His chief campaigns against the Germans were (1) against the _Suevi_, who were crossing the Rhine north of the confluence with the Moselle, and (2) against Ariovistus in the territory of the _Sequani_ at the southern bend of the Rhine eastward. And it is remarkable that the _Suevi_ were prominent again among the tribes enlisted in the army of Ariovistus.[510] So that it is easy to see how the Suevi, coming into close contact with Cæsar at both ends, came to be considered by him as the most important of the German peoples. He describes the _Suevi_ separately, and in terms which show over again that they were still in the early tribal stage[511] in which an annual shifting of holdings was practised. Indeed, their semi-nomadic habits could not be shown better than by the inadvertently mentioned facts that the Suevi who were crossing the Rhine to the north brought their families with them; and that the Suevi and other tribes forming the army of Ariovistus to the south had not had settled homes for fourteen years,[512] but brought their families about with them in waggons wherever they went, the waggons and women of each tribe being placed behind the warriors when they were drawn up by tribes in battle array.[513] This statement of Cæsar that the Germans of his [p338] time were still in the early tribal stage of economic development in which there was an annual shifting of the households from place to place needs no corroboration or explaining away after what has already been seen going on under the Welsh and Irish tribal systems. The ease with which tribal redistributions were made under the peculiar method of clustering homesteads which prevailed in Wales and Ireland, makes the statement of Cæsar perfectly probable. * * * * * But how was it 150 years later, when Tacitus wrote his celebrated description of the Germans of his time? «The 'Germania' of Tacitus.» The 'Germania' was obviously written from a distinctly Roman point of view. The eye of the writer was struck with those points chiefly in which German and Roman manners differed. The Romans of the well-to-do classes lived in cities. City life was their usual life, and those of them who had villas in the country, whilst sometimes having residences for themselves upon them, as we have seen, cultivated them most often by means of slave-labour under a _villicus_, but sometimes by _coloni_. «The scattered settlements of the free tribesmen.» «The villages of their servile tenants.»