Germania (book)

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Map of the Roman Empire and Germania Magna in the early 2nd century, with the location of some Germanic tribes as described by Tacitus.

The Germania (Latin title: De Origine et situ Germanorum), written by Gaius Cornelius Tacitus around 98, is an ethnographic work on the diverse set of Germanic tribes outside the Roman Empire.

1 Purpose and uses
2 Reliability
3 Sources of the book
4 References
5 Further reading
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Purpose and uses

Ethnography had a long and distinguished heritage in classical literature, and the Germania fits squarely within the tradition established by authors from Herodotus to Julius Caesar. Tacitus himself had already written a similar—albeit shorter—essay on the lands and tribes of Britannia in his Agricola (chapters 10–13).

The Germania begins with a description of the lands, laws, and customs of the Germanic people chapters 1–27); it then segues into descriptions of individual tribes, beginning with those dwelling closest to Roman lands and ending on the uttermost shores of the Baltic, among the amber gathering Aesti, the primitive and savage Fenni, and the lesser known tribes beyond them, upon the fables told of which Tacitus with good judgment declines to comment. The work contains strong hints of a moralising intent, implicitly characterizing Germania in some respects as better than Rome, yet in other respects worse; yet these moral judgments are not, perhaps, its primary purposes. Tacitus might have wanted to stress the dangers that the barbarians posed to the Empire, indicated by his joy at the event of two German tribes fighting one another at the cost of sixty thousand dead. Although he focuses on Northern Britain in another work, it may be that he has a particular interest for the border with the Germanic people, because he seems persuaded that the people of the Germania were dangerous to the Empire. Perhaps he even saw the region as a potential addition to the empire, but he in no wise states or even implies this in his book.

Tacitus' descriptions of the Germanic character seem, at times, favorable in an implicit contrast to the Romans of his day, but these are never stated in an open comparison within the work. He appears to hold the fairly strict monogamy (with some exceptions among nobles who marry again) between Germanic husbands and wives and the chastity among the unmarried to be worthy of the highest praise (Ch. 18), in a sidelong contrast to the vice and immorality rampant in Roman society of his day, a theme that Juvenal and others describe in detail. He seems to admire the Germanics' open hospitality, their simplicity, and their bravery in battle. All of these traits may be especially highlighted because of their similarity to idealized Roman virtues. These glowing portrayals made the work popular in Germany—especially among German nationalists and German Romantics—from the sixteenth century on. One should not, however, think that Tacitus' portrayal of Germanic customs is entirely favorable; he castigates the Germanic people for what he saw as their habitual drunkenness, laziness, and barbarism, among other traits.

Despite this potential sign of bias, he does supply us with many names for the tribes with which Rome had come into contact, although his information may not have based on first-hand knowledge--much of it may have been condensed from the now lost History of Germania by Pliny the Elder, a military commander and writer who campaigned into Germania himself.

[edit] Reliability

On the question of Tacitus' reliability in Germania, much can be said. Significant agreement does exist with later sources written by the Germanic cultures themselves as they developed a greater literacy, including correctly identifying wergild as a customary way of handling murder, a fact that would later be codified in many Germanic law codes, including Salian Frank laws setting a fixed fee for the killing of various people based on status.

He description of folk assemblies agrees with the widespread Germanic assemblies known as Things, wapentakes, or folk-moots; the etymological derivation, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, of the Northern British local assemblies known as Wapentakes traces back to waepn-taec or, in Modern English, the "weapon-showing" and suggests that Tacitus was correct about weapons being required in order to take part in Germanic folk assemblies.

Archaeological evidence also bears out his description of the Suebian Knot, a good example of which is found on the bog body called Osterby Man. Some debate exists over his reliability despite these congruities to other sources and evidence. In fact, contemporary historians debate whether all these tribes were really Germanic in the sense that they spoke a Germanic language. Some of them, like the Batavians, may have been Celts, although elsewhere Tacitus shows care in rejecting the Nervii as true Germanics based on habits and appearance more similar to Celts, takes pains to emphasize that the Gothini of Central Germania are not Germanic but conquered Celts, and also carefully expresses doubt upon several of the easternmost tribes' ambiguous mix of Sarmatian and Germanic traits.

His description of the Scandinavian goddess Nerthus has lead to a substantial amount of speculation among researchers of Norse mythology and older Germanic and Indo-European mythology, as it is our only written source of Scandinavian mythology before the Eddas a thousand years later, and because it only poorly resembles the religion described there.

[edit] Sources of the book

Tacitus himself had never travelled in the Germanic lands; all his information is second-hand at best^[1]. Ronald Syme supposed that Tacitus closely copied the lost Bella Germaniae of Pliny the Elder, since the Germania is in some places outdated: in its description of the Danubian tribes, says Syme, "they are loyal clients of the Empire. . . . Which is peculiar. The defection of these peoples in the year 89 during Domitian's war against the Dacians modified the whole frontier policy of the Empire." (p. 128). While Pliny may have been the primary source, scholars have identified others; among them are Caesar's Gallic Wars, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Posidonius, Aufidius Bassus, and numerous non-literary sources: interviews with traders and soldiers who had ventured beyond the Rhine and Danube borders.

[edit] References

^ Alfred Gudeman (1900). "The Sources of the Germania of Tacitus". Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 31: 93-111.

J.G.C. Anderson (ed.), Germania; (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1938)
T.A. Dorey, 'Agricola' and 'Germania', in Tacitus (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969) (Studies in Latin Literature series)
Alfred Gudeman, The Sources of the Germania of Tacitus, in Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 31. (1900), pp. 93-111
Simon Schama, 1995. Landscape and Memory 2.i "The hunt for Germania"
Ronald Syme, Tacitus, vol. 1 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1958)

[edit] Further reading

Rodney Potter Robinson, 1935. The Germania of Tacitus (Middletown, Connecticut; American Philological Association) (textual and manuscript analysis)
Kenneth C. Schellhase, 1976. Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought (Chicago)