Hilleviones

The Hilleviones were a Germanic people occupying an island called Scatinavia in the 1st century AD, according to the Roman geographer Pliny the Elder in Naturalis Historia (Book 4, Chapter 96), written circa 77 AD. Pliny's Scatinavia is generally believed to have referred to the Scandinavian peninsula, which in the 1st century AD had not yet been fully explored by the Romans and was therefore described as an island. Pliny wrote that it was an island "of a magnitude as yet unascertained". The Hilleviones lived in the only part of the island that was known, and according to Pliny, they thought of their 500 villages as a separate (alterum) world.

Along the route to Scatinavia, as described by Pliny, were unexplored islands with people who were rumoured to have "ears of such extraordinary size as to cover the rest of the body, which is otherwise left naked". On neighboring islands, "human beings are produced with the feet of horses", Pliny wrote. Leaving these unfamiliar lands behind, a traveller will enter the nation of the Ingaevones in Germania, where, according to Pliny, "we begin to have some information upon which more implicit reliance can be placed". In this more familiar territory is a mountain range called Saevo, which stretches all the way to a large promontory called Cimbri (Cimbrorum), which ends in a gulf called Codanus. It is here, in this gulf, that the island of Scatinavia can be found.

The section that mentions the Hilleviones is short:

In another chapter of Naturalis Historia, Pliny mentions an island called Tyle (Book 4, Chapter 104)

All the classical geographers who wrote about this region during the first six centuries AD name different tribes as the inhabitants of the main Scandinavian "island". Shortly before Pliny, Pomponius Mela wrote about Codannovia (also assumed to be Scandinavia) where a tribe called the Teutoni could be found. In Tacitus's Germania from around 98 AD, tribes called the Sitones and the Suiones are mentioned as inhabitants in neighboring lands. The Suiones are described as living "in the sea", which has generally been interpreted as meaning "living on an island". The area described by Tacitus has therefore sometimes been treated as being the equivalent of Pliny's island Scatinavia, although variants on Scandiae and Scandinavia are not names used by Tacitus for this region.

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