Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/77

THE BARBARIAN WORLD 41 Caesar speaks briefly of the character and customs of these German barbarians in his account of his conquest of Gaul, but the chief, and indeed almost the sole, c r 1 i'ii , Sources for description of them which has come down to us the early from Roman times is the brief Ger mania of Germans Tacitus, written in 98 a.d. Scholars have fought almost tooth and nail over the interpretation of a sentence or the wording of a phrase in this precious text. Every student of the Middle Ages should read for himself the dozen of its pages that deal with the traits and institutions of the Ger- mans as a whole, and get a first-hand knowledge of this original source which forms the basis of all modern accounts of the early Germans. Although Tacitus was one of the ablest of Roman historians, one caution must be observed in reading him. In his other historical writings we find him bitter against many persons and things in Roman society and politics; this bias and discontent may make him too ready to see good in the Germans and their customs. When, for instance, he says that among the Germans freedmen are of slight account, except in those tribes where the king elevates them above freemen and even nobles, he is prob- ably sneering at the imperial freedmen of Rome — who often held high governmental positions under the emperor — rather than accurately depicting German conditions. When he describes German funerals as exceedingly simple, he probably has it in mind to reprove Roman pomp and luxury, and ignores the elaborate games and feasting that often accompanied the funeral of a German chieftain. Aside from Caesar and Tacitus, our sources of information about the early Germans may be roughly summarized as follows: (1) primitive utensils, valuables, and other human remains, which are found most richly in excavations made in Scandinavia; (2) brief and usually unsatisfactory inci- dental allusions to the Germans in the works of Greek and Roman geographers, travelers, romancers, and historians, of whom the last simply recount the wars of Rome against the barbarians and tell little of the Germans themselves; (3) laws issued in Latin, after the break-up of the Roman