1Here is the end of Suebia. 1Whether I should assign the tribes of the Peucini, the Venethi and the Fenni to the Germans or the Sarmatians I am unsure. 1Yet the Peucini, whom some call Bastarnae, in speech, way of life, settlement and dwellings live like Germans. 1Squalor is common to all, and sluggishness to their nobles: through mixed marriages they are somewhat debased into the appearance of the Sarmatians. 2The Venethi have taken on much of their customs; 2for whatever forests and mountains rise between the Peucini and the Fenni, they roam over on their raids. 2These, however, are rather to be counted among the Germans, because they build fixed houses and carry shields and delight in the use and swiftness of their feet: all of which is the opposite of the Sarmatians, who live in wagons and on horseback.
3The Fenni have an astonishing savagery and a squalid poverty: no arms, no horses, no homes; 3for food they have grass, for clothing skins, for a bed the ground: their only hope lies in their arrows, which, for lack of iron, they tip with bone. 3The same hunting feeds the men and the women alike; 3for the women go with them everywhere and claim a share of the prey. 4Nor have the infants any other refuge from wild beasts and rains than to be covered in some interlacing of branches; 4to this the young men return, this is the shelter of the old. 5But they think this happier than to groan over the fields, to toil at building houses, and to turn over their own and others' fortunes with hope and fear: careless of men, careless of gods, they have attained the most difficult of things, that they should have no need even of prayer.
6The rest is now the stuff of fable: that the Hellusii and Oxiones have the faces and features of men, the bodies and limbs of beasts: this, as unverified, I shall leave undecided.