13 - The Germanic peoples and Germanic society

Summary

NEW GROUPINGS

After the relative richness of the written sources for the Germanic peoples and their dealings with Rome during the first century a.d., a pall of near-silence envelops the following century. The wars generally referred to as the Marcomannic wars in the reign of Marcus Aurelius are sketchily recorded and reveal Germanic society fitfully, and then only in limited aspects. Dio's account of Roman relations with various German groups is not informative; later third-century writers offer little more than brief notices of raids and invasions. This extensive gap cannot be filled by recourse to archaeological evidence, important though this is. By its very nature archaeology cannot answer central questions of political and social history, however much it may illumine economic and technological matters. It is particularly unfortunate that the written sources give out when they do. Even in the Germania of Tacitus there are clear signs of change in barbarian society consequent upon a century and a half of contact and interchange with the Roman world. Within certain peoples social development had made major advances during the first century a.d., leading in some cases to internal strain, as among the Cherusci, or even to political collapse and dependence on Rome. On the wider stage, changes in the political geography of Germania which had hardly begun by a.d. 100 were well advanced a hundred years later. Many of the small tribes known to Tacitus and Ptolemy are scarcely mentioned thereafter or disappear entirely, while larger groupings of a different stamp increasingly dominate the lands close to the Rhine and Danube frontiers, chief among them the Goths, Alamanni and Franks.