Germanic people in Northern Europe mentioned by Tacitus
Map showing the Roman empire in AD 125 and contemporary barbarian Europe, showing two possible locations of theSitones. One, based onTacitus, places them in central Sweden. Another view places them roughly in modernEstonia and/orFinland.
TheSitones were aGermanic people living somewhere in Northern Europe in the first centuryCE. They are mentioned only byCornelius Tacitus in 97 CE inGermania.[1] Tacitus considered them similar toSuiones (ancestors of modernSwedes) apart from one descriptor, namely that women were the ruling sex. Phonetical equivalent of ᚦ (þurisaz) may have been documented equivalent to either T or D, explaining sitones, suiones and suehans as local differences similar to viking age runestone carvings describing siþiuþu, suiþiuþu and suoþiauþu meaningSvitjod (Sweden).
Closely bordering on the Suiones are the tribes of the Sitones, which, resembling them in all else, differ only in being ruled by a woman. So low have they fallen, not merely from freedom, but even from slavery itself.[2]
Speculations on the Sitones' background are numerous. According to one theory, the name is a partial misunderstanding ofSigtuna, one of the central locations in the Swedish kingdom, which much later had aLatin spellingSitune.[3][4][5]
Another view is that the "queen" of the Sitones derives by linguistic confusion with anOld Norse word for "woman" from the name of theKvens or Quains.[6][7][8]
According to medievalistKemp Malone (1925), Tacitus' characterization of both the Suiones and the Sitones is "a work of art, not a piece of historical research", with the Sitones' submission to a woman as the logical culminating degeneracy after the Suiones' total submission to their king and surrendering of their weapons to a slave.[9]
^Tacitus.Germania. Translated by Church, Alfred John; Brodribb, William Jackson. Audiobook proofed, coordinated, and produced by Merline, Karen.LibriVox. Event occurs in Section 3, at 20:30 – viaInternet Archive.
^Heinrich Gottfried Reichard took this view in his edition of theGermania;Pauly's Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft in alphabetischer Ordnung, ed. August Pauly, Christian Walz and W.S. Teuffel, Volume 6.1Pra - Stoiai, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1852,OCLC165378771,p. 1226(in German)
^Charles Anthon,A classical dictionary containing an account of the principal proper names mentioned in ancient authors and intended to elucidate all the important points connected with the geography, history, biography, mythology, and fine arts of the Greeks and Romans: Together with an account of coins, weights, and measures, with tabular values of the same, New York: Harper, 1841, repr. 1869,OCLC52696823,p. 1244.
^Gudmund Schütte, tr.Jean Young,Our Forefathers, the Gothonic Nations: A Manual of the Ethnography of the Gothic, German, Dutch, Anglo-Saxon, Frisian and Scandinavian Peoples, Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1929–33,OCLC2084026,p. 126.
^Kyösti Julku,Kvenland - Kainuunmaa, Studia historica septentrionalia 11, Oulu, 1986,OCLC757840399(in Finnish), p. 51, writes that "there is no indistinctness whatsoever about the geographical location of the Sitones" and places them in Kvenland - areas north and northeast of the Suiones (later Sveas, Swedes) - asKven ancestors.
^Kemp Malone, "The Suiones of Tacitus",The American Journal of Philology 46.2, 1925,pp. 170–76, pp. 173–74.
