Romans had a real fascination for ‘barbarian’ people. Our reliance on this classical observation comes with its own challenges. Graeco-Roman testimony is, therefore, often the sole literary evidence that we have for early tribal peoples like the Germans a people integral to the foundation and development of the European continent. Written around 98 CE, the Germania is valuable because Rome’s tribal enemies (Germans, Celts, Iberians, and Britons) operated an oral rather than a literary cultural tradition. The Germania has remained invaluable to historians due to the view it offers into the customs and social landscape of early Germanic tribes. A powerhouse of Roman historical writing, Tacitus is one of the great writers of history. The Germaniais a short work by the historian and politician Publius Cornelius Tacitus (65 – 120 CE). The general reader may like to be warned that sections xi – xiv of this Introduction are less immediately necessary to the understanding of the text than sections i – x, and that the Notes on Manuscripts and passages of the text and the Bibliography are specially intended for classical students.Tacitus & The Germania Publius Cornelius Tacitus, via Wikimedia Commons The early parts of the introduction will be better understood when the whole of it has been read. As he is probably unfamiliar with much detail that is necessary for the full understanding of the story, it will be well to say something about the author and his works and the conditions of the age in which he wrote. It is to the modern British reader, then, that this version is offered. The story of the hero and the story of strange countries that were combined in Homer`s `Odyssey` have now, at a later stage of literature, come to receive separate treatment. The Germania, a detailed account of a great people that had already begun to be a European problem in the first century of our era, should still have a message for us in the twentieth. The Agricola of Tacitus, the biography of the most famous governor of Roman Britain, is part of our national story, and as such has a direct claim on our interest. Tacitus on Britain and Germany Introduction
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