ety. The
natural affections arising from family ties and blood relationship
steadily transformed woman's status in fact, if not in law. What the
dim, though growing intellect of the man, trained only for war and the
hunt, could not compass, the natural reasoning power of woman, her
natural womanly prudence, did accomplish. Concessions regarding the
purchase money, which originally subjected her absolutely to the buyer,
were made in her favor; the purchase of her body and soul became
gradually the acquisition of the right to protect her; the husband's
power over his wife's body became more limited; her immolation with her
dead husband fell into disuse; the widow's right over her children, even
her male children, arose and increased. Womanly power and influence made
many a free man dependent, regardless of law; women began to exert a
tremendous influence over their husbands, their tribes, their state
formations. All the Roman sources preserved to us prove that when the
Romans, after the conquest of Gaul, entered upon the gigantic task of
subjugating the Germans, women played a prominent part in the political
upheaval which then occurred.

It is in the period of Roman attack that we meet for the first time a
great royal character, a tragic type of a historical German woman:
Thusnelda, the wife of Arminius (Hermann), prince of the Cherusci, the
liberator of Germania from a foreign yoke. Her history is the oldest
Teutonic love story. History, legend, and poetry have vied in idealizing
and immortalizing her. Betrothed to another man, she is by force carried
away by Arminius from her father Segestes, Arminius's political
adversary, the friend of the Romans. Betrayed to the latter under Drusus
Germanicus, she is captured. "Inspired more by the spirit of her husband
than by that of her father no tear, no complaint or entreaty came from
Thusnelda's lips at her capture; with her hands clasped over her bosom,
she looked down silently at her pregnant body. The news of the capture
of his wife and of her slavery exasperated Arminius to mad rage. But in
vain he flew to her rescue. She was carried to Rome and there bore
Thumelicus. With her son and her brother Segimunt she adorned the
triumph of Drusus, while the traitor Segestes looked on, as son,
daughter, and grandson walked in chains before the carriage of the
triumphator." Indeed, Strabo, the celebrated Greek geographer, confirms
the story in his _Geographica_ (vii, i, 4): "To them