Teutons defeating the Romans in a battle by F. Tegelmeyer 1880

April 20, 2020

Teutons defeating the Romans in a battle by F. Tegelmeyer 1880

"The 4th century BC traveller, Pytheas, as reported by Pliny the Elder (died AD 79), described the Teutones as neighbours of the northern island of Abalus where amber washes up in the spring, which was traded with these Teutones. Abalus is one day's sail from a tidal marsh or estuary facing the ocean (an aestuarium) called Metuonis where the Germanic "Guiones" (probably an error for Inguaeones, Gutones, or the Teutones themselves) lived.

Pomponius Mela (died about AD 45) placed them on the largest island, Codannovia, presumed to be Scandinavia, which was one of a group of islands in a large bay called Codanus, open to the ocean. Traditionally, scholars interpret this bay as the Baltic sea.

31. On the other side of the Albis [Elbe], the huge Codanus Bay [Baltic Sea] is filled with big and small islands. For this reason, where the sea is received within the fold of the bay, it never lies wide open and never really looks like a sea but is sprinkled around, rambling and scattered like rivers, with water flowing in every direction and crossing many times. Where the sea comes into contact with the mainland, the sea is contained by the banks of islands, banks that are not far offshore and that are virtually equidistant everywhere. There the sea runs a narrow course like a strait, then, curving, it promptly adapts to a long brow of land. 32. On the bay are the Cimbri and the Teutoni; farther on, the farthest people of Germany, the Hermiones.

[...]

54. The thirty Orcades [Orkney Islands] are separated by narrow spaces between them; the seven Haemodae [Denmark] extend opposite Germany in what we have called Codanus Bay; of the islands there, Scadinavia [sic: the manuscript has Codannavia], which the Teutoni still hold, stands out as much for its size as for its fertility besides.

Plutarch in his biography of Marius, who fought the Teutones, wrote that they and Cimbri "had not had intercourse with other peoples, and had traversed a great stretch of country, so that it could not be ascertained what people it was nor whence they had set out". He reported that there were different conjectures: that they were "they were some of the German peoples which extended as far as the northern ocean"; that they were "Galloscythians", a mixture of Scythians and Celts who had lived as far east as the Black Sea, or that the Cimbri were actually Cimmerians, from even further east.

Surviving texts based on the work of the geographer Ptolemy mentioned both Teutones and "Teutonoaroi" in Germania, but this is in a part of his text which has become garbled in surviving copies. Gudmund Schütte proposed that the two peoples should be understood as one, but that different versions of works based on Ptolemy's used literary sources like Pliny and Mela to place them in different positions somewhere near the Cimbri, in a part of the landscape they did not have good information for - either in Zealand or Scandinavia, or else somewhere on the southern Baltic coast.

The name of the district of Thy in Jutland has been connected to the name of the Teutons, a proposal in line with ancient reports that they came from that area."

-taken from wikipedia