In about the year 98 CE, the Roman historian Publius (also called Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus (56–117) wrote Germania: A Treatise on the Situation, Manners, and Inhabitants of Germany (in Latin, De origine et situ Germanorum). This ethnographic treatise, as the title suggests, examines the characteristics, lives, and customs of the Germani, or the various “barbarian” Germanic tribes that lived beyond the frontier of the Roman Empire in central-northern Europe east of the Rhine River. The term, which Julius Caesar adopted from the Gauls and which probably means “neighbor” or possibly “men of the forests,” is not to be confused with the modern term designating the German-speaking peoples.