1To deal in loans and extend them into interest is unknown; 1and therefore it is guarded against more than if it had been forbidden. 1Lands are occupied by the whole community in turn, in proportion to the number of cultivators, and these they soon divide among themselves according to rank; 1the wide extent of the plains makes the dividing easy. 2They change their ploughland every year, and there is land to spare. 2For they do not strive with labour to match the fertility and extent of the soil, by planting orchards, fencing off meadows and watering gardens: only a corn crop is demanded of the earth. 3Hence they do not divide even the year itself into as many seasons: winter, spring and summer have meaning and names for them, but the name of autumn is as unknown as its bounty.
Tacitus · Germania
Germania 26
Usury unknown; the farming of the land
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Tacitus, Germania. Latin text: H. Furneaux, Cornelii Taciti Opera Minora (Oxford, 1900), public domain; digital text from the Perseus Digital Library, CC BY-SA. Word analysis: drafted by our own tagger (trained on the hand-checked texts on this site), with every doubtful word checked by hand. English translation and section titles: written for this app, each checked against the Latin by a second reader.