The Germans, as described by Tacitus, sixty years after the death of Christ, considered only treachery, desertion, cowardice and sexual perversion to be crimes serious enough to be punished by death. In a society where every fighting man was a valuable asset, execution and mutilation could not reasonably be considered suitable punishments for lesser offences, such as murder or theft; and so, as Tacitus discovered, the German murderer or thief when convicted paid a fine “in a stated number of oxen or cattle. Half of the fine was paid to the King, half to the person for whom justice was being obtained or to his relatives.”