a young man by the revolt of some Teutonic races in the wars that followed Nero's death in 68 A.D.
For supposing a satirical element in the 'Germany' there is plausible ground. His praise of the German wife is a scarcely concealed reproach of the Roman matron of his time. The Germans, he tells us, made no wills; the legacy-hunters of Rome were as notorious as the informers. The Roman nobles were often deeply in debt, and money-lenders were many and troublesome; whereas the virtuous Germans, at least of the interior—for those on the eastern Rhine-bank were beginning to be civilised and corrupted—cared little for gold or silver; and, indeed, were such outer-barbarians that their chieftains held the silver cups and salvers which prætors or proconsuls had given them as cheap as those of clay! Again, they were not at all, in respect of funerals, "noble animals, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave."[1] They did not heap garments or spices on the funeral pyre; they simply observed the custom of burning the bodies of illustrious men with certain kinds of wood. A turf mound formed their tombs; monuments, with their lofty and elaborate splendour, they rejected as oppressive to the dead. Whereas Pliny the elder says that the amount of spices consumed at Poppæa's (the wife of Nero) funeral exceeded a whole year's produce of Arabia—an exaggeration, probably, yet not an insignificant one. More instances of the contrasts between Roman and Teutonic manners might he culled from the 'Germany.' In fact, when two extremes of civilisation
- ↑ Sir T. Browne's 'Urn Burial.'
