ave been swept away
before the march of those Teutonic folk, whose women were virile and
could give birth to men; a folk among whom the woman received on the
morning of her marriage, from the man who was to be her companion
through life, no contemptible trinket to hang about her throat or limbs,
but a shield, a spear, a sword, and a yoke of oxen, while she bestowed
on him in return a suit of armour, in token that they two were
henceforth to be one in toil and in the facing of danger; that she too
should dare with him in war and suffer with him in peace; and of whom
another writer tells us, that their women not only bore the race and
fed it at their breasts without the help of others' hands, but that they
undertook the whole management of house and lands, leaving the males
free for war and chase; of whom Suetonius tells us, that when Augustus
Caesar demanded hostages from a tribe, he took women, not men, because
he found by experience that the women were more regarded than men, and
of whom Strabo says, that so highly did the Germanic races value the
intellect of their women that they regarded them as inspired, and
entered into no war or great undertaking without their advice and
counsel; while among the Cimbrian women who accompanied their husbands
in the invasion of Italy were certain who marched barefooted in the
midst of the lines, distinguished by their white hair and milk-white
robes, and who were regarded as inspired, and of whom Florus, describing
an early Roman victory, says, "The conflict was not less fierce and
obstinate with the wives of the vanquished; in their carts and wagons
they formed a line of battle, and from their elevated situation, as from
so many turrets, annoyed the Romans with their poles and lances. (The
South African Boer woman after two thousand years appears not wholly to
have forgotten the ancestral tactics.) Their death was as glorious as
their martial spirit. Finding that all was lost, they strangled their
children, and either destroyed themselves in one scene of mutual
slaughter, or with the sashes that bound up their hair suspended
themselves by the neck to the boughs of trees or the tops of their
wagons." It is of these women that Valerius Maximus says, that, "If the
gods on the day of battle had inspired the men with equal fortitude,
Marius would never have boasted of his Teutonic victory;" and of whom
Tacitus, speaking of those women who accompanied their husbands to war,
remarks, "The