It is generally agreed that Tacitus idealized the Germanic barbarians to some extent, in order to make the point that his fellow Romans couldn't afford to fall into slackness and decadence. Whenever a writer belonging to an imperialistic people praises certain virtues that the conquered have and the conquerors lack, it should probably be viewed as a rhetorical trope--i.e., "If THEY can live a moral life, then WE, who are really their superiors, ought to be able to do so _a fortiori_." In other words, the writer doesn't really believe deep down that the Others are better than his own people, but he wants to shame his own people into living up to higher standards. Aphra Behn does this sort of thing in _Oroonoko_, a work written just when the English were on the cusp of empire; no doubt many other British writers of the last three hundred years have done likewise. So, you see, it's not that Tacitus wants to abandon Romanitas and "go native"; rather, he is imaginatively projecting onto the Germanic peoples some aspects of old-style Romanitas that the Romans themselves have, to his regret, been neglecting. _Germania_ therefore is not an altogether reliable source of factual information about the Germanic peoples; it is more a wake-up call for the Roman people. Randi Eldevik Oklahoma State University
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