The Political, Social, and Literary History of Germany (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HISTORY OF GERMANY. DIVISION I.?PART I. THE ROMANO-GERMAN PERIOD, FROM THE CIMBRIAN WAR, B.c. 113, TO THE CONQUEST OF FRANCE BY CLOVIS, A.d. 486. THE OVERTHROW OF THE CIMBRI AND TEUTONI. B.C. 113-101. In the year B.c. 113, a people unknown to the Romans appeared in the passes of the Alps, and demanded a friendly alliance. They were the Cimbri, some three hundred thousand of whom, with their wives and children, had moved southwards, and were joined in their route by the Teutons, a tribe from the borders of the Baltic. They took their way through Bohemia, Bavaria, and Switzerland; and at length the Italian Gauls implored the Romans to resist their further progress, "for they covered the face of the whole land, and did eat up every herb of the field, and all the fruit of the trees, so that there remained not any green thing throughout all the land on account of them." The Romans, accordingly, sent Cneius Papirius Carbo, the consul, to drive them back or stamp them out. He tried, at first, to overreach them by treachery; but at the battle of Noreia, in the mountains of Styria, he was slain, and his whole army would have been cut to pieces had not a storm arisen to cover the fugitives (b.c. 113). After this victory the combined hordes marched without resistance to the south of Gaul (France), and were joined by a multitude of Helvetians (Swiss) from the foot of the Alps. They then sent to Rome demanding sufficient territory to form a colony, and promising, in return, to aid the Romans in their wars. This request was, of course, refused, and they resolved to win by the sword what they could not otherwise obtain. Noreia (pronounced No-re-i'-ah), now called Neumarkt, is in Styria. Styria is just below Vienna, and has Hungary to the east. Army after army w...