to the sea that washed the shores of Germany, visited that country. They went on to specify that Asciburgium,[1] a town on the banks of the Rhine, which existed in the historian's time, had been established and named by Ulysses.
The evidence offered to Tacitus for these beliefs was, that an altar had formerly been found at Asciburgium consecrated to Ulysses, to whose name was added that of his father Laertes; and that monuments and tombs were still extant in Greek characters on the confines of Germany and of Raetia. Now Asciburgium should mean Ash-burgh or Ash-town; and the natural conclusion from the name is that the native legend represented Woden, here called Ulysses, placing the man Ash whom he created at Ash-burgh, and giving it that name. When Romans, acquainted with the religion and mythology of their own country and those of Greece, began to inquire about the gods of the Germans, it may be supposed that they found much the same difficulty with regard to Woden as they did in the case of Ogmios. The accounts they heard of him made some equate him with Hercules, while they reminded others of Ulysses beyond all question. In other words, the Hercules and Ulysses of the Germania represented one and the same Teutonic god or hero, who was no other than Woden. According to this interpretation of the historian's words, the ancient Germans had poems about him which constituted at once the story of the labours of the Teutonic Hercules and a rude sort of Odyssey: what a vista of lost literature this discloses to the gaze
- ↑ It is supposed to be represented by Asburg, or else to have stood near Essenberg.
