Caesar; but in the case of Germany,
this information has been greatly amplified by a later and noble
treatise from the pen of Tacitus. Tacitus paints a splendid picture of
the domestic virtues and personal valor of these tribes, holding them
up as examples that might well be useful to his countrymen. Caesar found
many Teutonic tribes, not only in the Rhine Valley, but well established
in lands further west and already Gallic.

By the third century, German tribes had formed themselves into
federations--the Franks, Alemanni, Frisians and Saxons. The Rhine
Valley, after long subjection to the Romans, had acquired houses,
temples, fortresses and roads such as the Romans always built. Caesar
had found many evidences of an advanced state of society. Antiquarians
of our day, exploring German graves, discover signs of it in splendid
weapons of war and domestic utensils buried with the dead. Monolithic
sarcophagi have been found which give eloquent testimony of the
absorption by them of Roman culture. Western Germany, in fact, had
become, in the third century, a well-ordered and civilized land.
Christianity was well established there. In general the country compared
favorably with Roman England, but it was less advanced than Roman Gaul.
Centers of that Romanized German civilization, that were destined ever
afterward to remain important centers of German life, are Augsburg,
Strasburg, Worms, Speyer, Bonn and Cologne.

It was after the formation of the tribal federations that the great
migratory movement from Germany set in. This gave to Gaul a powerful
race in the Franks, from whom came Clovis and the other Merovingians; to
Gaul also it gave Burgundians, and to England perhaps the strongest
element in her future stock of men--the Saxons. Further east soon set in
another world-famous migration, which threatened at times to dominate
all Teutonic people--the Goths, Huns and Vandals of the Black and
Caspian Sea regions. Thence they prest on to Italy and Spain, where the
Goths founded and long maintained new and thriving states on the ruins
of the old.

Surviving these migrations, and serving to restore something like order
to Central Europe, there now rose into power in France, under Clovis and
Charlemagne, and spread their sway far across the Rhine, the great
Merovingian and Carlovingian dynasties. Charlemagne's empire came to
embrace in central Europe a region extending east of the Rhine as far as
Hungary, and from north to sout