Julius Caesar did not penetrate very far east of the Rhine, so his knowledge of the Germans, expressed in De Bello Gallico ( On the Gallic War, c. Prior to Tacitus’ narrative, a Syrian-born Hellenistic Greek polymath of the first century BC, Poseidonius, may have been the first to distinguish clearly between the Germans and the Celts, but only fragments of his writings survive. He requested information of those in a position to know” and “exercises critical judgment.” He consulted good sources, memoirs, biographies, and official records, and he frequently implies that he had more than one source before him. And Roman traders expanded traffic with the barbarians, generating, perhaps, more knowledge than the military men.Īccording to Jewish classicist Moses Hadas, Tacitus “never consciously sacrifices historical truth. Diplomatic exchanges between Rome and Germanic tribes brought German leaders to Rome and Roman emissaries to barbarian courts. Roman commanders produced unpublished memoirs of their campaigns along the lines of Caesar’s Commentaries, which circulated in Roman literary circles.

During the period knowledge of northern Europe increased rapidly. Tacitus’ book is based upon contemporaneous oral and written accounts. (It has been said that no one in Tacitus is good except Agricola and the Germans.) Though Tacitus at times writes critically of the Germans, he also stresses their simplicity, bravery, honor, fidelity, and other virtues in contrast to corrupt Roman imperial society, fallen from the vigor of the Republic. The book signifies the emergence of the northern Europeans from the obscurity of archaeology, philology, and prehistory into the light of history half a millennium after the emergence of the southern Europeans in Homer and Herodotus. Its reliable account of their ethnography, culture, institutions, and geography is the most thorough that has survived from ancient times, and to this day remains the preeminent classical text on the subject. The Germania has been the most influential source for the early Germanic peoples since the Renaissance.

Agricola, the general primarily responsible for the Roman conquest of Britain and governor of Britannia from 77–85 AD, was Tacitus’ father-in-law. The Agricola, about Roman Britain, is roughly the same length. It was translated from the Latin by Alfred Church and William Brodribb in 1876 and published in The Complete Work of Tacitus by Random House’s Modern Library in 1942. The Germania is a short work, not really a “book.” My copy, “Germany and Its Tribes,” is a mere 23 pages long - albeit in moderately small wartime print on thin paper containing no notes, annotations, maps, illustrations, or other editorial aids. Tacitus, a senator, is believed to have held the offices of quaestor in 79, praetor in 88, consul in 97, and proconsul or governor of the Roman provinces in “Asia” (western Turkey), from 112–13.

Germania by tacitus