Eric Adler on Tacitus' Germania

Welcome back to the new thing. My name is David Barnes with me as always is my good friend. Alex, how are you? How are you doing David?

I'm doing well. I hurt my hips squatting. I don't know. I'm getting older.

And so a friend of mine who's a serious lifter, he recommended this machine called a reverse hyper. Have you ever used that? I have no idea what that is. Look, I mean people that lift will know it's for the lower back.

It's wonderful. It's my. You can sit back. It's kind of the exercise.

No, no, you bend forward over it. Change that. You lift your leg. It's our good friend Greg McRae.

How are you? Hey, it's so nice to meet you guys. I'm coming at you live from Gettysburg, PA. Where are you used to wrestle and teach?

That's correct. Yeah. And you have to do my luck. That infamous photo of Greg in the red.

The very bad. I'm looking like he's a little worried. People know he's hanging out with the wrestling youth. Wait, wait, you know, Socrates used to hang out in the wrestling room just for us.

Alex, I was confused. You're bringing up his wrestling photo, which I encourage everybody to Google image. But I thought you meant instead with the photos that some kids took of Greg, he would deface the tombstones of Union soldiers at the Gettysburg field because the war of Northern aggression for some reason. He keeps saying it was anything but civil.

He keeps saying Greg, you can't kick over a tombstone every day. You know, this is like, you know, Stephen, I want to kick him over whenever I want. And then he grows the South will rise again. Heritage not he sells.

So we're very pleased to have, I think, our most recurring guest ever, Professor Aaron Gusser. It's him or Michael Zuker, right? I think it's Aaron. Hey, it's E to Z, baby.

You get them all here. Yeah. How are you doing Aaron? I'm well, thank you very much.

It's nice to be with all of you. I'm going to make it a given recent podcast episode. I was under the impression that he might be giving birth tonight. But I guess that's not the case.

And I was worried about his, you know, his Ryan Reynolds figure and what what the birthing would do to it. But I'm glad that all of you are with you. I actually think Tom Cleveland might be most often on the show. No, because he's also been a guest host.

If you count him as sort of a guest host, then I think he might have won them. I don't know. Sure. But Eric, you're still chair of the University of Maryland Classic's Department.

Is that accurate? Yes. Well, one small thing I'd like to give a shout out to the folks at SUNY Genesayo. They said they had you for a talk.

My friends, the Herald's. Yes. And they said that you are positively delightful. I'm not surprised.

You are positively delightful. And so anyway, I'm glad you did that. It's nice when friends are meeting friends. The Herald's given you a warm welcome.

They did. And they also told me about college age Greg. So I got to hear him. Oh, no.

Emery Greg, because Aaron Harold was a fellow undergraduate. I think maybe a year older than you. I think I was a year ahead of him. I think.

I was a year ahead of him. I think. I was a woman. Both of you tried to make the same joke at the same time.

And the sad truth is I didn't date a single girl the entire time I was in college. Really? You're not very smart animals in waterfowl. Yeah, that all we're not going to do is be tortured.

Yeah. Yeah. Girl was hit. You really hit girl like as if there were other possibilities.

You know, that would be a circumstance. No, they might be. Really quick guys. Eric is too modest to plug his own book, but Eric has a new book out.

Yeah, it would be hard to do an episode. We'll be kind of covered in a little bit with your previous book about all the classics, but this deserves its own plug and we'll plug it on Twitter. So the full title is humanistic letters, the Irving Babbitt, Tall Elmer Moore correspondence. If you want to give a few words about it and about the press and where people can buy it.

Yes, yes. Thank you so much, David, for that unearned plug. So the book is actually not out until September, so people can save their money now. You can print the order, however, on Amazon and wherever fine books are sold.

You probably won't find it. The book itself is the full correspondence as it survives of the work of two guys, Irving Babbitt, who was a professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard University in the late 19th and early 20th century. And Paul Elmer Moore, who was a literary critic and also a magazine editor. He was the editor of the nation for a while, and then ultimately an academic.

He was up twice as a very serious candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. And the two of them are the founding fathers of something called the New Humanism, which was a movement of literary and social criticism from the early 20th century that I think is really valuable and worth studying today. And Babbitt himself was partly a Berkian and partly influenced by Aristotle and also by Confucius and Buddha and Moore actually was a scholar of his very interest in Platonism. He wrote a whole series of books.

In fact, he wrote a book called Platonism as part of a Greek tradition series. So I've often thought of sending that text to Alex to see what he thinks of it, even though it was written in 1917. So they're very interesting guys. And I think that their reputation needs a good solid kick so that people are going to be more interested in them moving forward.

So I hope the book does that and actually has a full introduction to Babbitt more in the new humanism overall. So it's not just the letters themselves, but you also get a basic introduction to what their movement was all about. Great. He's right inside.

I'm not sure who he's pointing out because on my screen there's nobody there. But he's just saying, I just want to say we're happy to plug Babbitt. We're happy to plug Moore. We're happy to plug you.

We'll plug you all day. We'll plug you all night. So go pick up the book and go plug Eric yourself if you have the means. Yeah, you see him on the street, just plug him.

He won't resist. But more seriously, I was thinking of a potential podcast episode. The listeners since they're fresh, the tweet about it. I think this is interesting.

We could do an episode and squeeze the scenario. The group was up for the theme of the contours of famous intellectual public intellectual debates. So you have these, and even semi-private, so you have the Strauss Vogel and letters, right? And you have the Babbitt more correspondence, very famous correspondences that often result in interesting little tectonic shifts in various fields.

That's potentially, we could pick three or four of the more interesting ones and then shoot them in. That would be great. I mean, Babbitt and Moore became so famous and infamous in certain circles that in 1930, there was a debate at Carnegie Hall between Babbitt and two critics of Babbitt. Apparently, he was standing in room only in Carnegie Hall for a debate over the new humanism.

So under the circumstances, there's a great deal that you can possibly learn from them. And I actually think one of the reasons I'm so interested in them as thinkers is that they have a very solid argument for the valid B humanities. And I think it was very solid in their day, but actually we can kind of learn from it today. And obviously, as I'm sure you guys know, the humanities are not doing necessarily terribly well these days in American colleges.

I think MacRear has something to say. I was just going to say what most impressed me about Babbitt is that he was able to accomplish all this even after that incident with his wife. I mean, just an impressive story of covering after his wife, just remember him in that way. They were all familiar with him from the 90s.

Greg is dating himself, but I do remember. The Babbitt story, Greg, you just missed one of the Babbitt. Oh, I missed a lot of Babbitt. I'm perfectly understandable.

Perfectly understandable. I thought he was drinking a lot. I was absolutely no idea what he was talking about at all. Like in any way, she performed.

But then they also looked at us like, I have no idea what you're talking about either. It was this terrible pause. Was it John Wayne Babbitt? That's right.

John Wayne Babbitt. I was like, wait, wait, wait. The listeners at home can't see or sort of zoom call. Greg has been trying and he's been so frustrated trying to get it where I thought he was pointing off to the side.

I was frustrated because you kept jumping on David, not me. You just pulled right over his head. I thought you were like, I've got this. He doesn't follow the hands like this.

I've got this Bobbi joke. I've got this Bobbi joke. I need to get it in. Yeah, yeah.

Right. So your point is, I was not only was that a terrible joke, but it was like he was this was really important to his vision of the podcast and his, you know, this is why we're happier here, Greg, that you can make it. He starts the titter, but we're talking about the hunt today. Yeah, we're 45 minutes in.

We haven't even talked. We're talking about tachitus, right? Yeah, that's good. Look at that.

Some high school left and from Alex for you. Very, very nice. Absolutely. Yeah.

So I was contacted via text earlier this week and was told that you'd like to do an episode this week on Tassen. This is germania. So I guess I should who's got a high school latin now? Germania.

Yeah. You like that? I mean, I'm not going to do it for a while, you know, some good stuff. I mean, I just say that if I sound particularly in articulate this evening, not only is it rather late for this old man, but in addition, there's, there's all these chat messages just going on and they're all crazy.

Everyone of them is crazy. And all they're trying to do is make life as difficult for me as possible to get through this. And they're all on mute and they're all greatly enjoying this and the circumstances, it is vicious. It's really, really vicious.

I'm going to power through this. I don't care about David Barr. I'm going to power through this. He might have given up on Kensington, but I'm not giving up on this podcast.

Thank you. Who was Cassius Gaius Cornelia's Taccattouche? Yes. Yes.

So let's talk about who Cassius was before we move on to talk about the Germania itself. You guys already actually did a wonderful episode on the Agricola much earlier on. And I was impressed with it, but maybe we'll come up with in our conversation. But I'll give you some sort of more basic information about Cassius.

We actually don't know that much about this guy, which is sort of interesting given how important and influential he is. We don't know his full name. We have attestation of his first name as either Publius or Gaius, but we're not sure which one it is. It's maybe more likely Publius, but we're not perfectly certain.

That Cornelia's Taccattouche as Alex insisted on, or the nomen and pog nomen. He was a Roman senator and author who lived in the first and into the second century to say D. We're not actually certain where it was from either, but he appears to be a provincial. He's probably from what is now southern France, Galerian, Norbanensis.

And we guess that in part because that's where his father-in-law was from, which we know from the Agricola itself. And so it seems likely that he came from that area. But in any case, he's actually not from ancient Italy, but from the provinces. And that seems important because he's very nostalgically attached to the Roman Republic, which he perceives to be a superior form of government to the Roman Empire under which he lived.

And it's important to recognize that in the Roman Republic, he wouldn't have been a senator. He couldn't have had a political career because revengeless wouldn't have had so. So there's an interesting kind of dichotomy there, I guess. But Tassus was from a wealthy family and began a career in politics under the reign of this vision.

He was very successful, reaching the consul ship. He became Suffolk consul, so consul in the second half of the year in 97 AD. And he was actually an interestingly here likely chosen. We're not certain of this, but he was likely chosen by the demission as emperor, which is interesting because he has such terrible things to say about demission throughout much of his corpus.

Nevertheless, he was probably advanced through the system in part through demission. And then ultimately, after demissions assassination kind of turned on him, it seems. And maybe in part wrote the Agricola as a kind of maya culpa about his own career and how he had advanced under some who was quite hated. Nevertheless, by the time of his consul ship, Tassus was a famous order in Rome and he wrote a number of historical works or works on other topics.

We're not perfectly certain of the order. It is typically seen that the Agricola, which was written in 98 as the first thing he wrote, it's also perceived that I think you can see internal references from the germani, that the germani is likely second, seemingly coming from later in 98. He also wrote this work, the alaga, the dialogue on the decline of oratory. Some people actually think that's as early as work, but it's probably his third work.

And then he's most famous for writing the histories and then ultimately Analys or Analys, which David you'll notice spelled with two M, and that's actually important if you think it through. And those are sort of his claims to fame of his own work. The history's focus is on the year of the four embers in the flavian dynasty and the Analys focuses on the julial claudian dynasty. So from 14 until 68.

And we've also done it absolutely on the orders. What is it the oratory of us? On the orders with my good friend and colleague Wayne Amber. So if you want more, talk to you.

That's right. I forgot about that. But I have listened to that. That's true.

That's wonderful. Was tasidus' writings on oratory, standard curriculum up until we became stupid? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't think it's probably as much as school text as someone like Cicero say, you know, as far as latin oratory is concerned. The alaga is actually written in a supposedly cisoronian style.

And so it's sort of easier to read tasidus and this is something else we can talk about. We talk about the germania, but tasidus is a famously difficult author. He's probably the hardest latin prose author, at least from this sort of classical period. He writes that he favors a very cryptic style.

But oftentimes you see tasidus even these days typically isn't taught in an undergraduate curriculum. Sometimes he is, but he's more often offered to graduate students just because he's so hard latin wise. And so he may make a little bit of a less effective school text than someone like Cicero who writes a more sort of standard style. Yeah, for you to come on to the show and really open up the Analys for us.

I know it's a difficult book. It is. It's longer. It's not open up the Anals with you, if that's a possibility.

So tell us about the greek or the issue of germania. Yeah, Greg. Yeah, it's the germania. Yeah, so the germania, which again, as I said, was a work written or seemingly published to the degree of things are published in antiquity later in 98 AD in the very early days of the emperorship of Trajan.

The full title from the manuscript tradition is Deil Rigene et situ germanorum. You'd be very happy with that. Alex the pronunciation was impeccable concerning the origin and location of the Germans. It's a rather brief work.

It's about maybe 30 pages, maybe even less in the Latin itself. You've favored a kind of small, hard style of Latin. Overall, it's an ethnographic monograph on the perceived nature of the German people. That is to say those who lived up to the east of the Rhine River.

And actually, the kind of who counts as Germans is actually kind of a political question in antiquity, but also in modernity. And there is a sense in which Tacitus may be playing a little fast and loose with who counts as German who doesn't. But in this particular vision, those east of the Rhine River and Tacitus day are those who are free. That is to say those who are not under Roman control.

Whereas those to the west of the Rhine River, there were actually two provinces, German provinces to the west of Rhine River. That have been carved out of gold that had been made officially provinces in 90 AD, that is to say under demissions. So here he's not really focusing on all the German people. And it's also not clear that all the people he's discussing would have conceived of themselves as Germans.

This seems to be also an appellation the Romans like to give to them. But it's also the case that he doesn't talk about some other people who might have been considered Germans as well, who actually happen to live in Roman territory that particular term. So I mean, you said that there's this longer title. So I was wondering if there any antecedents that he was referring to here.

So the first thing that came to my mind, which now that I know the longer title, which is going to be the case, was the Hellenica, for example. Or isn't there, isn't there work by Caesar with a similar kind of title? It's difficult. Caesar's works.

It's very difficult. I mean, so we have the, you know, De Bello, Gallico, you know, and so forth. But it's actually difficult to tell what the original title was. Another thing I think we should probably think about is that the ancient seem not to have been as obsessed about titles as we are.

You know, naturally, when you're thinking about slaves copying a manuscript, you're not going to make a fortune off of what you're writing. And therefore, you don't have to come up with a snappy title in hopes that it's going to sell copies. And so I'm not so sure that it's necessarily as significant. But no, I'm not sure.

But I don't think that this is necessarily a nod to some other particular work on the title. One of the things you brought up in your notes is that this is a kind of seems to be an implicit critique of the Roman Empire, similar to how the Greek law, though it's more from the perspective of the Romans, uses what you get actually speech from Calgacus and the British leader, who is harshly critical of the Empire. And it's a sort of convenient way for Tacitus to critique Rome without it actually being him. There's this kind of similar thing in the Germanis.

So I thought maybe I could read just this is like a good indication. I think of Tacitus Estelle, a reader passage that I thought shows you how he does this. But here he's more showing how the continual wars and influence of Rome on the Germans has led some of them to change, some of them to preserve them more. So the way he puts this in section two, where the first page he says, apart from the danger of the wild and unknown sea, who would have left Asia, Africa or Italy to make for Germany with its unattractive landscape and raw climate harsh to cultivate and even to look at unless it were his home country.

And the answer is, well, the mission is one person who would have done it. But the similar thing happens in the gricle where he describes Britain as just horrible and awful. And it seems like by focusing on these remote, really harsh places that are cold and hard to cultivate with people that aren't especially like easy to conquer or sort of useful to you once you have them, except they are kind of marshal and some of the people are useful that way. I think the answer is right there.

And so he talks about the influence of money. So I thought maybe you could just spell out some of the subtle ways in which Tacitus is using this piece as a kind of ethnographic work, but it's also implicitly a kind of self-critique of Rome. So you're, I think you play both sides of this. So I think, you know, I don't want to make it seem like that's your simple view because you want to say it's also critical of the Germans as well.

Hey, and to piggyback off this, if it's okay, Alex. Right, a little piggy. Does, uh, is he doing anything? I understand how the German is going to be a mirror to the Romans, but in Herodotus, he's clearly using some of the people's as sandins for the Greeks for different types of Greek practices.

Are we taking him at base valley that this is that these are indeed the Germans or is this to be using the Germans as a kind of stocking horse for a critique of some faction in Rome or something, something weird like that? Yeah, those are both great questions. I think they also both really get to the heart of this text and why it's so difficult and why there are so many different possible readings of it. So one thing that I think to back up before I sort of address both of those points is to note, and I think this relates most solidly to what Alex had said, is that there's no preface to this work and there's no conclusion.

It just sort of trails off at the end. And so it's very difficult to tell precisely what he's up to. I think you already discussed when you looked at the, the, the agricula that there's a kind of surface reading of the agricula, but then if you sort of, sort of, you start to kind of work your way down, you start recognizing that there's ways of the undercuts that sort of surface reading too. And it seems likely that he's doing something simpler here.

So there have been very different guesses ventured as to what tasks this is up to. And I think maybe the most reasonable answer to this is kind of all of the above, as opposed to, you know, he's doing one thing as opposed to another thing and so forth. So that, yes, there have been some simplistic readings of this text. And one of them, I think that that Christopher Krebs, who's a professor at Stanford, he wrote a book called a most dangerous book, which focuses cheaply on the reception of the germania.

And he's focused on how the Germans themselves read this as this kind of great, you know, early story of how hardy and wonderful the German people are. And they perceive that this was this kind of logging of early Germans. And of course, there are ways, you can look at that. I think Alex has already suggested there are some ways in which the Germans look kind of like noble savages in the text itself.

But you have to read the text really selectively to come up with that as your kind of take home for what the work actually is. You might also suggest that there's an element in which Tacitus is using the German people to kind of complain about what these people are like and to make Rome look kind of better by comparison, or at least supposedly civilized people. There's an element of that in the text there to do. And then also, I think this gets back to what Alex said beforehand, the Germans aren't just some people who happen to be out in the world.

These are people who had involvement with the Romans militarily for centuries and recently too. So then there gets to be this possible notion that by writing this work, Tacitus is suggesting that the Romans should conquer the Germans, that they haven't done so, but it's worth doing so or maybe and Tacitus, maybe in the passage, Alex read sort of suggests this, maybe the reverse that it's not worth going to this place. It's, you know, in the middle of nowhere, the land is terrible. They don't have much money.

It appears they don't even have fruit and so forth as it's portrayed. And so, you know, there's, it seems like it's sort of all of the above and it's very difficult to figure out what that message is. Now, to get to David's question quickly, modern scholars have suggested that Tacitus is kind of playing fast and loose with his perception of who counts as German. It's not clear at this period whether all these people would have seen themselves as German.

It has also been presumed, we can't know this for sure, but the Tacitus never visited this area, but that largely his impression of them is bookish based on earlier writings of these people. So, and then some of the stuff, especially for the very end of the work is really fanciful. And he even says, I'm not sure this, you know, people who are part human and part animal at the very end, it's over. And he's not sure that's true and so.

Where's this? It falls apart. Yeah. Oh, Greg is suddenly interested.

I'm actually. If you asshole, you stole my joke, I was going to read that passage. Say this is McRaeley. The only thing I did pick up trying to figure out what the purpose was, and I haven't had a lot of time to prep this.

So, but the end of section three, after he's given a kind of account of Hercules and Odysseus at the end of section three, he says it's not my intent to support these statements with proof, sort of fut them. Let each person believe or disagree with his inclination. So that led me to question what is his intent? And I mean, if it is about the origin of Germans or Germany or whatever, it would almost seem like this seems to be a nod that I don't know that these are sort of mythical or fanciful and that you can't know these things.

Yeah. So that was at least my process of elimination. This is not what he's doing. He's not trying to figure out the mythical origins of these places.

Yeah. I don't know if you were. So one thing you'll note, I think if you look through the text, I don't even get to look at it with great here. You'll notice that you really just focus on German history.

There's almost no history that he talks about sort of ancestral things. Everyone's smiling talks about movements of people here and there. He really sort of suggests that these people don't really have a history. Because of there, it doesn't really make that much to be different.

I have different sorts of political organization. He doesn't focus too much on that. He does to some degree. But these are people who are kind of static in the way that he's actually offering this.

To me, it seems like, and again, you may disagree with in your readings of this, it seems like this is sort of a series of reflections from Tacitus on both the benefits but also the drawbacks of what he perceived to be civilized life. And so he is kind of using the Germans as a foil for that. And in some degree, to some degree, they're praised because there's some aspects of kind of less civilized life that are hardy and wonderful and maybe make Rome look bad by comparison. But then there are other aspects of the text in which he seems to suggest, no, it's actually better to be civilized, at least in certain respects.

And there are aspects of the German culture that he finds, the other drunkenness and the kind of quarrelsome nature of the Germans and so forth that he actually perceives that Rome is a kind of improvement upon. So I'm not sure he really came to a kind of full conclusion himself about what these people were really like and what their value is and so forth. But it does seem like it's kind of trying to tease out what are the benefits and what are the drawbacks of Roman civilization vis-à-vis those people who are perceived to be less civilized who live in the interland. Yeah.

I think there is this established thing where, for instance, he mentions at one point this is in section 26, the practice of lending out capital and stretching it out to interest is unknown. Ignorance is a surer protection than any prohibition. So it seems like if they knew about this stuff, they would go off the D-ben and there are some that have been more romanized. But there's one exception and this is the last people he discusses, the Fennie, just before he gets to the sort of mythical half-human beings.

But if this is just before the mythical, the question rises, are these people mythical as well? Right? But these people are pretty interesting. He says that Fennie are remarkably savage and wretchedly poor.

The poverty of the Germans is always emphasized, right? They have no weapons though, even though the Germans are quite martial, no horses and no homes. They feed our wild plants, wear skins and sleep on the ground. Their only hope is their arrows, which for lack of iron they tip with bones.

So they don't even have metallurgy. It looks like they just use the animals they've killed. Men and women alike live by hunting to women accompany them everywhere and insist on taking a share of the spoils. Their only way of protecting infants against wild beasts are rain is a shelter made from interwoven branches.

This is what the young men come back to and where the old man take refuge. On to this point, it just seems like these people are so uncivilized under the belt. But then he introduces a very strange thing, which goes back to this religious aspect, which is, yet they think this is a happier lot than to groan over the telinger fields toiling over house holding or speculating between hope and fear with their own and other people's money. So they seem wholly aware of agriculture, of architecture, and of even things like interest and money and empire.

So there seems to be some contact having nothing to fear the hands of men or gods. They have reached a state that is very difficult to attain. You do not even need to pray. Right?

So they seem like they don't even need gods ultimately. And I wonder if at this point, there is a kind of acknowledgement that there is a kind of awareness of the ills of empire and kind of savage contentment or even you could say stoicism if you want to go that far, that these outer Germans, even our Germans at this point have achieved. So I wonder to what extent there is this critique of the Romans, there is this critique of the Germans, but there's a kind of synthesis that can come out of this, aware of the superiority of Roman civilization to this sort of German ignorance drunkenness, laziness, as you point out. So you will worse than nine.

I love the German people. Please don't come after me. But there's also this higher standard that incorporates the virtues of each kind of noble simplicity in light of the sort of irrational hopes you could say of empire. Yeah, that's a really good point.

I mean, first of all, I would say about, so we're now talking about the second part of the works. The first part is sort of about the Germans more generally, whereas the second part is sort of a travel through various tribes. And one thing you'll notice is he starts, if you have a decent edition of the text, he starts with those tribes that are closest to Roman territory and moves outward, moves eastward further away. So the further away, he obviously gets the worst the information is likely to be from the Romans themselves about what these people are actually like.

So it's not surprising then that the last thing sounds like a kind of culture full of McRayers, where half human, you know, half animal and stuff, but this is sort of the circumstances, but then at the same time, I would also say that this sort of calls to mind what you're saying, Alex, some comments that Tacitus makes in the Agricola as well, where he talks about the Britons learning to wear a toga, they learning the liberal arts and so forth, and they perceive that this is becoming civilized. But actually, this is just tools of their enslavement. So again, you get this sort of double edged sword in Tacitus. On the one hand, he doesn't want to live like these people live, but he also conceives that there's something kind of noble about the simplicity that they live in, and there's something degenerating about civilization, that it has, there are certain kinds of virtues that Romans are less likely to possess by nature of their society, but there are certain virtues that the Germans are not likely to possess as a result of their society too.

So again, it's sort of a mixed message that he offers here, it seems to me, and he sort of blasé about whether Roman civilization is worth all that much, because it actually is a destructive of certain virtues that he believes that the Germans actually naturally possess. I mean, this comes up really well with the Cionis in 44. These are Germans, but the Germans are characterized by freedom, right? The simplicity and the poverty go with freedom, and everybody's arm, it seems like, except for these people, he says, these people even respect wealth, which is why a single ruler is in power, whose authority is now unrestricted with an absolute right to obedience.

It's not familiar with the country. Weapons are not in general use here as in the rest of Germany, but are kept locked up in under the guard of the slave. This is because the ocean makes any sudden invasion impossible, and it is the most important point, I think, in peacetime, armsmen can easily become indisciplined, and indeed is in the king's interest that noble or freeman, or even freed men, meaning a former slave, should have charge of the weapon. So it seems like there, he's suggesting that wealth and power are incompatible with freedom, which requires an armed sort of citizenry and poverty, right?

So that you have to fight for things. And so there's a kind of, I think there, you see really the dilemma put in there, right? Like you can talk about the noble savage and talk about simpler, like virtue times, like you really want to never have McDonald's franchise, again, like, do you really never want to have, you know, all the creature comforts of a highly sort of sophisticated society, that's a much harder, and I think Tacitus is in a way, I like the way you're phrasing this, I think maybe he's having a crisis of conscience or a real internal dilemma, which is I like the luxury, I hate the tyranny. Right, right.

Yeah, that's very well put. And I also think that that is just one of numerous instances in this text where he's clearly making a kind of oblique reference to the circumstances, the sort of political circumstances under which he lives. Anytime he's going to talk about freedom, which is typically Liebertas for Tacitus, this is a sign that he's interested in talking about the Roman imperial present, because this is a kind of very important message for Roman senators that they had Liebertas, they had political freedom under the Republic, and they lost it under the Empire. So I don't think he's just saying, oh, well, let's talk about German freedom and so forth.

And he's not thinking about the Roman experience. He's very much thinking about the Roman experience. There are other aspects of him doing this throughout the text elsewhere, too. So for instance, he talks about the hatred of adultery among the German.

This is one of the things he sees as moral among them is that they hate adultery. It's very uncommon. They viciously punish anyone who's suspect of this and so forth, who's done it. And he says something about how, well, you know, their habits are stronger than laws, essentially.

And what he means there, obviously, is a reference to the fact that Augustus, the emperor Augustus, made adultery illegal in certain circumstances so that he felt like there was a declining birth rate. There are all kinds of moral problems that are happening in Rome, the beginning of the Roman Empire. And he decides to legislate this particular issue to stop certain kinds of adultery. And so obviously that's a comment from Tacitus in which he's sort of suggesting that the natural habit of the Germans is opposed to adultery, whereas the Romans have slipped into becoming so decadent that they actually need a law to stop them from being adulterers because they can't.

Their habits aren't going to end up working in the right direction, maybe because they're overly civilized, maybe because their political culture has gone wrong. It's not perfectly clear. But nevertheless, they lack that kind of natural goodness that the Germans actually have as it's portrayed by Tacitus. I have a quick question, Eric.

So Tacitus is writing at the beginning of the empire? Nearly. I mean, not the very beginning. So he was writing, you know, he began writing, I guess, in 98.

Let's just put it that way. By that time, we've already seen Augustus, the whole Julian dynasty, the year of the four emperors and the Flavian dynasty. How much of the servant and then Trajan? So we're still in the kind of earlyish, I guess, comparative period of the empire.

But I wouldn't say it's particularly early. He's a kind of second century author, I would say. And so the reason I ask is, one effect that reading this short text, I was trying to imagine how the typical upper-class Roman would have received it, especially one who is concerned with foreign policy or foreign policy that may or may not be off the rails when like the Romania for expansion is underway. And by including what we would consider like extraneous or funny details, he captures just how much one needs to know, even of a quote unquote savage people, to really conquer them successfully.

So if I was a foreign policy type at that time in Rome, I would read this and say, oh, hey, just a second. What we thought would just be, you know, clunking a few savages over the head is actually much more difficult. And these people have their own mythos. I mean, he points out at the beginning.

So I don't know if, I guess I don't know enough Roman history of the mania to make everything Roman was in part because they just considered the rest of the world as some Roman is so easy to conquer. Yeah. Well, I don't think a Roman reader who's from Tacitus' time would have thought necessarily the Germans were easy to conquer. I mean, partly this is a result of the fact that they had had a number of run-ins with the Germans by that particular period of time, and they hadn't gone very well.

So Augustus was interested in making a kind of greater Germany profit that he wanted carved out during his tenure as emperor. And then he ultimately lost a series of legions in the Battle of Toytoburg Forest in 9 AD, and he abandoned that project under the circumstances. And this was supposedly one of the great things that Augustus hated during his own reign. It was like one of the great disasters of his reign as the disaster of Ereus.

Also, I should say, I think this relates to the kind of political history that Tacitus is interested in offering here. Domitian, the kind of hated emperor, Domitian, was assassinated in 1986, about two years before Tacitus wrote this particular work, had gone in and fought against the Chatea group that is mentioned in this text itself, and had claimed that he was victorious and therefore celebrated to triumph. But Tacitus and a number of other writers suggested he sort of claimed he was victorious. But he didn't really do anything or didn't do very much.

And so again, he's seemingly commenting on recent Roman history in writing this particular work. There are some people who are suggesting that this work was a kind of call to Trachin, who's now a new emperor, to go out and conquer the rest of Germany. And so they see the- This is the worst of the moderating. Right, the point of the point.

But I don't know, I don't really see that. I would say that there are many kind of anti-war sort of sentiments to this. He does suggest, and I think Alex sort of pointed this out in some of the quotes he read, this land is not wealthy. You're not going to get very much from these people.

They're naturally quarrelsome. Another thing he says is that the Germans start to get nervous anytime there's peace. And some of them, if there's peace in their tribe for long enough, they'll head to another tribe where they can sort of bash people's heads in and so forth. So they don't seem like they make very good political subjects for the Romans.

You're not going to make very much money from it. So to me, it seems as if it's kind of maybe more anti-war. But again, this gets at how difficult this message is to try to intuit, because it seems like it's so complex and he himself doesn't seem necessarily very clear on what the actual message of this text is supposed to be. Can I go back to adultery for a moment?

Yeah. It's going to be taken out of context in my future life. But I'm reminded here of Xenophans, regime of the locomotians, a couple of things like that as far as what you do, X, Y, or Z. They wouldn't desert their posts, for example, and Xenophans seemingly extols as far as it is for being so courageous, isn't actually recorded.

But being so courageous and martial, nobody ever was a coward. And he says, why? Because like, he just made life absolutely terrible for anybody who was a coward. And so here, I wonder if the same thing as being said.

So let me just put my cards on table in the throat. I find it hard to believe that people like he is describing would be so diligent in protecting sanctity of marriage. It seems like this, let me on the woods. So anyway, a couple of things.

Because they also married, it seems like they married late. That's in section 20. So there's this long period where your humors are flowing, but you're apparently not allowed to do it. But you did mention it's like if they catch someone, the punishment is left to the husband.

The punishment is pretty severe, right? The husband drives, if the husband catches his wife, I guess, in the act, I don't know. In the presence of her relatives, the husband drives her naked from the home. Cut their hair off and whips her through the whole village.

And so I guess the skeptic in me would say, is this proof that there's no adultery there? Or does this mean they're very, very careful in hiding their adultery? Or is it they're not, or is it they're actually, they don't put adultery because they're just definitely afraid of being whipped and drawn out of the town? Can I ask you a question as well as I'd like?

But the idea here is that, I think you're getting the question. And one detail in support of that in section 19, it says, even better is the practice of those states, he doesn't mention how many or which, where only virgins can marry. So there are, obviously, there's a practice of remarital sex in at least some way. Right.

So that's not adultery. Yeah. I mean, well, first of all, if you know some things about Roman marriage practices, it seems like how he's talking about this is obviously interested in a juxtaposition with how the Romans were, where Romans, typically the man was older, the woman was much younger and so forth. So this was very typical.

So it's obviously focused on the differences. I didn't read it that way. I mean, you may certainly be right. And you can read everything.

And this is sort of the way he tested this is you can read everything in multiplicity of ways. But I was under the impression that he was sort of trying to praise them as if this is sort of, yes, it happens, but very, very merely. And it's punished because people think it's so despicable, but I don't think that they punish it because it's so, it would be rife other words, otherwise. But instead that they perceive this as just something that's sort of un-German, people don't act that particular way.

And he seems to do that with a number of other things as well, that they don't do usury, so there's no money lending among certain German tribes and so forth. And then again, these are certain vices that you might attach to the Romans. They just sort of by nature, they're not interested in those kinds of things, I think. So I didn't read that the same way.

But again, I don't know how you would support one version versus another. It seems like either one of them, they're both arguable, I guess. There's something happening in those. I agree with Greg.

I agree with Greg. I think so. Let me draw some specific negatives about the Germans that I think are helpful. You mentioned that they drink a lot, Eric.

This leads to frequent quarrels. It says, which are occasionally settled by violent words more often by killing and wounding. So this is get drunk and stab each other to death, apparently. And he says a little earlier, he explains this, he says, it is an obligation to take over the fathers or the kinsmen's feuds and friendships, where feuds do not go with no reconciliation.

And he mentions how they compensate. He says, this is an advantage, the compensation for the community, since feuds are rather dangerous where freedom exists. So not having a strong state and police force can lead to all sorts of problems. Even still, it's kind of interesting when he's explaining the German customs.

He's often explaining them to a Roman audience. So then you get the negative side of the Romans just by sort of implication. So in 19 says, they live a life of sheltered chastity, uncorrupted by the temptations of public shows or the excitement of banquets. Right?

And then a little later, this is one of my favorites, which reminds me of America in the 21st century, in section 38 says, the chiefs of the Suebi have an even more elaborate hairstyle. Such is the attention they pay to their personal appearance, yet in all innocence. So it's uncorrupted. Why?

It is not for love-making or to inspire passion that they adorn themselves, but for the eyes of their enemies, dressing their hair when they went about to go to war, so as to add considerably to their heightened appear more terrifying. And just reminding of all these like, rotted out muscle heads who look like strong, like they're going to go into battle. They think of themselves as athletes, but meanwhile, they're just peacocking, like trying to get ladies. Right.

Right. It's a sign of virility or masculinity that's completely separated from actual male virtues, but it's actually quite feminine. Yeah. And I think that also relates to another picture that he offers of a German.

So they're very hardy and more. They consider running from war to be a disgrace. I believe there's a discussion of one tribe in which the tribe, someone from the tribe, doesn't cut their hair until they've actually killed somebody. So that this is a sort of mark that you can now cut your hair and so forth.

But at the same time, as Alex, who notices his very well-quoiled hair under the circumstances, but there's also a sense in which these people, or at least the men among them, have nothing to do with themselves if they're not at war. They don't farm. They hunt a certain amount, but they don't farm. They have no proper leisure activities under the circumstances.

And so they don't have anything to do. And so they get into drunk fights with one other gamble, which also doesn't fit their supposed lack of concern for money. And so there's a certain sort of problem there, at least potentially. But these are people just sort of sit around waiting to get into fights.

And they're valorous when it comes to fighting. But in regard, they don't use their leisure time reasonably because they haven't got any sense of that. Jesus, Alex. Well, it's nice to see that success has been spoiled determines a bit.

People can't see what we're typing through to that. Eric, so what the heck is going on? I could easily see modern historians saying, well, this is a corrupt detect. It's all over the place.

It ends abruptly. There's no real introduction. We don't understand the point where there are too many points to take care of. Alekhar.

Do you have a kind of unified theory of the whole at all that you would tentatively? I would be very nervous to do that because I just think the text is itself so complex. Related to that, it used to be thought by some modern scholars, I think, more in the 19th century than in the 20th, that this text may have been some sort of preliminary sketch for writing the histories and that this wasn't supposed to be its own work, but it was supposed to be sort of part of a longer history. No, no, no, no, you're sorry.

Sorry to interrupt you. That reminds me. Does he write about the Germans anywhere else? And the histories and the animals?

Does that shed light on the screen? Yeah, to some degree, yeah. So he will write elsewhere to some degree about the Germans, but not at the kind of length of this. And so I think the idea is that, though, unfortunately, the books of the histories in which they might have actually talked about emissions campaigns in Germany are lost.

So we don't have that as a comparison, but we do have some other discussions of the Germans in Tasset's work. At the same time, I think that's sort of the answer that this is supposed to be a preliminary sketch for another work is kind of a cop out about what this text is actually about and sort of suggesting, well, if we can't figure out what this text is about, then clearly it was just part of another work because it doesn't have as clear of a message and sort of. I think you guys noticed from the Agricola, there are multiple messages going on at the same time in the work. And there's a kind of pro-Agricola message that sort of suggests that you can be a good person living under a bad system and have a decent career, but then there's another side in which he sort of doubts that.

And maybe the Imperial Project is a disaster from start to finish, right? That's not very clear when you finish the work. Oh, I know precisely what the Agricola is about. Well, the Grimani is maybe even more complex and more pearl over the place, but that seems to be in keeping with some of Tasset's other early writings as well.

Yeah, I mean, I think he praises the Germans at length in the annals, right? I mean, I don't know this, I'm just assuming that because I've always heard the Germans love the annals, but to go to the Germania, one thought I had about what might unify the Texas, when he says in section one, is only recently that certain people's and kings have become known, war has opened them up and he talks about the Romans introducing money. In a way, it's kind of ethnography, but it's all through the lens of the Germans coming up against the Romans as kind of two types or two different political polls, you could say. And the two parts are one, just giving an account of the Germans as a whole and then giving the sort of topography, which shows the various influences.

And then when it culminates in this comment about the Fennian, their sort of outright rejection, I think one way to think about the unity of this work without thinking of it as a giraffe, like if it's going to have integrity on it, without thinking of it as a drafter, thinking of it as like a war track or something like that, it might be that it's an attempt to understand the nature of politics or political, these polls of political life through the various interactions that have come about. And in what way the Germans have proven susceptible to Roman influence and what way resistance and thereby to maybe try to come at some kind of synthesis or understanding of the underlying phenomenon. Yeah, I like that very much, Alex, and actually that also calls to mind Cassius' description of the Britons in the Agricola, which I think maybe serves a somewhat similar purpose. Obviously the ethnographic sections of the Agricola are smaller than this entire ethnographic monograph and so forth.

But at the same period of time, I do think that he's also trying to figure out what does contact with the Romans do ultimately to the Britain. In the same way that you could argue, implicitly he's sort of doing in the Girmania. Those people who live closer to Rome end up having a culture that is more Roman, these people use Roman coinage. They don't border and so forth like people are further out.

Their political culture might be slightly different. Some of them are loyal to the Romans. Others are not loyal to the Romans and so forth. So yes, I think maybe you could see this kind of like a test case of what happens to a culture when it ends up bumping up against another culture, especially one that might be more advanced at that particular time.

I think you can see that in the Agricola. You could arguably see that in the Girmania as well. What would you suggest people read after this? Because I love Tacitus.

I've read those three short ones. I now episode on all three of them. And I wanted, but the histories in the annals are just like forbidding. They're huge source full of all sorts of names.

And it kind of began in media race. You don't really know. They're kind of fragmentary in that. So how do you, I mean, there's this famous dream of Skippyo, right?

In other passages. But what would you suggest? Does Tacitus kind of, you know, people mention this as a draft? Is this because they're kind of like nice little vignettes aside from the most famous part of it?

Yeah. I mean, there's sort of, there's been a typical strain in scholarship on Tacitus. Not everyone agrees with it. I don't really.

That have seen the Agricola and the Girmani in particular as the sort of minor work or part of the minor works of Tacitus. And the histories and the annals are sort of the real stuff. Along with that has come the idea that Tacitus in the Agricola was critical of demission, but was not yet critical of the empire as a system. It's only later in the histories and the annals that you get him critical of the empire as a whole and the regime.

I actually agree with you guys when you did that episode on the Agricola. I think there's sort of an undercurrent of disdain for the empire as a whole in the Agricola too. You just have to look more carefully for it. But yeah, as far as what to read next, I mean, I think one thing that might be most useful is just break off a book of the annals and read them one by one rather than feeling like you have to read the entire thing.

If you start with book one of the annals, it's really wonderful. And he has some really interesting things to say about what people thought about Augustus right after he died. There's also a discussion about Tiberius as the second emperor. So the first time that there's actually going to switch to a new emperor and there's this kind of brutal and awful scene there in which it's not clear how this is going to work and the Senate doesn't know how much kind of freedom of speaking to have and so forth.

And there's some wonderful vignettes actually throughout the piece. And yes, I agree that he's tough going. There are a lot of names. There's also a lot of murder of senators.

And so at some point it starts to get like, okay, I'll get it. He's yelled another person and so forth. But at the same time, I think if you take a book by book, you can kind of see why it's seen as the masterpiece that it is. Yeah, could you, you kind of I think implicitly have mentioned this and maybe we can close on this because we're coming up on an hour or a little over.

There's a lot of film that we're going to have to cut. But what is the relationship between the histories and the, I mean, why is it just one history because they don't overlap? Do they? What's the, yeah?

Well, the history is focused is on 69 to 96. So it focuses on the year of the four emperors and then the Flavian dynasty, whereas the Analis. And again, we don't have all of either of these works. So we don't have his full discussion.

But the Analis focused on 14. So the 14 AD, the beginning with the death of Augustus going to, and we don't have the end of the work. We're not sure you even finished it, but going to the death of Nero, presumably. So even though he wrote the history, seemingly before he wrote the annals, you actually can read from one going all the way through and we get a kind of through line from it.

But they are seemingly two separate works at the same period of time. And so one thing that's kind of interesting is toward the beginning of the Agriegal of our remember correctly, he suggests that he might be interested in writing or maybe some histories I cannot remember now, he's interested in possibly writing about the days of Nerva and Trajan. And he never danced up. And that itself might be kind of illuminating and also speak to some of the undercurrent of hatred for the Empire that has to have overall.

Of course, he has to say the current emperor is great. Right. And so the Agriegal talks about, oh, Domitian was terrible. But thank God, now everything is wonderful because of Nerva, now because of Trajan.

So he has to say that. You know, it's suicidal if he doesn't say something like that. So it's possible that he was offering this impression that he was going to talk about Nerva and Trajan, but he never actually intended to do so because he's not suicidal. He goes talking about Trajan.

If Trajan is a current emperor is insane. You can't do that. He couldn't write that kind of history. So that's what he works against that.

That's what's so funny about the Agriegal is that he's like, oh, yeah, this number was bad, but these guys good. Meanwhile, Cargaccus is like, no, empire is fundamentally like just what? So we would need to know such things. So you can put them more broad political critique.

That's what he else is. That's exactly right. That's what I'm asking though is, are the histories and the animals fundamentally different work character works in character? Like, why, why are they?

What indicates that these are two separate works rather than other than maybe just a tradition of meaning. Is there something about the text that different? Yeah. So there's no structure.

I'm curious that they don't overlap. Why do you think this? Yeah. Right.

It used to be perceived by some scholars that there was something fundamentally different between writing histories versus writing annales. And the idea that annales is supposed to be kind of year by year in a way that histories aren't necessarily. But the titles of the works seem kind of arbitrary. I mean, the other one could have been called the annales and the other one could have been called the histories.

It really doesn't make any difference, it seems to me. So it's very difficult to tell. From our standpoint, I guess, you know, there are similar themes throughout. I think he's interested in similar things, the way in which power corrupts, how difficult it is to be a senator and live some sort of decent life under this sort of terrible political culture in which there's no freedom, in which people have to worry about what they say at all times, in which you can be killed for the most absurd reasons for, you know, and nothing can stop it and so forth.

You see similar ideas. The personalities are different. You know, one of the things that's so depressing about the fact that we don't have all the annales is that his discussion of Caligula does not come to us at all. There's not even a page of it.

And you can imagine as bad as he is with a mirror and with Claudius and Tiberius, just imagine if he had gotten his hands on the maniac Caligula. What he would have said about this guy and what it might have been like to be a number of the time. One of the things he does talk about for the beginning of the history is that I think is slightly different. There are a series of very short-lived emperors, the year of the four emperors.

And he is really interested in how it comes about that an emperor who doesn't come from the julioh, Claudian family can become emperor. And what are the sort of dangers involved in being a pretender to the empire itself? So there are slightly different themes, but I do think that overall they are rather similar works, I think. Well, this has been illuminating.

So it's very rough. Yeah. Thanks very much. I really appreciate it.

I am good into the episode. Go by Eric's book, the Dabit work respondents. What's the full title? Yeah.

Humanistic letters, the Irving Babbit called Elmer Moore correspond. Really? And Vannevere. With the subtitle or the whole title?

Yeah. No, well, you know, academics are nothing if not inventive. No, but I, but I'm serious about that episode where we talk about famous correspondences and how some can result in dead ends and others can kick off something very interesting. That would be great.

And actually, I think you guys would genuinely be interested possibly in the course one of the self. Babbit and Moore ultimately had a break from one another. And in part, that was because Moore returned to Christianity. He became a semi-anglicant, but also partly because Babbit was chiefly inspired as far as Western thinkers were concerned by Aristotle.

And Moore was a plate and they had very different visions of both religion, but also philosophy that came from their sort of perspective of concerns. And so it does speak to some of the interests that the three of you actually have in your own. You sure there wasn't like a yoga in there? No, some things.

Don't think there was a yoga. I don't think there were any hit records, you know, there's no murder in some words. I guess it's a little less colorful than the Beatles, but, you know, at the same time, maybe a little bit more intellectual. You just need to get on the cover of the right letter.

That's all. Yeah. I don't think either Paul Elmer Moore or me, or me, or me, or the lyrics of the song imagined. I don't think either one would have perceived that that was a kind of reasonable series of lyrics for people to hear as adults.

Eric, last question before we break. Research wise, what do you up to? So right now, actually, so I had previously, when we were talking about this, I had talked about doing this book on kind of defenses of an attacks on the study of Latin and Greek and American history, beginning of colonial period, and moving forward. I sort of tabled that a little bit.

I may turn back to it, but for reasons we may have talked about off-camera, I'm moving away from that a little bit. And I'm actually interested in possibly doing, Greg is going to be deeply excited about this. The world's first biography of Irving Bevet, the father of the new humanism. I'm a little worried about that because I'm chair, so I have much less time to do research and this is going to be a big project.

It turns out the Irving Bevet papers at Harvard are 33,000 pages I have. So there's like a lot to look at over that. There's also letters elsewhere in terms of what I am kind of excited about the project. So that's what I've just started.

It'll take a little bit. What about some Greek and or Roman monographs? I haven't been working on that more recently. The last, I'd say, piece that I wrote specifically on Greek and Roman authors was I did a piece on Cassius Dio and his views of foreign policy.

It came out in, I think in 2021, I have been interested, because Greg is kind of interested in doing this at ACTC and possibly doing something on Salas and the view of kind of human dualism in Salas, but I have to learn more about ACTC and how you do those papers. They seem they're very short and I'm going to be short done something precisely like that. So I'd have to sort of see what they're going to do. We're going to do a TNT panel.

We love you. We are. I thought so. We're in the next.