Tacitus never saw the Teutonic forests, but in his first-century bestseller Germania, he told Romans that the German tribes who lived there had an “inherent love of liberty” and a rude kind of self-government. The men kept their women “fenced-in and chaste, without seductive display,” and if they caught a woman jumping the fence in adultery, they scourged her in public. They were an honorable and warlike people, and levying interest on loans was…