1Of the gods they worship Mercury most, to whom on certain days they consider it right to sacrifice even human victims. 1Hercules and Mars they appease with permitted animals. 2Part of the Suebi also sacrifice to Isis: what the cause and origin of this foreign cult may be I have not found out, except that the emblem itself, shaped like a Liburnian galley, shows that the worship was brought from abroad. 3For the rest, they do not think it in keeping with the greatness of the heavenly beings to confine the gods within walls or to represent them in any likeness of the human face: they consecrate woods and groves, and they call by the names of gods that hidden presence which they see by reverence alone.
Tacitus · Germania
Germania 9
The gods and their worship
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Tacitus, Germania. Latin text: H. Furneaux, Cornelii Taciti Opera Minora (Oxford, 1900), public domain; digital text from the Perseus Digital Library, CC BY-SA. Word analysis: drafted by our own tagger (trained on the hand-checked texts on this site), with every doubtful word checked by hand. English translation and section titles: written for this app, each checked against the Latin by a second reader.