Germania

The Germania, published by Tacitus in AD 98, the same year as his Agricola, is a short ethnographic treatise on the lands and peoples beyond the Rhine and Danube. Tacitus probably never went there; he drew on earlier writers, notably the Elder Pliny's lost German Wars, and on soldiers' and traders' reports.

The first half covers the Germans as a whole: their boundaries, their claim to be native to the land, their appearance, the soil and its lack of precious metals. Tacitus describes their weapons and order of battle, kings chosen for birth and generals for courage, the respect paid to women, their gods, divination by lots and by sacred horses, and assemblies where approval is shown by clashing spears. He goes on to the chief and his band of companions, their villages and houses, dress, strict marriage customs and punishment of adultery, inheritance, feuds settled by compensation, hospitality, drinking, the sword dance, gambling, slavery, farming and burial. The second half moves from tribe to tribe, from the Batavi and the disciplined Chatti on the Rhine through the Chauci, Cherusci, Cimbri and the Suebi with their knotted hair, to the cult of the goddess Nerthus, the Suiones of Scandinavia with their ships, the amber-gathering Aestii and the Fenni at the edge of the known world.

Tacitus often holds the Germans up as a reproach to Roman luxury. The work is the main ancient source on early Germanic peoples and, rediscovered in the fifteenth century, it had a long and sometimes misused afterlife. Its Latin is concise and epigrammatic.