The Evolution of an Empire: A Brief Historical Sketch of Germany

by Mary Platt Parmele

Greece and Rome were unaware of the existence of the Teuton until about the year 330 B.C., when Pythias, a Greek navigator, came home from a voyage to the Baltic with terrible tales of the Goths whom he had met. Nearly one century before Christ the inhabitants of Italy were enabled to judge for themselves of the accuracy of the description. Driven from their homes by the inroads of the sea, the Goths poured in a hungry torrent down into the tempting vineyards of Northern Italy. Gigantic in stature, with long yellow hair, eyes blue but fierce—what wonder that the people thought they were scarcely human, and fled affrighted, leaving them to enjoy the vineyards at their leisure.

Accounts of this uncanny host reached Rome, which soon knew of their breastplates of iron, their helmets crowned with heads of wild beasts, their white shields glistening in the sun, and, more terrible than all, of their priestesses, clad in white linen, who prophesied and offered human sacrifices to their gods.

But the sacrifices did not avail against the legions which the great Consul Marius led against them. The ponderous Goth was not yet a match for the finer skill of the Roman, and the invaders were exterminated at Aix-la-Chapelle, 102 B.C. The women, in despair, slew first their children and then themselves, a few only surviving to be paraded in chains at the triumph accorded to Marius on his return to Rome. Such was the first appearance of the Teuton in the Eternal City, and the last until five hundred years later, when the conditions were changed.

At the time of this first invasion of the Goths they had made some progress in political and social organization, though of the simplest kind. Predatory in habits and fierce as the wild beasts of their forests, they were, however, romantic in ideals, had a fine sense of the beautiful. They exalted woman, and honored marriage and the family relation to an extent beyond any ancient people. When I have said that, added to this, they had a glimmering sense of human rights in communities and in the State, it will be seen that the German race had the basis of a superior civilization; and when the Christian era dawned, though the world knew it not, a great nation was coming into organic form.

At this period, Julius Cæsar had made Roman provinces of Gaul and Britain; and now the wave of conquest naturally overflowed the boundary line into the land of the Teuton; and the German, in his barbaric simplicity, stood face to face with that finished human product, the astute, cultivated Roman.

For centuries they fought—always on German soil—the legions often repulsed, yet pressing on and on, until a chain of Roman fortresses stretched from the Rhine to the Baltic, and the people were held—not subjugated—by Roman power.

About the year 100 of our era there arose the first heroic figure in the history of Germany, when Hermann made a prodigious but ineffectual attempt to consolidate his people and expel the Romans. The colossal statue only recently erected in Germany, is a tribute to the unhappy hero of eighteen centuries ago.

At the time of this attempt the Germans had learned much from the superior civilization by which they were invaded. They were no longer the barbarous race which had trampled down the vineyards of northern Italy two hundred years before. Nor was this lesson in civilization yet over. For five hundred years Teuton and Roman continued the struggle. The one by the process growing wiser, richer in resource, and in supplementing his rude strength with the finer methods of old civilizations, becoming a more and more dangerous adversary; while the other saw himself more and more enfeebled, and, wearied with the conflict, felt decrepitude stealing surely over him.

In the year 300 the Teutons had ramified into six branches—the Burgundians, Thuringians, Franks, Saxons, Allemani, and Goths—all one in race, but each with its own distinct traits and life. The Allemani were so called from aller-mannen—all men; seeming to signify that this tribe was composed of the fragments of many tribes. Why this tribal name should have become that of the whole German nation is not apparent. Obviously the word Allemagne has this origin, just as Deutsch may be as readily traced to Teuton.

But of these six tribes it was the Goths who first adopted Christianity, and took on the forms of a higher civilization.