Tacitus Writes Germania - First Ethnography of the Germans
Tacitus published the Germania around AD 98, an ethnographic account of the peoples beyond the Rhine and Danube in some thirty pages. He had almost certainly never been there. The work draws on Pliny the Elder's lost German history, on merchants, soldiers and envoys, and on a Roman tradition of writing about barbarians that was as much about Rome as about them. The first half describes the Germans in general — their origin, appearance, weapons, assemblies, marriage customs, funerals, drinking and gambling. The second treats individual peoples from the Rhine outward to the Baltic and the Finns. Its method is comparative and its purpose is partly satirical. Marriage among the Germans is monogamous and adultery rare; no one there finds vice amusing, and corrupting or being corrupted is not called the spirit of the age. The contrast with Rome is the point, and the German virtues are made to reprove Roman ones. He is not writing propaganda for them. He records drunkenness, idleness between wars, human sacrifice and a taste for gambling that ends with men staking their own freedom. The text survived in a single manuscript found at Hersfeld and brought to Italy in the fifteenth century. What happened to it afterwards is its own history. German humanists read it as a national origin story; nineteenth-century nationalists read the purity passages as racial doctrine; and the SS pursued the surviving codex during the war, which Himmler regarded as a founding document. Momigliano called it among the most dangerous books ever written.
- Year: 98 CE
- Category: Cultural
