The Teutons gave Germans a nickname, but they may not have been Germanic
Teutonic has meant German for more than a thousand years. The original Teutones, who shook the Roman Republic in the late 2nd century BC, are harder to pin down: their name and their leaders' names look Celtic, while ancient writers placed their homeland in the far north, among early Germanic speakers.
The name rests on a very old Indo-European root meaning people, tribe or crowd, the same one behind the Celtic god Teutates. It conveys a mass of ordinary folk rather than heroes, and may once have meant people under arms, judging by Hittite and Luwian words for army. It could be Celtic or an early form of Germanic, but its spelling does not match the later Germanic word for a people, so if it is Germanic it predates a major sound change in that language.
Ancient sources disagree about where they came from. The explorer Pytheas, in the fourth century BC, reportedly described them trading amber near a northern island. Pomponius Mela put them on a large island in a bay most scholars read as the Baltic, probably Scandinavia. The linguist Stefan Zimmer notes that both the Teutones and their allies the Cimbri left traces in place names in Jutland, and sees no reason to doubt the old accounts of their origin. Plutarch admitted nobody really knew.
They are remembered for the Cimbrian War. Alongside the Cimbri, they crushed Roman armies at Noreia and Arausio in 105 BC, then split up. Gaius Marius beat the Teutones at Aquae Sextiae, near today's Aix-en-Provence, in 102 BC and the Cimbri the next year. Their king, Teutobod, was captured, and some survivors reportedly fought as gladiators in the slave revolt of 73 to 71 BC.
The ethnic labels came later. Early Greek and Roman writers called them Celts without distinguishing northern peoples. Julius Caesar drew the line between Gauls and Germans partly to argue that northern raiders were a lasting threat demanding pre-emptive war, his justification for invading northern Gaul. From ninth-century monastic Latin onward, Teuton became a learned word for speakers of West Germanic languages, standing in for theodiscus, meaning of the people.
Source: Teutons
