velleda

Updated: June 5, 2025

The Germans treated their women with esteem and confidence, consulted them on every occasion of importance, and fondly believed, that in their breasts resided a sanctity and wisdom more than human. Some of the interpreters of fate, such as Velleda, in the Batavian war, governed, in the name of the deity, the fiercest nations of Germany.

Edward Gibbon - History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Volume 1

But the Teutons might have done it a hundred years before that, when Rome was in a death agony, and Vitellius and Vespasian were struggling for the purple, and Civilis and the fair Velleda, like Barak and Deborah of old, raised the Teuton tribes.

Charles Kingsley - The Roman and the Teuton : A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge

The reign of Charlemagne had at last accomplished the promise of the sorceress Velleda and other soothsayers. A German race had re-established the empire of the world. The Netherlands, like-the other provinces of the great monarch's dominion, were governed by crown-appointed functionaries, military and judicial.

John Lothrop Motley - The Rise of the Dutch Republic — Volume 01: Introduction I

Be assured, therefore, that this eternal glory, which He promised to those who trust in Him, will be fulfilled likewise when He comes to judge all nations. For instance, Cassandra, the Pythia in Delphi, Triton and Peristhaea in Dodona, the Sybils, the Velleda of Tacitus, the Mandragoras, and Druidesses, the witches of the Reformation age; and in fine, the modern somnambules are all women too.

Wilhelm Meinhold - Sidonia, the Sorceress : the Supposed Destroyer of the Whole Reigning Ducal House of Pomerania — Volume 1