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cargopantsman · 5 years

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Back to Germania

Disclaimers and Table Of Contents

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Knowing where I am, and when, is a good start. It does bring to light the fact that I really have no firm idea of what all was going on at the time. I'm aware that Caesar had conquered Gaul and is now full of holes. There is a certain fun little side game here though; wherein I have access to a translated contemporary text, footnotes from the translator from a century ago, and now access to modern theories on what was going on at the time. Which is part of why I'm getting sidetracked so often because I like trying to corroborate these things.

To continue: "2.) The people of Germany appear to me indigenous, and free from intermixture with foreigners, either as settlers or casual visitants." Oh did the Nazis have fun with that. (Actually, they had an obsession with the whole text and I probably need to give a read to "A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich" by Christopher B Krebs).

Skipping a paragraph, this is later expounded on. "4. I concur in opinion with those who deem the Germans never to have intermarried with other nations; but to be a race, pure, unmixed, and stamped with a distinct character. Hence a family likeness pervades the whole, though their numbers are so great: eyes stern and blue; ruddy hair; large bodies, powerful in sudden exertions, but impatient of toil and labor, least of all capable of sustaining thirst and heat. Cold and hunger they are accustomed by their climate and soil to endure."

This is where I went scrambling for two things, a Latin transcription of the text (not that I know Latin, but I can be patient enough to look up each and word and cobble enough meaning to figure out if the translation is faithful) and a biography of the translator (where I previously settled on Edward Brooks Jr being Anglo-American and probably not a 19th century German Nationalist).

So stop and think. This is a text written 1,850 years before the events that make these sentences cringe-worthy occurred. Written by a Roman concerning tribes that have been and will be a threat to the Roman Empire since the Cimbrian Wars of 113-101 BCE up to the Sack of Rome in 546.

The footnote for paragraph claims "12. The ancient writers called all nations indigenae (i.e. inde geniti), or autochthones, "sprung from the soil," of whose origin they were ignorant."

The commentary on "a race, pure, unmixed," after considerable effort to disassociate it from modern connotation, might more clearly read as "a race, isolated, just coming into historical record." I doubt it would be far off the mark to think of many Romans saying "They all look the same, they don't look like us, and there's a lot of them."

The next thing my brain wandered off and pondered on were the Gauls. "The Gauls are tall of body, with rippling muscles, and white of skin, and their hair is blond, and not only naturally so, but they also make it their practice by artificial means to increase the distinguishing colour which nature has given it. For they are always washing their hair in lime-water, and they pull it back from the forehead to the top of the head and back to the nape of the neck, with the result that their appearance is like that of Satyrs and Pans, since the treatment of their hair makes it so heavy and coarse that it differs in no respect from the mane of horses. Some of them shave the beard, but others let it grow a little; and the nobles shave their cheeks, but they let the moustache grow until it covers the mouth." [Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, book 5, chapter 28, trans. CH Oldfather]

Looking at the geographical coverage of Hallstatt and La Tène culture archaeology, the people we would call Celts covered most of Europe north of the Alps with particular cores right in the heart of Germania (this covers a date range of 800-450 BCE for Hallstatt and up to 1 CE for La Tène giving way to Roman conquest). Meanwhile, in Denmark/Jutland and the Scandinavian lands beyond the North and Baltic seas, from 1700-500 BCE, the Germanic ancestors were having a lot of fun with bronze. From 500 BCE to the current era covers a period called the Jastorf Culture where the Germani migrated south from Scandinavia and filled in a gap in the north of Europe until they came into contact with La Tène cultures, and presumably picked up a membership to the Iron Age.

My learning of this little migration at this time lines up pretty well with Tacitus. Jumping back to paragraph 2: "- and free from intermixture with foreigners, either as settlers or casual visitants. For the emigrants of former ages performed their expeditions not by land, but by water; [13] and that immense, and, if I may so call it, hostile ocean, is rarely navigated by ships from our world." What made me laugh is the associated footnote that reads "It is, however, well established that the ancestors of the Germans migrated by land from Asia. Tacitus here falls into a very common kind of error, in assuming a local fact (viz. the manner in which migrations took place in the basin of the Mediterranean) to be the expression of a general law.—ED."

I couldn't help but imagine the editor reading Snorri's Forward in the Prose Edda and just rolling with it. (Granted, this may refer to an even earlier migration I haven't looked into regarding Proto-Indo-Europeans moving in from Scythia, but that’s a digression I don’t want to go into right now.)

Back to the Celts, particularly the Gauls; Rome had spent the last 400 years securing a border against Gallic invaders starting with Brennus of the Senones successfully sacking Rome in 390 BCE. Celtic tribes at this time were also pushing into the Carpathian region of Dacia to the east and Pannonia to the west. An advance that lead to (a different) Brennus nearly sacking Delphi. (They wisely waited until Alexander the Great had died before trying this.) This general southern push of Celtic/Gallic peoples from ~400-250 BCE ties in neatly with the southern expansion of Jastorf culture findings in the same time frame.

Generally speaking, migrations and invasions are rarely so cut and dry that peoples A are wholly displaced and dispersed by peoples B. Lacking information on what actually happened at the borders between Jastorf and La Tene cultures, how they interacted as both Germani and Celt moved southward, I'll for the moment assume a median model of trade, warfare, raids and, contrary to Tacitus' opinion, an intermixing of Celtic and Germanic bloodlines.

The Germanic Cimbri tribe offers a glimpse of this probable cultural blending. Having swept southeast from Jutland-Denmark through Germania and first clashing with Rome in Noricum to kick off the Cimbrian War from 113-101 BCE. While Caesar, Pliny, Tacitus, and Strabo consider the Cimbri to be Germanic, at least one ancient scholar, Appian in his Civil Wars, consider the Cimbri to be Celtic. The main Cimbrian chief from the wars, Boiorix, has a heavily Celtic name with the "-rix" suffix. The name translates to "King of the Boii" that signifies him as a leader of a Celtic tribe even though he is leading a Germanic tribe. (Dat Boii being one of the Gallic tribes pushed out of Cisalpine Gaul into Bohemia [Boiohaemum] back around the 193 BCE).

Fifty years later, Julius Caesar declared a delineation between Celtic and Germanic tribes being the Rhine river, but the Rhine does not appear to have been as much a blockade against Jastorf expansion as the Danube (and Roman presence along it) did. The Rhine line seems to be more politically and militarily motivated in that Caesar wasn't interested in taking his legions east of the Rhine. It is said that the Romans were rather indiscriminant in labeling Transalpine tribes as Gallic, Celtic or Germanic as it was. Grouping the barbarian tribes as Gallic, Celtic or Germanic may well have been more an issue of geography than ethnography.

I would venture to take this viewpoint positively in figuring what Tacitus might mean in his use of the phrase "intermarried with other nations," in particularly what the Roman concept of a nation is. For if the Romans considered the Germanic and Celtic tribes to be close enough to be careless with their labels of them, a collection of large, muscular peoples with reddish-blond hair and beards might be sufficient to call "unmixed."

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