This group of Teutonic peoples, with ramifications extending far towards the pole was divided into two principal branches: the Germanic branch, properly so called, which comprised the Goths, Angles, Saxons, the upper and lower Germans, the Dutch, the Frisians, the Lombards, the Franks, the Vandals, &c.; and the Scandinavian branch, settled farther north and composed of the Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes. The same region which Tacitus describes as bordering on the place "where nature ends," held thus in his day tribes that would later have for their capitals, towns founded long before by Celts: London, Vienna, Paris, and Milan. Many hundred years before settling there, these men had already found themselves in contact with the Celts, and, at the time the latter were powerful in Europe, terrible wars had arisen between the two races. But all the north-east, from the Elbe to the Vistula, continued impenetrable; the Germanic tribes remained there intact, they united with no others, and alone might have told if the sun's chariot was really to be seen rising from the ocean, and splashing the sky with salt sea foam. From this region were about to start the wild host destined to conquer the isle of Britain, to change its name and rebaptize it in blood. Twice, during the first ten centuries of our era, the Teutonic race hurled upon the civilised world its savage hordes of warriors, streams of molten lava. The first invasion was vehement, especially in the fifth century, and was principally composed of Germanic tribes, Angles, Franks, Saxons, Burgundians, Vandals; the second exercised its greatest ravages in the ninth century, at the time of Charlemagne's successors, and proceeded mostly from the Scandinavian tribes, called Danish or Norman by contemporary chroniclers. From the third century after Christ, fermentation begins among the former of these two groups. No longer are the Germanic tribes content with fighting for their land, retreating step by step before the Latin invader; alarming symptoms of retaliation manifest themselves, like the rumblings that herald the great cataclysms of nature. The Roman, in the meanwhile, wrapped in his glory, continued to rule the world and mould it to his image; he skilfully enervated the conquered nations, instructed them in the arts, inoculated them with his vices, and weakened in them the spring of their formerly strong will. They called civilisation, _humanitas_, Tacitus said of the Britons, what was actually "servitude."[27] The frontiers of the empire were now so far distant that the roar of the advancing tide scarcely reached Rome. What was overheard of it acted as a stimulus to pleasure, added point to the rhetorician's speeches, excitement to the circus games, and a halo to the beauty of red-haired courtesans. The Romans had reached that point in tottering empires, at which the threat of calamities no longer arouses dormant energy, but only whets and renews the appetite for enjoyment.