439, &c.] This was "about the year 327 before Christ," while
Alexander of Macedon was busy conquering India. Beyond question,
Pytheas, the first WRITING or civilized creature that ever saw
Germany, gazed with his Greek eyes, and occasionally landed,
striving to speak and inquire, upon those old Baltic Coasts,
north border of the now Prussian Kingdom; and reported of it to
mankind we know not what. Which brings home to us the fact that it
existed, but almost nothing more: A Country of lakes and woods,
of marshy jungles, sandy wildernesses; inhabited by bears, otters,
bisons, wolves, wild swine, and certain shaggy Germans of the
Suevic type, as good as inarticulate to Pytheas. After which all
direct notice of it ceases for above three hundred years. We can
hope only that the jungles were getting cleared a little, and the
wild creatures hunted down; that the Germans were increasing in
number, and becoming a thought less shaggy. These latter, tall
Suevi Semnones, men of blond stern aspect (oculi truces
coerulei) and great strength of bone, were known to
possess a formidable talent for fighting: [Tacitus, De
Moribus Germanorum, c. 45.] Drusus Germanicus, it has
been guessed, did not like to appear personally among them: some
"gigantic woman prophesying to him across the Elbe" that it might
be dangerous, Drusus contented himself with erecting some
triumphal pillar on his own safe side of the Elbe, to say that
they were conquered.

In the Fourth Century of our era, when the German populations, on
impulse of certain "Huns expelled from the Chinese frontier," or
for other reasons valid to themselves, began flowing universally
southward, to take possession of the rich Roman world, and so
continued flowing for two centuries more; the old German frontiers