134 



MAETIN L. ROUSE, ESQ., B.L., ON 



beside Ocean in tlie east* (for Ulysses half circled the earth 

 upon Ocean's tide ere his bark returned to civilised shores and 

 well-known harliours). Now, jutting out into what both Strabo 

 and Tacitus' describes as the northern reach of Ocean is the 

 peninsula of Denmark, which Posidonius, who wrote about 

 ninety years before the Christian era, and Strabo, who wrote 

 ten years after it, and other geographers of those times 

 knew as the Cimbric Chersonesus, inhabited in their time 

 by the nation of the Cimbri, whose name is uttered by scholars 

 generally as Kimhri.'\ Of these people and their country Tacitus 

 thus writes :J The Cimbri nearest to the Ocean occupy the 

 same bulge§ in Germany, now a little state but very great in 

 renown ; and the traces of their ancient reputation remain widely 

 spread — camps on both shores,! | and enclosures by the extent of 

 which you may measure the mass and the troops of the nation 

 and the belief to be placed in the existence of so great an 

 army." These Kimbri, then, I believe to be the Kimmerioi of 

 whom Homer wrote ; and I may add that the belief that they 

 were one people with the Kimmerioi of Southern Eussia was 

 held by Posidonius and Strabo, and is common among historians 

 in our own day.^ 



In speaking as he does of the decline of the Kimbri in power 

 and population, Tacitus of course had in mind the mighty 

 invasion of the more genial and fruitful regions of central and 

 southern Europe in the years 113 to 101 B.C., when, in league 

 with the Teutones, another northern people, but marching by a 

 different route, the Kimbri passed into Noricum (or Austria 

 Proper) and lUyricum, back into Switzerland, where they were 

 joined by two Keltic tribes (the Tigurini and Ambrones), through 

 Gaul into Spain (where they remained tln^ee years), and back 

 into Italy. The whole liost is said by Eoman writers to have 



^ Gladstone, Horner^ p. GO. 



t Posidonius and Strabo, VII, ii, 1, p. 292, and presumably all other 

 Greek i^eographers write the name Kiju/Spot : and by philologists and 

 reformers of the English pronunciation (;f Latin e and g are always 

 uttered hard (as k and as g in gun), though it is arguable whether before 

 e and i they were not sometimes uttered as in Italian they are, like g 

 twice in ginger and c twice in cicerone. 



\ (Jermania, xxxvii. 



§ The word is sinus, but refers to the ingens flexus in Septentrionem 

 along which the Frisians and Chanci were spread (c. xxxv). 



II Utraque ripd, which probably means on both banks (of the Elbe 

 at its estuary), althougli no river has been hinted at. 



1 See Smith, Diet. Class. G'eog., where it is siniply dismissed as fanciful. 



