Yet there is something to be said. If the Roman generals prescribed a Roman form of government for the barbarians, as Corbulo did for the Frisians in A.D. 47, German fashions intruded into the Roman world and the Roman ladies wore barbarian costume and coiffure.[123] On the Rhine frontier these barbarians developed to such an extent and so many towns sprang up—Cologne the prosperous, Bonn, Coblentz, Strassburg—which grew out of the Roman camps but drew their life from the neighbouring tribes, that the law forbade the selling of certain commodities to barbarians.[124] On the other hand, the Empire needed them as cultivators and soldiers, and the _Panegyrici Latini_ show us that it was part of the imperial policy to make them settle in the provinces.[125] Social history shows that the Germanic peoples stood on a fairly high level of culture even in the first centuries of our era. They possessed a traditional religious cult which promoted the noblest virtues—conjugal love, friendship, hospitality—a body of legends about gods and heroes, an ancestral poetry, in which clan and family feeling plays a large part.[126] In these respects they were capable of influencing the Romans, who admired their courage and feared their strength. Besides the casual intermingling of people for various reasons, there were three main sources of intercourse: the army, the administration, and trade. The first need not be dwelt on, nor the well-known question be raised how far the German element in it was responsible for the fall of the Empire. Of the second we may mention as an instance Pliny’s picture of Trajan dispensing justice in Germany—sometimes without an interpreter—while the influence of the trade in furs, wine, and fish in introducing Germanic words into Latin has been amply established.[127]