The description given of the Germans by Cæsar is evidently that of a people in the same tribal stage of economic development as the one with which Irish and Welsh evidence has made us familiar.
'Their whole life is occupied in hunting and warlike enterprise. . . . They do not apply much to agriculture, and their food mostly consists of milk, cheese, and flesh. Nor has anyone a fixed quantity of land or defined individual property, but the magistrates and chiefs assign to tribes and families who herd together, annually, and for one year's occupation, as much land and in such place as they think fit, compelling them the next year to move somewhere else.' [508]
He also alludes to the frailty of their houses,[509] another mark of the tribal system in Wales, which [p337] indeed was a necessary result of the yearly migration to fresh fields and pastures.
Now what were the tribes of Germans with whom Cæsar came most in contact?
The Suevi.
His chief campaigns against the Germans were (1) against the Suevi, who were crossing the Rhine north of the confluence with the Moselle, and (2) against Ariovistus in the territory of the Sequani at the southern bend of the Rhine eastward. And it is remarkable that the Suevi were prominent again among the tribes enlisted in the army of Ariovistus.[510] So that it is easy to see how the Suevi, coming into close contact with Cæsar at both ends, came to be considered by him as the most important of the German peoples.
He describes the Suevi separately, and in terms which show over again that they were still in the early tribal stage[511] in which an annual shifting of holdings was practised. Indeed, their semi-nomadic habits could not be shown better than by the inadvertently mentioned facts that the Suevi who were crossing the Rhine to the north brought their families with them; and that the Suevi and other tribes forming the army of Ariovistus to the south had not had settled homes for fourteen years,[512] but brought their families about with them in waggons wherever they went, the waggons and women of each tribe being placed behind the warriors when they were drawn up by tribes in battle array.[513]
This statement of Cæsar that the Germans of his [p338] time were still in the early tribal stage of economic development in which there was an annual shifting of the households from place to place needs no corroboration or explaining away after what has already been seen going on under the Welsh and Irish tribal systems. The ease with which tribal redistributions were made under the peculiar method of clustering homesteads which prevailed in Wales and Ireland, makes the statement of Cæsar perfectly probable.
But how was it 150 years later, when Tacitus wrote his celebrated description of the Germans of his time?
The 'Germania' of Tacitus.