Divus Cæsar, who is severe upon Gallic _nobilitas_, _levitas_, and _infirmitas animi_, employed nine years in subduing Gaul (B.C. 59–50). Before a century elapsed, the people had given up their old barbarous habits and costume, their fur-coats, like the Slav and Afghan _postín_, with sleeves opening in front; their saga-cloaks or tartan-plaids[975] which were probably imitations of the primæval tattoo;[976] their copper torques and their rude chains and armlets. Gallia Comata shore her limed and flowing locks, and Gallia Bracchata (Provincia, Provence) doffed the ‘_truis_’ (trews or trowsers) which were strapped at the waist and tied in at the ankles.[977] Their women adopted Roman fashions, and forgot all that Ammianus Marcellinus had said of them: ‘A whole troop of foreigners could not withstand a single Gaul, if he called to aid his wife, who is usually very strong and blue-eyed, especially when, swelling her neck, gnashing her teeth, and whirling her sallow arms of enormous bulk, she begins to strike blows, mingled with kicks, as if they were so many missiles sent from the string of a catapult.’ Of their old and rugged virtue we may judge by the tale of Ortiagon’s gallant wife and the caitiff centurion.[978] Thus Gaul was thoroughly subdued by Roman civilisation and the Latin tongue; she contributed to literature her quotum of poets and rhetoricians; her cities established schools of philosophy, and she saw nothing to envy in Gallia Togata—Upper Italy.[979] [Heading: _THE OLD GERMAN SWORD._] [Illustration: FIG. 288.—FOUND AT AUGSBURG (66 centimètres long. In Sigmaringen Museum).] The Alemanni or Germans (Germani) cast of the Rhine inhabited, at the time of the Roman conquests, a dismal land of swamps and _silvæ_: even in the present day a run from Hamburg to Berlin explains the ancient exodus of tribes bent upon conquering the ‘promised lands’ of the south, and the modern wholesale emigration to America. These ‘warmen’ were formerly surpassed by the Gauls in bravery,[980] but they had none of the Keltic levity or instability. The national characteristic was and is the steadfast purpose. Till lately the German Empire was a shadowy tradition; yet the Germans managed to occupy every throne in Europe save two. They never yet made a colony, yet cuckoo-like they hold the best of those made by others; and their sound physical constitution, strengthened by gymnastics, enables them to resist tropical and extreme climates better than any European people save the Slavs and the Jews. In the great cities of the world they occupy the first commercial place, the result of an education carefully adapted to its end and object; and their progress in late years seems to promise ‘Germanism’ an immense future based upon the ruins of the neo-Latin races.