Thou from thy mother didst inherit them,
And she from hers, &c.—Page 123.
Oehlenschläger probably refers in this passage to the desperate
resolution of the Cimbrian women after the great defeat by Marius
of the Cimbrian army, at the Adige (B. C. 102.) ‘The first act of
the wives of the Cimbri,’ says Michelet, in his History of France,
‘was to set their children at liberty by death; they strangled
them, or cast them under the wheels of their waggons. They then
hanged themselves; fastening themselves by a running knot to
the horns of their oxen, and goading them on so as to ensure their
being trampled to pieces.’
