In chapter 4, he mentions that they all have common physical characteristics, blue eyes ( truces et caerulei oculi = "sky-coloured, azure, dark blue, dark green"), reddish hair ( rutilae comae = "red, golden-red, reddish yellow"), and large bodies, vigorous at the first onset but not tolerant of exhausting labour, tolerant of hunger and cold, but not of heat or thirst.
They are divided into three large branches, the Ingaevones, the Irminones, and the Istaevones, deriving their ancestry from three sons of Mannus, son of Tuisto, their common forefather. Tacitus says (chapter 2) that physically, the Germanic peoples appear to be a distinct nation, not an admixture of their neighbors, since nobody would desire to migrate to a climate as horrid as that of Germania. The Germania begins with a description of the lands, laws, and customs of the Germanic people (chapters 1–27) it then describes individual peoples, beginning with those dwelling closest to Roman lands and ending on the uttermost shores of the Baltic, among the amber-gathering Aesti, the Fenni, and the unknown peoples beyond them. The Germania, written by the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus around 98 AD and originally entitled On the Origin and Situation of the Germans ( Latin: De origine et situ Germanorum), is a historical and ethnographic work on the Germanic peoples outside the Roman Empire. Map of the Roman Empire and Germania Magna in the early 2nd century, with the possible locations of some peoples described by Tacitus as Germanic
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