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THE ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW NO. XCII.—OCTOBER 1908' Downloaded from The Germans of Caesar ir. http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ E will now consider rather moro in detail the composition of the W confederacy which Ariovistua led. Caeear thus enumerate* the tribes commanded by that chief in the order in which they were ranged in the battlefield : gencratimque constitutrunt Hantdet, MoTcomanoB, Tnbocot, Vangionet, Nemett$, Scdasiot . SUCCOB.1 The Harades did not originally form a part of the confederacy. They arrived in Gaul Beparately. In the address of the Aeduan at University of Sussex on August 31, 2015 Divitiacus, reported by Caesar in chapter ixxi. of his first book, we are told : ptncis mengitms ante Harodnm milia hominnm xxir ad earn veniuent, qnibai looas %o aedea pararentur. In this passage, be it noted, the Harxides are not qualified as Germans, In chapter xxivii. we read again of them as acting quite Beparately : Aedai qoeetam qaod Huudot, qm naper in Gftliiun truuport&ij Msent, fines eomni popnlareotor. Here, again, they are not described as Germane, and are found acting independently of Ariovistua. It w*s later only that they joined his confederacy. We may leave them out of consideration therefore for the present- In regnrd to the Suevi, it would seem that theirs also was a contingent of foreignera which had joined the forces of Ariovistua. He had married a daughter of the Suevian king, and it was not 1 Comm. d» B. O. i. 61. VOL. XJUI —NO. XCII. 8 6- • All righti roerr»d. 628 THE GERMANS OF CAESAR Oct. unnatural that the hitter Bhould supply him with a contingent. Caesar speaks of the hundred paiji of the Suevi who had settled on the further bank of the Rhine and endeavoured to cross that river, and who were led by two brothers called Niiaua and Cimber.* The Suevi clearly belonged to a different community from that of Ario- vistua. Caesar tells UB again that the news about their arrival disturbed him : ne n novt man as Suevorum cam vetenbus copiis AriovisU lese commix- isset, minui fecile reflisti poewt. W« can hardly doubt that the Suevi who are enumerated after- wardi as forming part of his force were Borne of these new hands of Suevi who Caesar was afraid would join the old forces of Ario- Downloaded from viBtus, and that they had nothing to do with his original people.1 The Sedusii eo nomine are not named by any other writer than Caesar. It is curious that in all manuscripts OroaiuB in tran- scribing from Caesar the names of the tribes led by Ariovistus substitutes the name Eduses for Sedusii, and this may possibly be http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ the right form of the name, and recalls the Eudoses of Tacitus, Germ. xl. It will be noticed in confirmation of this that Caesar names the Suevi and Sedusii together. The uncertainty on this matter makes any argument based on it hazardous. Putting aside these adventitious or uncertain elements in hia army, we have four tribes remaining which probably formed the bulk of the forces of Ariovistus. In regard to the Marcornani, they were clearly entire stranger* at University of Sussex on August 31, 2015 to the .Rhine country, and came from Central or Eastern Europe. "Where their original home was we cannot say exactly, for it would seem that they did not occupy Bohemia until the reign of Maroboduu*, which was later From what we know of them and their sister tribe, the Quadi, it is by no means certain that they were Teutons by race. Those who rely on their name as proving it have overlooked such Keltic names OB Marcomagos (in the Peutinger Table, now called Marmagen), Marcodurum (Tac. Hitt. iv. 28), Cenomani, and Paemani. In Keltic marca means a horse. At all events, they seem to have had a good many points in common, in customs and in dress, with the Getae and Daci. Bremer has suggested that Ariovistus was a chief of the Marco- mani, which is not improbable. The other three tribes mentioned are banded together by their history, and have generally been supposed to have lived in tho country immediately beyond the Rhine, in Wurtemberg and 1 B. G. L 87 ' Th* Boman «rit«n who wroi* mora than a eentorj later, and whow aothoritj tlwefort U T«7 small, as U«U, UL S, and Plinj, H. N iL 67, 170, t**m to point r, to ArkxrliUu when ihtj rtftr to tbt king of tht Socri. 1908 THE GERMANS OF CAESAR 627 Baden, before the campaign of ArioviBtus. Of thia I know of no adequate evidence, and it seems to me to be improbable. None of their names occura in the nomenclature of the country east of the Ehine, and I believe they were brought with him by Ariovitjtus from much further east. This is, at all events, highly probable in regard to one of them, and perhaps the history of all three must be treated as substantially the same. The Vangionea have a name which is best explained aa derived from the personal name Vangio. A Vangio, son-in-law of VanniuB, king of the Quadi,* is a person known to history, and Vangiones may merely mean the people of Vangio, and may have been BO named from some chief of the Quadi, who were closely connected in history with Pannonia and the land of the Getae. It ia at least carious that Lucan in hia Phartalia, i. 430, one of the few poets who apostrophi&e them, Downloaded from says of the Vangiones, et qui U laxit tmitantur, Sarmata, bracts Vangiona. The Sarnmtae were near relatives of the Getae. Ptolemy seems to duplicate the name Vangionee as he does other names. One tribe of the name he places west of the Rhine, and he writes it* name Ovayjlopit; and east of the Upper Rhine he http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ puts another tribe, which he calls Ovapylovtx. This latter tribe ia otherwise not known ; Bremer treats the name aa a variant of that of the Vangiones.1 Let ub now turn to the Triboci. Strabo, who does not mention either the Vangionea or the Nemetes, BayB of the Triboci: Beyond the Helvetii on the Rhine dwell the Sequani and Medio- matrici, among whom a German race, the Triboci, have transported themselves from their own country.* at University of Sussex on August 31, 2015 This seems to point to their having planted themselves among the Sequani and Mediomatrici, who previously to their arrival apparently possessed all the country west of the river. What was their old country ? We have no definite information about this, but we have one or two facts which point to Ariovistus having brought them with him from his eastern dominions. Thus the tribes of the "Eaftoxoi and Costoboci, which have been considered Keltic by Borne and Getio by others, and which lived north of the Budete Mountains, north-west of Bohemia, have names formed in this same way with the particle boci. Again, an inscrip- tion is known, found east of the Rhine, in which the name Triboci occurs associated with the Boii. It reads: 'Eiploratores Triboci et Boi.' Their name is universally accepted as a Keltic one, and its initial particle tri is found in many undoubted Keltic names, as Tricastini, Tricorii, Tricolli, Trinobantes, Triulatii, Trisanton <a river in Britain), &c. Gluck, too, distinguishes two uses 1 TadUu, Ann. rlL 29-31 • EOmofrapku, p. 01 * 0«vr. 1Y 8, 4. • 4 3 628 THE GERMANS OF CAESAR Oct. of tbo particlo tri. In ono it ineanB the numeral three, as in Kymric and IriBh, tlte Greek rpitt, Latin Ires, and it occurs in such names as Tiigaranus ('three cranes'), rpipapKHria ('three horses *), Sec. In a second sense he connecta it with the proposition troi, trui, the modorn trtry**tre in Welsh and tn in Irinh. In the name Triboci he claims for it the second of these senses. In regard to boci he compares it with tho similar particle in Touto Bocio and MtXtfioKov. He says it in still found in modern Keltic tongues, as Irish boeaun (tumeo) = boewi, boend (ostcntttfw), Armorican bodtnil (tumulvs) — bocil, Welsh boyait, btyrt (um- bilicus), whence bocel, bogeilcaro (pwmntre, em-mere). The true meaning of the word is a swelling, hence its secondary meaning of a height (locus edilus, divu$ coihs). Triboci he therefore explains Downloaded from as meaning hillmen (clivo* kabitantes, regwms chrotae incolac). "We wiU now torn to the Nemetes, and first as to their original home. In regard to this we may quote the evidence of the place- name Taei Nemetam, given in the Peutinger Table, and plficed near the modern KJagenfurt, in Carinthia, and of certain coins found http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ within the borders of the ancient Noricuru and its neighbourhood, and inscribed Nemet and Adnamat. Some of these were found at Eiss on the Drave, near Yolkermarkt in Carinthia, at Zolfeld, north of KJagenfurt, also in Carinthia; and at Ober Laibach in the Bame province, and elsewhere in Carinthia and Styria, and in Hungary.1 The name Nemetes is unquestionably' of Keltic origin, as Zeuse, Mullenhoff, Mehlis, and Gluck agree. It occurs frequently in the topography of Gaul, as Nemetocenna, Drynemetum, Augus- at University of Sussex on August 31, 2015 tonemeton, Tasinemetum, NemetobriguB, &c. Venantiuu Fortu- natus has an apt comment on one name in which it occurs : * Nomine Veraemetes volait vocittre vetujtus, qaod qnasi faJiuin in gens Gallic* lingua refert. The name Vernemetum also occurs as a place-namo in Britain in Ajitontne's Itinerary, but is wrongly spelt Verometum in the edition of Parthey and Pindar." The same name occura in Welsh and Amiorican as Guornemet.11 In Armorican we have Nemet (glossed silva quae voeatur Nemet),** and wo also have Catunemet, Kadnemet, KadnemeduB,11 which answer to the old name Catunemetus.14 The three tribeB we have just mentioned formed the main part of the confederacy led by AriovistUB.