the open air in forests and groves, for the Germans thought it absurd to confine a nature spirit in an abode built by human hands. There was no powerful sacerdotal class like the Druids of Gaul or Britain, but there were priests and priestesses who presided over religious ceremonies, sat as judges in criminal cases, and divined the future by studying the motions and neighings of white horses. As in Gaul, there were bards who sang in rude verse the legends and history of their tribes. A small minority could read and write, and adapted the Latin characters to form the “runes” that serve for their alphabet. Art was primitive, but skillful work was done in gold.
When Rome withdrew her legions from Germany she retained control of the Rhine from source to mouths and divided the majestic valley into two provinces—Upper and Lower Germany. The latter included Holland and the Rhineland south to Cologne. This once lovely city, known to the Romans as Colonia Agrippinensis, had been made a colony (A.D. 50) in honor of Nero’s mother, who had been born there; half a century later it was the most opulent settlement on the Rhine. The province of Upper Germany followed the Rhine southward through Moguntiacum (Mayence), Aquae Aureliae (Baden-Baden), Argentoratum (Strasbourg), and Augusta Rauricorum (Augst) to Vindonissa (Windisch). Nearly all these towns had the usual array of temples, basilicas, theaters, baths, and public statuary. Many of the legionaries sent by Rome to guard the Rhine lived outside their camps, married German girls, and remained as citizens when their term of service was complete. The Rhineland was probably as thickly settled and affluent in Roman days as at any time before the nineteenth century.
Between the Rhine and the Danube, as we have seen, Rome’s military engineers built a fortified road (limes), with a fortress every nine miles, and 300 miles of wall. It served Rome for a century, but availed little when the Roman birth rate fell too far below the German. Still weaker as a frontier was the Danube, which the ancients considered the longest river in the world. South of it lay the half-barbarous provinces of Raetia, Noricum, and Pannonia, approximately composing what our youth knew as Austria-Hungary and Serbia. On the site of modern Augsburg (i.e., Augustus’ town) the Romans established a colony, Augusta Vindelicorum, as a main station on the road from Italy over the Brenner Pass to the Danube. On the river they built two fortress cities—at Vindobona, now Vienna, and at Aquincum on the heights from which Buda looks down upon Pesth. In southeastern Pannonia, on the Save River west of the modern Belgrade, the city of Sirmium (Mitrovica) rose to be in Diocletian’s time one of the four imperial capitals. South of Pannonia, in the province of Dalmatia, the commercial energy of Greeks, Romans, and natives had developed the Adriatic ports of Salona (Spalato), Apollonia (near Valona), and Dyrrhachium (Durazzo). From these provinces below the Danube came imperial Rome’s sturdiest soldiers and, in the third century, the martial emperors who would for 200 years hold back the barbarian avalanche. East of Pannonia lay Dacia (Rumania), with its now vanished capital of Sarmizegetusa. South and east of this Moesia (parts of Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Bulgaria) boasted two cities on the Danube—Singidunum (Belgrade) and Troesmis (Iglitza); one near the Isker—Sardica (Sofia); and three major towns on the Black Sea—Istrus, Tomi (Constanta), and Odessus (Varna). In these harassed settlements Greek civilization and Roman arms struggled in vain to maintain themselves against the Goths, Sarmatians, Huns, and other barbarian tribes breeding and wandering north of the great stream.
It was Rome’s inability to civilize these provinces south of the Danube that led to her fall. The task was too great for a people suffering from old age; the vitality of the master race was ebbing in sterile comfort while the tribes of the north were advancing in reckless health. When Trajan subsidized the Sarmatians to keep the peace it was the beginning of the end; when Marcus Aurelius brought thousands of Germans into the Empire as settlers, the dikes were down. German soldiers were welcomed into the Roman army and rose to positions of command; German families multiplied in Italy while Italian families died. In this process the movement of Romanization was reversed: the barbarians were barbarizing Rome.
Nevertheless, it was a magnificent and precious achievement that the West, if not the North, had been won for the classical heritage. There, at least, the arts of peace had emerged from the travail of war, and men could turn their swords into plowshares without decaying in urban ease and slums. Out of the earthy vigor of Spain and Gaul a new civilization would rise when the barbarian flood would fall; and the seed of despot centuries would come to fruit and pardon in the lands where the merciless legions had brought the law of Rome and the enkindling light of Greece.
I The Ambiani in Amiens, Bellovaci in Beauvais, Bituriges in Bourges, Carnutes in Chartres, Parisii in Paris, Pictones in Poitiers, Remi in Rheims, Senones in Sens, Suessiones in Soissons etc.
II So Haverfield;48 the more widely accepted derivation is from the Latin castrum, fortress, or castra, camp. Most Roman-British towns were designed on the chessboard plan of a Roman camp.
III Rome used the adjective germanus (from germen, offspring) to mean born of the same parents; and in applying it to the Germans they may have had in mind the kinship organization of the Teutonic tribes.