Tacitus Dialogus Agricola and Germania Author:Cornelius Tacitus Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GERMANY Germany proper is separated from Gaul, Raetia, and I Pannonia by the rivers Rhine and Danube; from Sarmatia and Dacia by mountains and mutual suspicio... more »n. The ocean washes its other sides, embracing broad peninsulas and islands of vast size, where lately the disclosures of war have brought to our knowledge new peoples and their kings. The Rhine, rising on an inaccessible peak of the Raetian Alps, takes a slight bend towards the west and mingles its waters in the North Sea. The Danube flows from the gentle slopes of Mount Adnoba, reaching many peoples in its course, .until it forces its way by six mouths into the Pontic Sea. The seventh mouth is drained by marshes. The Germans themselves are, I am inclined to believe, an 2 indigenous people, very little affected by admixture with other races through immigration or intercourse. For in old days emigrants travelled not by land but in ships ; and owing to the limitless extent of the sea beyond our ken, and what I may call its inhospitality, Germany was seldom visited by ships from our clime. Besides, to say nothing of the dangers of the rough and unknown sea, who would leave Asia or Africa or Italy and sail for Germany, with its jnm scenery and severe climate, ill to visit and ill to live in— unless of course it were his fatherland? The ancient songs, which are their sole form of history and tradition, tell the praises of the earth-born god Tuisto, and hissonMannus. These are the fathers and founders of the race. To Mannus they assign three sons, after whom the tribes nearest the sea are called Ingaevones, those in the interior Herminones, and the rest Istaevones. Some people maintain —antiquity invites conjecture—that there are more tribes of divine descent, and more group-names, such as Marsi, Gam- brivii, Suebi, Vandi...« less