tradition, which consistently represents the Teutoni as a people whose
original home was in the North. The simplest solution of the difficulty
is that the Miftenberg Toutoni were a fragment which split off from the
Teutonic peoples during their migration southward, and settled in this
district, just as in north-eastern Gaul a portion of the Cimbri and
Teutones maintained itself as the tribe of the Aduatuci.
The whole process of the expulsion of the Kelts from South Germany must have been accomplished between b.c. 100 and 70, for Caesar knows of no Gauls on the right bank of the upper Rhine, and the Helveti had been living for a considerable time to the south of the head-waters of the river which, as Caesar tells us, divides Helvetic from German territoiy.
The first collision between the Teutons and the Graeco-Roman world took place far to the east of Gaul. It resulted from a great migration of the eastern Teutonic tribes in the neighbourhood of the Vistula, which had carried some of them as far as the shore of the Black Sea. The chief of these tribes was that of the Bastarnae. Settled, it would seem, before their exodus near the head-waters of the Vistula they appear, as early as the beginning of the second century b.c., near the estuary of the Danube. The whole region north of the Pruth, from the Black Sea to the northern slope of the Carpathians, was in their possession and remained so during all the time that they are known to history. Another Germanic tribe, doubtless dependent upon them, meets us in the same district, namely the Sciri from the lower Vistula. The well-known and much discussed “psephisma”of the town of Olbia in honour of Protogenes mentions them as allied with the Galatai, and there has been much debate as to what nation is to be understood by these IaXdmu, and they have sometimes been conjectured to be Illyrian Kelts (Scordisci), sometimes Thracian, sometimes the—also Keltic—Britolages, or the Teutonic Bastarnae, or even the Goths. The majority of scholars has however decided that these “Galatians” are the Bastarnae,[1] whose presence in the neighbourhood of Olbia in the year b.c. 182 is attested by Polybius. There is, indeed, much in favour of this hypothesis and nothing against it. The inscription then, which is proved by the character of the writing to be one of the oldest found in this locality, would have been written about the time of the arrival of the Bastarnae at the estuary of the Danube, that is to say, about b.c. 200-180, and would therefore be the earliest documentary evidence for the entrance of the Germanic tribes on the field of general history.
As early as the year b.c. 182 we find the Bastarnae in negotiations with Philip of Macedon. Philip’s plan was to get rid of the Dardanians, and after settling his allies on the territory thus vacated to use it as a base for an expedition against Italy. After long negotiations, the Bastarnae in 179 abandoned their lately-won territory, crossed the
- ↑ So Zeuss and Staehelin.
