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52 final throw they stake the freedom of their own persons. The loser goes into voluntary slavery. Though the younger and stronger, he suffers himself to be bound and sold."

Among the numerous varieties of the human race who flocked to Rome, the Germans had many representatives. They usually formed the Cæsar's guard, as the Scotch archers at first, and the Swiss mousquetaires afterwards, did that of the French kings. The cavalry was no longer composed of Roman knights or Italians, and the Batavian horse had become an almost indispensable adjunct to the legions. A brother of the Cheruscan Arminius served in the Roman army, and boasted of his services and loyalty to Augustus and Tiberius. Civilis, the Batavian chief, had been trained in a Roman barrack, and had smarted under a centurion's rod. Here, then, was at hand an ample supply of men able to enlighten an historian of the German people—an advantage, however, of which Tacitus, so far at least as ethnology is concerned, seems not to have availed himself to any great extent.

We now turn from this curious, and in part perhaps fanciful, account of the German nations. In what relation it stands to the other writings of Tacitus can never be known. It is the only one of them that has not an introductory preface. It bears some marks of not being completed; and may very possibly have been an early draft or an abandoned design of a full history of the German wars similar in kind to the one already mentioned—Pliny the elder's.