the hardy and stately women who were little inferior in size and strength to the men, and the children with old men’s hair, as the amazed Italians called the flaxen-haired youths of the north.  Their system of warfare was substantially that of the Celts of this period, who no longer fought, as the Italian Celts had formerly done, bareheaded and with merely sword and dagger, but with copper helmets often richly adorned and with a peculiar missile weapon, the -materis-; the large sword was retained and the long narrow shield, along with which they probably wore also a coat of mail.  They were not destitute of cavalry; but the Romans were superior to them in that arm.  Their order of battle was as formerly a rude phalanx professedly drawn up with just as many ranks in depth as in breadth, the first rank of which in dangerous combats not unfrequently tied together their metallic girdles with cords.  Their manners were rude.  Flesh was frequently devoured raw.  The bravest and, if possible, the tallest man was king of the host.  Not unfrequently, after the manner of the Celts and of barbarians generally, the time and place of the combat were previously arranged with the enemy, and sometimes also, before the battle began, an individual opponent was challenged to single combat.  The conflict was ushered in by their insulting the enemy with unseemly gestures, and by a horrible noise—­the men raising their battle-shout, and the women and children increasing the din by drumming on the leathern covers of the waggons.  The Cimbrian fought bravely—­death on the bed of honour was deemed by him the only death worthy of a free man—­but after the victory he indemnified himself by the most savage brutality, and sometimes promised beforehand to present to the gods of battle whatever victory should place in the power of the victor.  The effects of the enemy were broken in pieces, the horses were killed, the prisoners were hanged or preserved only to be sacrificed to the gods.  It was the priestesses—­grey-haired women in white linen dresses and unshod—­who, like Iphigenia in Scythia, offered these sacrifices, and prophesied the future from the streaming blood of the prisoner of war or the criminal who formed the victim.  How much in these customs was the universal usage of the northern barbarians, how much was borrowed from the Celts, and how much was peculiar to the Germans, cannot be ascertained; but the practice of having the army accompanied and directed not by priests, but by priestesses, may be pronounced an undoubtedly Germanic custom.  Thus marched the Cimbri into the unknown land—­an immense multitude of various origin which had congregated round a nucleus of Germanic emigrants from the Baltic—­ not without resemblance to the great bodies of emigrants, that in our own times cross the ocean similarly burdened and similarly mingled, and with aims not much less vague; carrying their lumbering waggon-castle, with the dexterity which a long migratory life imparts,