Cosuanetes Erotic

The Cosuanetes were an Iron Age Celtic people of Vindelicia, the Alpine foreland between the Danube and the mountains in what is now southern Germany. Rome conquered them in 15 BC, and they faded into the provincial population of Raetia. No community today descends from them under that name. What survives is a word cut in stone. Around 7 or 6 BC Augustus put up a victory monument at La Turbie, above present-day Monaco, carved with the names of the Alpine nations he had conquered. It lists four Vindelician peoples: the Cosuanetes, Rucinates, Licates and Catenates. Pliny the Elder copied the list into his Natural History. Later the geographer Ptolemy recorded a Vindelician group called the Consuantae, generally taken to be the same people.

That is nearly the whole written record, so the rest has to be read from the region. We can't say where their land was. The Licates took their name from the Lech river, but the Cosuanetes can't be tied to any known valley or town. Like the other Vindelici they almost certainly spoke a Continental Celtic language, now known only from the names of tribes, people and places. They belonged to the late La Tène world of southern Bavaria. That world had walled towns such as Manching on the Danube, ironworking and trade. It also struck small cup-shaped gold coins. Farmers who later dug them up called them Regenbogenschüsselchen, little rainbow bowls, because they believed the coins fell where a rainbow touched the earth. Religion was polytheistic. Square earthwork enclosures dot the same landscape, and archaeologists still argue over whether they were sanctuaries.

The end came fast. In 15 BC Augustus sent his stepsons Drusus and Tiberius into the Alps from two directions, and in a single campaigning season the Raeti and Vindelici were beaten. Cassius Dio reports that Rome then took away most of the men of fighting age. It left enough people to work the land but too few to revolt. The territory became part of the province of Raetia, whose capital grew up at Augusta Vindelicorum, today Augsburg. Vindelician recruits served in Roman auxiliary units far from home, and the old tribal names fell out of use. After Roman rule collapsed, Alemanni and Bavarii settled the same ground. Nothing the Cosuanetes made can be credited to them by name. All that remains is their place on a conqueror's list.