Germania and Agricola
Germania and Agricola brings together two short prose works by the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus. The Germania surveys the geography, customs, institutions, and tribes of the Germanic peoples beyond the Rhine and Danube, describing their warfare, religion, family life, and political assemblies. The Agricola is a biography of Tacitus's father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the Roman general and governor whose campaigns extended Roman power across Britain. Through his career it follows the conquest and administration of the province, culminating in a great battle against the northern Britons and a memorable speech placed in the mouth of their chieftain.
Both works probe the moral condition of Rome under imperial rule, holding up the unspoiled vigor and liberty of barbarian peoples as a pointed contrast to Roman corruption and servility. Tacitus writes in a famously concise, abrupt, and pointed style, weighing virtue, ambition, and the cost of tyranny. The Germania remains a primary source for early Germanic society, while the Agricola endures as a model of biography and a meditation on serving honorably under a bad emperor.
How it begins
This edition of the Germania and Agricola of Tacitus is designed to meet the following wants, which, it is believed, have been generally felt by teachers and pupils in American Colleges. 1. A Latin text, approved and established by the essential concurrence of all the more recent editors. The editions of Tacitus now in use in this country abound in readings purely conjectural, adopted without due regard to the peculiarities of the author, and in direct contravention of the critical canon, that, other things being equal, the more difficult reading is the more likely to be genuine. The recent German editions labor to exhibit and explain, so far as possible, the reading of the best MSS. 2. A more copious illustration of the grammatical constructions, also of the rhetorical and poetical usages peculiar to Tacitus, without translating, however, to such an extent as to supersede the proper exertions of the student. Few books require so much illustration of this kind, as the Germania and Agricola of Tacitus; few have received more in Germany, yet few so little here. In a writer so concise and abrupt as Tacitus, it has been deemed necessary to pay particular regard to the connexion of thought, and to the particles, as the hinges of that connexion. 3.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.