Die Germania
1876
Written by the Roman senator and historian around 98 AD, this slender treatise is the most detailed surviving ancient account of the peoples living beyond the Rhine and Danube. Tacitus observes the Germans with a Roman eye that is equal parts fascination and alarm: he sees a society uncorrupted by Mediterranean luxury, yet dangerous in its wildness. The text moves through their geography, their origins (both mythic and disputed), their physical descriptions, their tribal governance, their religious practices, and their martial customs. What makes the work enduring is not its accuracy but its artfulness. Tacitus constructs the Germans as a mirror to Rome's own anxieties about decadence and military readiness. Here are people who elect their kings for merit, who value loyalty over gold, who fight naked if it means moving faster. Whether this is noble portrait or deliberate exaggeration remains debated for two millennia. The work matters because it is essentially all we have from antiquity about these peoples, and because it reveals as much about Roman self-perception as about Germanic life.
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“Secure against the designs of men, secure against the malignity of the Gods, they have accomplished a thing of infinite difficulty; that to them nothing remains even to be wished.””
— Cornelius Tacitus
“Escolhem os Reis pela nobreza, os chefes pelo valor. O poder não é ilimitado nem arbitrário para os reis, e os chefes impõem-se pela admiração, mais por exemplo do que por autoridade, se são ousados e insignes, se actuam à frente na linha de batalha.””
— Cornelius Tacitus
“In wonderful savageness live the nation of the Fennians, and in beastly poverty, destitute of arms, of horses, and of homes; their food, the common herbs; their apparel, skins; their bed, the earth; their only hope in their arrows, which for want of iron they point with bones. Their common support they have from the chase, women as well as men; for with these the former wander up and down, and crave a portion of the prey. Nor other shelter have they even for their babes, against the violence of tempests and ravening beasts, than to cover them with the branches of trees twisted together; this a reception for the old men, and hither resort the young. Such a condition they judge more happy than the painful occupation of cultivating the ground, than the labour of rearing houses, than the agitations of hope and fear attending the defence of their own property or the seizing that of others. Secure against the designs of men, secure against the malignity of the Gods, they have accomplished a thing of infinite difficulty; that to them nothing remains even to be wished.””
— Cornelius Tacitus
