In the first century CE, all of these qualities had been attributed by Tacitus to the German barbarians in his "Germania", in which he contrasted them repeatedly with the softened, Romanized, corrupted Gauls, by inference criticizing his own Roman culture for getting away from its roots—which was the perennial function of such comparisons. The Germans did not inhabit a "Golden Age" of ease, but were tough and inured to hardship, qualities which Tacitus saw as preferable to the "softness" of civilized life. In antiquity this form of "hard Primitivism", whether viewed as desirable or seen as something to escape, co-existed in rhetorical opposition to the "soft Primitivism" of visions of a lost Golden Age of ease and plenty.