Sitones

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Map showing the Roman empire in AD 125 and contemporary barbarian Europe, showing two possible locations of the Sitones. One, based on Tacitus, places them in central Sweden. Another view places them roughly in modern Estonia and/or Finland.

The Sitones were a

Suiones (ancestors of modern Swedes
) apart from one descriptor, namely that women were the ruling sex.

Upon the Suiones, border the people Sitones; and, agreeing with them in all other things, differ from them in one, that here the sovereignty is exercised by a woman. So notoriously do they degenerate not only from a state of liberty, but even below a state of bondage.[2]

Speculations on the Sitones' background are numerous. According to one theory, the name is a partial misunderstanding of

Sigtuna, one of the central locations in the Swedish kingdom, which much later had a Latin spelling Situne.[3][4][5]

Another view is that the "queen" of the Sitones derives by linguistic confusion with an

Kvens or Quains.[6][7][8]

According to medievalist Kemp 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]

See also

  • List of Germanic tribes

References

  1. ^ "Worshiping Power- An Anarchist View of Early State Formation" (PDF).
  2. ^ Tacitus, Germania, Germania.XLV
  3. Jarl Birger Brosa
    in the 1170s.
  4. OCLC 165378771, p. 1226
    (in German)
  5. OCLC 52696823, p. 1244
    .
  6. OCLC 2084026, p. 126
    .
  7. ISBN 9780192851390, pp. 24–25
    .
  8. OCLC 757840399 (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) - as Kven
    ancestors.
  9. ^ Kemp Malone, "The Suiones of Tacitus", The American Journal of Philology 46.2, 1925, pp. 170–76, pp. 173–74.
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