TRANSLATION: Cornelius Tacitus, The Germania, pt.2

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.

Here’s the second and final part of the introduction. You can read the first part here. The translation, in full, will follow next week.

2.2 The Purpose of the Germania[1]

The Germania is not simply an ethnography as a layman might understand – an account of the unusual and interesting customs of an alien people, for information and enjoyment. It cuts both ways, providing a double description, of both subject and observer. This is something many anthropologists now acknowledge that all ethnographies must, to a greater or lesser extent, do. Even apparently neutral concepts such as “society”, “religion”, “economics” and “politics” have their own histories and are culture-bound, they say, and to apply them to another culture is also, inescapably, to consider the development of the culture and thinking that produced them. Tacitus, however, is not aiming to show that a truly “emic” description – an account of native culture solely in the natives’ terms – is an unattainable ideal, or likewise a truly “etic” description – an account from outside the mental constraints of time and place.[2] Which is not to say that he doesn’t grasp the idea of ethnocentrism. He clearly does. Consider, for instance, his discussion of the northern ocean, where Hercules – “first of all men” to the Germans, some said – had apparently ventured:

Legend imparts that even now pillars of Hercules remain in that place, whether Hercules really did go there or whether we agree to assign to his fame whatever is magnificent in the world, wherever it may be.

Or consider his description of a certain religious custom of the Nahanavali. In “a grove of ancient religion”, a priest in female dress stands watch over two male gods – brothers. These, naturally, are Castor and Pollux, the Gemini. Or, at least, that is “a Roman interpretation”; for in actual fact there are “no traces of a foreign cult”.

Tacitus’s aim is, instead, a moral comparison; although, he generally leaves the actual comparing to the knowing reader. Many of the statements he makes about the vigorousness and purity of German customs are also contrasting statements about the stagnation and corruption of their Roman counterparts. These contrasts tend to be expressed in the pithy sententiae he ends many chapters with. For instance:

They consecrate groves and woods, and they call sacred, using the names of the gods, what they see with reverence alone.

Good customs are more powerful there than good laws elsewhere.

The more kin, the greater the number of affines – the more agreeable [a] man’s old age. Childlessness has no rewards.

The first is an allusion to the glut of deifications and cults at Rome, especially imports from the east; the second, made at the end of Chapter 19, on German marriage customs, to the failure of Roman laws to combat the harmful social effects of celibacy; the third, to the lucrative practice of legacy-hunting. The Germans are not ostentatious in their display. They care little for gold. They are chaste, and “no-one there laughs at immorality”. Youthful vigour is not exhausted in seduction. They seek distinction in war wherever they can and judge cowardice the ultimate disgrace. Politically, they are free, with kings whose power is not absolute. The contrasts with Rome at this time were clear – clear enough, Tacitus believed, that they didn’t even need to be stated.

In using the customs of the Germans to provide another perspective on his own people’s customs and state, Tacitus was writing from within an ancient tradition of ethnography that includes the work of Herodotus – the “father” of both anthropology and history, as he is often named – as well as the work of Xenophon, Polybius and Plutarch. To the method of this venerable tradition, he adds that of a younger one, Roman historiography, whose purpose was also moral in a very definite and similar sense. Contrary to the modern idea that the historian, after Leopold von Ranke, must only describe the past wie es eigentlich gewesen (“how things actually were”), Tacitus’s conception of history and the historian’s role, like that of his contemporaries, was inherently a moral one. To borrow two concepts from Nietzsche, we could describe the Roman conception of history as “monumental” rather than “antiquarian”.[3] Whereas “antiquarian” history concerns itself only with the preservation and accumulation of facts, “monumental” history is used to empower present readers by reminding them of the great deeds of the past. It is a model for right action, now. According to Ronald Mellor:

Roman historians always regarded moral teaching as a central function, perhaps the central function, of historical writing. They saw all change in moral terms, and they saw important historical issues like causation as fundamentally moral questions… For it was from their study of the past, from the virtues and vices of the ancestors, that the Romans derived their conception of public morality.[4]

But Tacitus doesn’t simply continue this tradition: he changes it, recasting the meaning of political virtue and with it the moral trajectory of his people. He abandons the “easygoing chauvinism” of Livy, to show that political virtue (virtus) “consisted in something more complex than fighting to the death to defend the state against a foreign enemy.”[5] Although his story is still one of virtus, he tells not of its growth but its decline and the resulting loss of political freedom. The contrast between the noble deeds of the past and the follies of the present is a bitter one; for it presages further disasters to come.

In the Germania, the history, mostly contained in the second half, reinforces and extends the unspoken moral comparison of the ethnography. There is no division of moral labour. In Chapter 37, Tacitus’s most sustained treatment of the common history of Rome and the Germans, he states that of all his people’s enemies, neither the Samnites, nor the Carthaginians, nor the Hispaniae and the Gauls – not even the Parthians – have proven more persistent and dangerous than the Germans:

For what else has the East – itself humbled under Ventidius, with the loss of Pacorus[6] – hindered us with than the killing of Crassus?

Whereas the Germans “took from the Roman people five consular armies at once, and even from Caesar took Varus and three legions with him.” Indeed:

Not without punishment were there victories over the Germans for Gaius Marius in Italy, for Drusus and Nero and Germanicus in their own territories.

(A nice use of litotes – a double negative as an emphatic positive.) After a reference to Caligula’s abortive campaign against the Germans (amusingly described by Robert Graves in his novel, I, Claudius), he also alludes to the revolt of the Batavi and to recent policies as a result of which the Germans “have been repulsed, more triumphed over than conquered.” This must be a dig at Domitian and his brief campaign against the Chatti in AD 83, described in the Agricola as a “mock triumph” and by Suetonius, in the Lives of the Caesars, as “uncalled for”. The Roman will to fight the Germans appeared to be waning, but the Germans would make the Romans fight – willingly or not.

A clear warning about the fate of the Empire. And its timing is unlikely to have been incidental. Trajan, yet to return to Rome and take up the emperorship, was still far away in the north, fortifying the German frontier. This in itself was encouraging: the emperor-elect clearly understood that defence against the Germans should be among the Empire’s chief priorities. But would he go further, as Tacitus hoped? Would he reverse the policy of defence and match the Empire’s most dangerous enemies strength for strength? Whether Trajan ever read the Germania, and how extensively and influentially it circulated, we do not know.

If Tacitus aimed to redirect the course of the Empire, then he was not a fatalist, as some – including the man himself – have claimed.[7] But he was not an optimist, either. In Chapter 33, he describes a bloody war instigated against the Bructeri by their neighbours. The final battle was a magnificent slaughter witnessed by the Romans themselves, although they played no part in it. Sixty thousand died, without the Romans’ lifting a hand. A cause for celebration? Tacitus ends the chapter with a plea:

I beg may there remain and endure among these peoples, if not love of us, then at least hatred of one another, when, with the destiny of the Empire pressing onwards, fortune can offer us nothing better than the discord of our enemies.

Fortune would not intervene to save the Romans if they couldn’t save themselves.

2.3 Tacitus and “the Germans”: the Sources of the Germania and the Supporting Evidence

Tacitus never went to live among his subjects as modern anthropologists do. Or even, for that matter, as ancient anthropologists did; for a number of them, including the Greeks Herodotus and Polybius, had spent much time in contact with the natives they wrote about, as traders, ambassadors or simply travellers. Although Tacitus had seen the German prophetess Veleda in Rome, as he recounts at the end of Chapter 8 of the Germania, and must surely also have seen German slaves or prisoners of war there, it is probable that he never stepped foot north of the Alps. Rather than gathering primary data himself, he relied almost exclusively on secondary sources – written accounts. Among them were definitely the works of Julius Caesar (100-44 BC), whom he refers to in Chapter 28 as “the greatest of all historians, the deified Julius” (probably with a certain irony, since he otherwise deliberately avoided the “deified” epithet). Caesar had fought the Germans, on both sides of the Rhine, and wrote extensively about these campaigns. His description of the campaign against Ariovistus is a definite source for the Germania, especially with regard to German tactics – their mixing cavalry and infantry, for instance, or the presence of their kin on the side-lines of battles. Book six of De Bello Gallico includes a short ethnography of the Germans, and its influence on the Germania’s chapters on land tenure and hospitality is obvious. Tacitus also used the works of Poseidonius, a Greek philosopher of the second century BC, and Pliny the Elder (AD 23-79). Pliny had served as an army officer on the Rhine frontier, campaigning against the Chatti and Chauci and helping to construct a canal between the rivers Rhine and Maas. He later drew on these experiences to write a twenty-book account of the most recent German wars, now lost. Otherwise, soldiers and merchants may have provided Tacitus with oral testimony. He seems particularly well informed about trade with the Germans, especially their preference for certain kinds of currency and good.

If Tacitus’s use of secondary sources, some written decades or centuries earlier, should alert us at once to the danger of simply assuming the truth of the Germania, there is an equal danger in claiming that he somehow “invented” the Germans. It has long been fashionable in academe to write of the “construction” and “imagination” of identity. Nations are “imagined communities”,[8] created by literature and historical writing, the media and government policies in education, the economy and the military. Ethnic groups assert and, in doing so, create their identity – through rituals, sports, dress and language. By imagining and creating in-groups – us, the Romans – we simultaneously imagine and create out-groups – them, the Germans. Boundary-maintaining is boundary-making. In one form or another, weak or strong, such claims seem to be true, perhaps rather obviously. Even so, they are often made without asking from what materials the acts of construction and imagination took place, or indeed whether what has been created bears any resemblance to what was there before. The impression is of creation ex nihilo. This tendency is far from absent in writing on the Germania, including Christopher Krebs’ recent book. Combining a scepticism of all claims to national or racial unity with a desire to rubbish the later political, especially Nazi, uses of the Germania, Krebs often fails to distinguish between the text itself and its later interpellations, eliding the two:

The Germania was taught in schools, amply quoted in Nazi articles, and a source of enthusiasm for countless National Socialists, from party foot-soldiers to high-ranking leaders. The only comprehensive account from ancient times of the Germanic peoples, it was read as a report of the German past and widely celebrated as a “magnificent monument”. Unfortunately it is not a report, nor is it about the German past.[9]

Krebs’ main target is what Himmler took from the Germania: the idea of an ancient German race whose genius and destiny was biologically inscribed, a race directly continuous with the modern German nation. This idea certainly does deserve scrutiny – on historical, sociological and linguistic grounds. But what Tacitus wrote about the Germans and the uses that have since been made of it, can be separated. They are not the same.

Is Tacitus really claiming racial unity for the Germans? A huge weight is usually afforded to two short passages early in the text. Tacitus writes, in Chapters 2 and 4, respectively:

I should believe that the Germans are indigenous and have barely mixed with other peoples through migrations and friendships.

I myself agree with the opinions of those who think the peoples of Germany untainted by marriages with other nations, and a nation peculiar, pure and like to itself alone. For this reason their physical appearance, although there are a great many of them, is the same for all: savage blue eyes, reddish hair, bodies large and powerful only for quick bursts of effort.

Both of these statements have been central to the myth-making of the most virulent forms of German nationalism since the 18^th century, not least of all National Socialism. Perhaps this fact alone has been enough to convince historians that the text itself must bear some blame for its uses – that it is, per se, a “dangerous book”.[10] And if we choose to treat the above quotations as two stand-alone assertions about the origins and character of the ancient Germans, such a conclusion seems inescapable.

But to do so is to ignore the way their meaning is altered by their relation to the rest of the text. Context restored, the claim to racial unity seems far from certain, the blame shifting back from text to users. To begin with, take the language Tacitus uses to describe the Germans as a collective. Although he follows Poseidonius and Caesar in making the German tribes a single gens (a group of common descent) with a single name – Germani – his use of these and related terms of cultural, social and ethnic identification – natio, populus, civitas – is extremely variable. In Chapter 38, he uses the plural of gens to mean what we might recognise as “tribes” or even “sub-tribes”, when he identifies the various sub-groups of the Suebi, themselves one of the constituent parts of the greater whole. A similar usage is notable in Chapter 34. Likewise, natio is used in a number of different senses, to refer both to the Germans in their entirety and to individual tribes and even sub-tribes. Both of these uses of natio can even be found within Chapter 2, separated by only a few sentences. Then there are the populi and civitates – sometimes “sub-tribes”, sometimes “peoples” or “tribes”, as in the case of the Cimbri. For the work of such a careful stylist, this seems less like elegant variation and more like imprecision or uncertainty – a more unstable definition of “race” than we have inherited from Victorian pseudo-science, perhaps.[11] (Note, however, that the final word on this matter would surely require a closer literary and historical analysis than is possible here, including a comparison not only with the rest of Tacitus’s surviving works but also with other contemporary texts.)

That’s not all. Just as important as the terminology Tacitus uses are the significant differences he acknowledges in language and culture among the Germans – differences later ideologues did their very best to efface, for reasons that aren’t difficult to imagine. He states quite clearly that not all of the German tribes are the same. Only some are fierce and great, and only a very few remarkable. Not all of them speak Germanic languages, and not all who claim to be German, are. The idea of an innate national destiny finds no support in Tacitus’s description of the Germans. He even gives his assent to Caesar’s claim that the Gauls had once been the stronger people and done to the Germans what the Germans in turn did to them – crossed the Rhine, conquered and settled. Perhaps Tacitus believed, as Caesar did, that increasing trade and prosperity, especially the importation of luxuries, had simply effeminised the Gauls and made them lazy and weak. Otherwise, Tacitus remains largely agnostic with regard to the Germans’ mythology and to questions of their origins, beyond his belief that nobody would live in Germania Magna simply out of choice alone. Climate and landscape seem to play almost an equal part in determining German customs as blood or anything else.