some called Bastarnae, agree with the Germans in language, apparel, and
habitations. [269] All of them live in filth and laziness. The
intermarriages of their chiefs with the Sarmatians have debased them by a
mixture of the manners of that people. [270] The Venedi have drawn much
from this source; [271] for they overrun in their predatory excursions all
the woody and mountainous tracts between the Peucini and Fenni. Yet even
these are rather to be referred to the Germans, since they build houses,
carry shields, and travel with speed on foot; in all which particulars
they totally differ from the Sarmatians, who pass their time in wagons and
on horseback. [272] The Fenni [273] live in a state of amazing savageness
and squalid poverty. They are destitute of arms, horses, and settled
abodes: their food is herbs; [274] their clothing, skins; their bed, the
ground. Their only dependence is on their arrows, which, for want of iron,
are headed with bone; [275] and the chase is the support of the women as
well as the men; the former accompany the latter in the pursuit, and claim
a share of the prey. Nor do they provide any other shelter for their
infants from wild beasts and storms, than a covering of branches twisted
together. This is the resort of youth; this is the receptacle of old age.
Yet even this way of life is in their estimation happier than groaning
over the plough; toiling in the erection of houses; subjecting their own
fortunes and those of others to the agitations of alternate hope and fear.
Secure against men, secure against the gods, they have attained the most
difficult point, not to need even a wish.

All our further accounts are intermixed with fable; as, that the Hellusii
and Oxionae [276] have human faces, with the bodies and limbs of wild
beasts. These unauthenticated reports I shall leave untouched. [277]