TRANSLATION: Cornelius Tacitus, The Germania, pt.1

A previously unseen translation, by me, of the one of the most important ethnographic texts in history

A scene from Trajan’s column depicting Germanic warriors battling Roman legionaries

One of the great things about being a facephag now is that I can talk about any aspect of my life and work I choose to, including all the things I’ve been and done when I wasn’t the Raw Egg Nationalist.

Here’s one thing I did as myself: I published a new translation of the Germania, by the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus. I published it in 2015, in a small run, as a tribute to my wonderful Latin teacher, just before I went up to Oxford to read for my DPhil in medieval history. The book consists of a 10,000+ word introductory essay on Tacitus, his life and works, and the Germania in particular, and then the translation itself.

I thought I’d reproduce the full book here, starting with the introductory essay, in two parts, and then the translation itself as the third and final part.

I’ll release part two tomorrow and the full translation early next week.

Introduction

About Cornelius Tacitus – aristocrat, senator, consul, and governor of Asia, rhetor, historian, and ethnographer – we know little, and likewise his works. Only a third of what he wrote and published has survived, and in that small portion he displays little enthusiasm for autobiography, passing over his life and self in a silence befitting his cognomen.[1] Despite Pliny the Younger’s confident assurance to his old friend, Auguror nec me fallit augurium, historias tuas immortales futuras (“I predict, and my prediction does not fail me, that your histories will be immortal”), what immortality the histories have achieved has rather owed as much to chance as to their splendid content. Almost immediately, their continuing existence came into doubt. Hardly a popular writer in late antiquity, Tacitus was even less so in the Middle Ages. After a thousand years of neglect, his major surviving works – the Agricola, the Germania, the Histories and the Annals – had each diminished to one or two manuscripts, hidden away here and there, as good as lost. A single act of copying has often been all that has separated them from oblivion.

Take the Germania. By the end of the Western Roman Empire, perhaps just a handful of manuscripts existed across the whole of Europe. Already, Pliny’s prediction could scarcely have appeared less infallible. Then, in the ninth century, came the Carolingian Renaissance, a state-led cultural revival in the empire of Charlemagne and his descendants. As well as producing an efflorescence of art, theology, literature and jurisprudence, this movement was responsible for the copying of a great many Classical and Patristic texts. But the aim, beyond mere preservation, was uncertain, and, as often as not, little or no attention was paid to the content of the texts to be copied. So it was that a German monk of Fulda, rooting through his monastery’s library, discovered and then copied an antique manuscript – which happened to contain, among other things, a Ciceronian dialogue, a biography of a Roman governor of Britain and a short, obscure treatise on the monk’s own ancient ancestors. The original perished, the copy remained safely preserved in the library for six-hundred years. By then it had probably acquired the distinction of being the only extant copy of each of the three works by Tacitus it contained – the Dialogue on Oratory, the Agricola and, of course, the Germania. Now desperate to shore up their increasingly rickety foundation, the monks were quick to recognise the potential value of the manuscript. A new renaissance was taking place, one no less hungry for Classical knowledge than its Carolingian forerunner, yet with rather more specific tastes: the political histories of Tacitus, newly rediscovered, were coming into fashion among humanist scholars. One of the monks travelled to Rome and met with a number of manuscript-hunters, including the future pope Pius II. So began a bidding-war. After thirty years of enticements, wrangling and frustration, the manuscript finally left Germany, for Italy and a price. At some point it was then lost, but not before further copying had ensured the survival of its contents.[2] Thus the Germania was freed from a millennium’s subjection to the whims of chance. The primacy of its content could now be asserted, all over Europe’s increasingly fertile and divided ground. For the next five centuries, the Germania was widely published and in the hands of various interested parties – from Martin Luther to Martin Mayer, Machiavelli to Montesquieu, Johann Herder to Heinrich Himmler – became a potent weapon of ideological warfare, culminating in the twentieth century with its most sinister interpellation, into the Blut und Boden mythology of the Third Reich. Tacitus’s primitive Germans, once at risk of being swept quietly away with the detritus of history, have since taken on lives neither he nor his friend Pliny could ever have foreseen.

This remarkable story has recently been told by Christopher Krebs[3] and will not be further rehearsed here. Instead, I shall offer a short biography of Tacitus and details of his works, surviving and lost; I shall then discuss the Germania, with reference first to the history of Rome’s relationship with the Germans, and then to Tacitus’s purpose and sources, as well as some of the evidence in support of his claims.

1. Tacitus Himself, His Works[4]

Cornelius Tacitus was probably born in AD 56 or -7, in a provincial town of Gallia Narbonesis (also known as “our Province” or “Transalpine Gaul”), a region roughly coterminous with modern Languedoc and Provence that had first become Roman in the late second-century BC. A tradition states that Tacitus was in fact born in Umbria, but there is no more to it than the questionable claim to shared descent made by the Emperor Tacitus (AD 275-6), whose family lived in the Umbrian town of Interamna. The historian’s praenomen is unknown. Nor do we know much of the family from which he came, although it must have been of political influence. The sources for his life consist mainly of a scattering of autobiography in his own writings, his correspondence with Pliny the Younger (also a correspondent of Suetonius, the historian most famous for his De Vita Caesarum) and two small and incomplete inscriptions, the first using Tacitus’s name for a date (as was common practice with regard to regional governors in the regions they governed), the second being a section from Tacitus’s funerary inscription lately identified. Fugitive though these sources may be, they nonetheless allow us to reconstruct the major events of his career.

Tacitus was probably the son of a member of the equestrian class, if a remark by Pliny the Elder is correct – perhaps of the Cornelius Tacitus who was procurator of the northern provinces of Belgica and Germania. Like Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, as the son of an aristocrat, was given a rigorous education in rhetoric, small details of which he relates in his minor work, the Dialogue on Oratory. Both may have been taught by the great orator Quintillian, who had opened a public school in Rome; although, their friendship is just as likely to have resulted from their common membership of the wealthy provincial aristocracy. Both achieved early fame as orators. And it may be precocious talent that explains Tacitus’s marriage, in AD 78, to the daughter of Julius Agricola, a distinguished general who at that time was consul and governor of the newly enlarged province of Britannia. We know almost nothing of Tacitus’s married life, beyond his fondness for hunting and outdoor pursuits.  

A few years later, in the reign of Titus, he began his political career proper by becoming quaestor and senator, his first step on the cursus honorum, the ladder of public offices which all aspiring politicians had to climb. He duly ascended to aedile, praetor then quindecimvir.

But it was not all plain climbing. The period of Tacitus’s early career coincided with what came to be known, in no small part thanks to Tacitus himself, as Domitian’s “reign of terror”, whose height was apparently reached around the time when Tacitus returned to Rome from provincial office, in AD 93. The view of Domitian as a cruel and capricious tyrant derives largely from accounts written by Tacitus and his contemporaries Pliny and Suetonius in later reigns, after the danger had passed. The reign they describe is in almost every respect a totalitarian regime of the modern sort: at its centre a religious personality cult (according to Suetonius, Domitian was the first emperor to demand the Senate address him as dominus et deus – master and god); widespread repression; intrusive surveillance and the use of spies and informers; curbs on free expression and behaviour (he appointed himself perpetual censor); summary trials on trumped-up charges; banishments and political murders; extravagant spending; military incompetence and hubris. Tacitus’s full account of the Flavian dynasty, given in his Histories, is now lost. Beyond a few comments elsewhere in the surviving books of the Histories and an allusion or two in the Germania, we are left with the Agricola (De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae) as his most sustained account of life under Domitian. This work is not a full history of the reign, but the answer to what Tacitus saw as the most important question it posed: how – indeed, whether – it is possible to live morally under a despotism. Through the later life of his father-in-law – who served Domitian first as military commander and then as governor of Gallia Aquitania and Britannia, before his recall to Rome and subsequent disgrace – Tacitus shows that the answer is yes, a man can be a moral island. Agricola remained uncorrupted in public office. He added to the glories of the Empire. Neither was he servile, nor did he make futile gestures against the regime, as many of the Stoics had through suicide: even in disgrace, he refused an ostentatious martyrdom. In offering this conclusion, Tacitus was, without doubt, offering an apologia for his own conduct at that time. Not unlike Agricola, he and other members of the governing class had also chosen to continue running the Empire in accordance with past ideals, despite the tide of corruption rising around them. Yet Tacitus makes clear that he cannot excuse, but only mitigate, his complicity in Domitian’s crimes. His candour, regret and shame – that of both collaborator and survivor – are striking. On the death of Agricola, he writes:

It was not his fate to see the Senate-house besieged, the Senate surrounded by armed men, and in the same reign of terror so many consulars butchered, the flight and exile of so many honourable women… A little while and our hands it was which dragged Helvidius to his dungeon; we it was who put asunder Mauricus and Rusticus; Senecio bathed us in his offending blood.[5] Nero after all withdrew his eyes, nor contemplated the crimes he authorised. Under Domitian it was no small part of our sufferings that we saw him and were seen of him; that our sighs were counted in his books; that not a pale cheek of all that company escaped those brutal eyes, that crimson face which flushed continually lest shame should unawares surprise it.[6]

But was Tacitus exaggerating the extent of Domitian’s tyranny, of his uncle’s suffering – and, by extension, his own? Modern scholars tend to disagree with Tacitus, Pliny and Suetonius in their general assessment of Domitian as a ruler. This tendency began as early as 1930, with Ronald Syme and a re-evaluation of the emperor’s management of the imperial finances. He opened an influential article thus:

The work of the spade and the use of common sense have done much to mitigate the influence of Tacitus and Pliny and redeem the memory of Domitian from infamy or oblivion. But much remains to be done.[7]

And much has been done. While not disagreeing with the view that Domitian was autocratic – yes, he did foster a cult of personality, deifying himself and family members and celebrating largely unearned triumphs, and, yes, he did use his powers as censor oppressively, especially towards the Senate – historians such as Brian Jones[8] have portrayed him as by no means an unpopular or unwise ruler. During his reign there was little persecution of religious minorities. His military policies were conciliatory, a realistic alternative to the expansionism and aggression of earlier reigns. Together with his economic policies, rehabilitated by Syme, the new peace laid the foundations for the future prosperity under Machiavelli’s “Five Good Emperors” (Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius). Domitian did face determined and powerful opposition – notably the revolt of Saturninus, governor of Germania Superior – and relations with the Senate, which rushed to have his memory consigned to oblivion upon his death, could hardly have been worse. So as a senator, Tacitus, like Pliny, may very well have suffered and had to dissemble. But his suffering was probably unrepresentative. What’s more, a need to distance himself and his family from the deposed Flavian dynasty may even have led him into deliberate distortion; for by his own later admission, he owed his political career to Flavian patronage. He doesn’t list a single act of hostility by Domitian against Agricola but instead uses innuendo to convict him of complicity in Agricola’s death – as also Nero and the Great Fire. Other evidence suggests that Agricola and Domitian were far closer than Tacitus would have us believe.[9]

After the palace conspiracy which led to Domitian’s murder in AD 96, Tacitus reached the final rung of the cursus honorum, becoming consul under the new emperor Trajan, who succeeded Nerva after his brief rule. Tacitus now began to publish his writings. First was probably the Dialogue on Oratory, an archetypal Ciceronian dialogue between four of the great orators of the day. Its stylistic dissimilarity to the rest of his works has led some to question its authorship. Next, in AD 98, were the Agricola and also the Germania. All the while, Tacitus as orator remained in demand. He delivered the funeral oration for Lucius Verginius Rufus, a veteran soldier and politician who had refused the throne during the chaos which followed the death of Nero. A few years later, in AD 100, he and Pliny conducted the successful impeachment of Marius Priscus for extortion during his term as governor of Africa. There then followed a twelve-year hiatus from politics and oratory, during which Tacitus focused on his historical writing. First came the Histories, written concurrently with a significant portion of the Annals. Towards the beginning of the Agricola, Tacitus had stated his desire to write about the reigns of Domitian, Nerva and Trajan, but this project was put to one side in favour of an account which begins in AD 69, the Year of the Four Emperors – a brief civil war after Nero’s suicide, when four emperors ruled in quick succession – and ends with the death of Domitian. The Histories originally comprised fourteen books,[10] but only the first four books survive whole, along with 26 chapters of the fifth. The last of these chapters is a short ethnography of the ancient Jews, rather like the short ethnographies in the Agricola and Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, and served as the preface to his lost account of the Great Jewish Revolt. The Annals, which appears to be Tacitus’s final work, begins after the death of Augustus in AD 14. Tacitus wrote at least 16 books, of which books seven to ten and parts of books five, six, 11 and 16 are missing. The surviving first half of book 16 closes in AD 66 and marks the end of the Annals as we know them. It is unclear whether he wrote the further histories he had planned: there are no extant accounts of the reigns of Nerva and Trajan, nor of Augustus’s reign or the early days of the Republic. At least some of the Annals were probably written after 112 AD, when Tacitus returned to politics as governor of the province of Asia, in what is now western Turkey (one of the two surviving inscriptions naming him is from this time). A passage in the Annals concerning recent additions to the Empire suggests that he was still alive and writing in AD 116, in which case he definitely survived his friend Pliny (d. AD 113) and could have survived Trajan too, who died in August of the next year. Of the period from then until his death, we know nothing. His succession is a mystery.

2. The Germania

As Christopher Krebs shows, the Germania has punched, or been made to punch, far above its own weight. The dangerous “book” of his title is something of a misnomer; for the Germania is not really a book as we would understand it, but more of an essay. The average paperback version of the text is no more than 30 or so pages, 46 numbered chapters of paragraph length. Although more substantial than Tacitus’s ethnography of the Jews in the first half of book five of the Histories (four chapters) and longer than similar accounts in Caesar’s work, it is in no way comparable to Tacitus’s later histories, even in the ragged state in which we have inherited them. It is a little shorter than the Agricola, also 46 chapter-paragraphs. But this brevity should not be equated with a lack of substance. If anything, the breathlessness of the journey across “broad peninsulas and immense extents of islands”, through vast plains and forests and up precipitous mountains, and the compression of Tacitus’s style, often diamond-like and impenetrable, seem only to make the text more enigmatic and compelling. In the course of just a short train journey, Heinrich Himmler was able to lose himself completely “in the loftiness, purity and nobleness of [his] ancestors”, determining immediately afterwards in his note book, “Thus shall we be again, or at least some among us.”[11] This incipient flushing of racial pride is likely to be shared by few modern readers on first encountering the Germania, but they may still feel, quite forgivably, that they have experienced something far greater than the sum of its parts.

The text begins with a general description of the geography and situation of Germany, the first chapter making a clear allusion with its opening words, Germania omnis…, to those of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. The book is divided into two clear sections. Section one, Chapters one to 27, deals with the history and customs of the Germans as a whole – from their origin in the earth-born god Tuisto and his son Mannus, to their marriage-customs, dice-playing and love of liberty, from their councils to their carousing. Section two, Chapters 28 to 46, deals with individual German tribes, as well as the strange and savage peoples of the far limits, who collect amber or sleep naked in the dirt, with no more than bone-tipped arrows and tangles of branches to protect them from beasts and the elements.

The description of the physical geography of Germany is swift, but no less memorable for it. Dismissing the possibility that the Germans had migrated to their present homeland, Tacitus asks rhetorically:

Who, indeed, to add to the horrors of the unknown sea, would leave Asia or Africa or Italy and make for Germany – appalling in its soils, harsh in its climate, dismal in its culture and appearance – unless if it were their fatherland?

The weather, he tells us, is “forsaken”, the land “bristling with forests and foul with marshes.”

He then proceeds with the main subject of section one, a description of the common customs of all the German peoples, beginning with their mythical poems – “their only history and chronicles” – and ending with their sober funerals.