What Are We Teaching These Kids?:
Using Tacitus’ Germania to Cultivate
Humanity in the Latin Classroom

Bridget Thomas (Truman State University)

Ancient ethnography is not usually covered in surveys of ancient literature, perhaps because of the topic of those works (on the surface, at least, not about Greeks and Romans), because of their tone (observations or reports presented as fact), or because of the values that they relay (often a tone of superiority, dismissive of the primitive Other).  Courses on race and ethnicity in antiquity (e.g. McCoskey CW 1999) may include the Germania as one primary source among many, but there is the risk that the nuances of this particular work may get lost in discussions of such diverse and relatively noisy perspectives as Cicero, Caesar, and Juvenal.  Can we justify teaching this work and indeed this genre on its own?  Can we  work past superficial impressions of topic, tone, and values to a more appreciative understanding of such works as both records of encounters with the Other and exercises in self-definition?

I think that we find this justification in Martha Nussbaum’s 1998 book, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.   In this book Nussbaum makes the case for reforming the curriculum so that it more effectively prepares undergraduates for the demands of “an age of cultural diversity and increasing internationalization” (6).  She recommends three attitudes that educators should strive to cultivate in our students, specifically the capacity for critical self-examination, “world citizenship” (the sense that we as human beings have something in common despite our many real differences), and “narrative imagination” (the ability to imagine life in another person’s situation) (pages 9-11 and passim).  Most of us no doubt feel that this is an encouraging list: we already teach at least one of these capacities (narrative imagination) every day in literature classes; we already teach self-examination and a sense of cultural and linguistic perspective in our language and civilization courses. 

I would like to go one better and suggest that Tacitus’ Germania may be uniquely suited to serve as a model of someone striving to achieve all three capacities at once.  First, Tacitus is critical of the Romans of his own day and indeed states that the Germans are in some respect superior to his peers; second, he recognizes that the Germans have concerns similar to the Romans – that the two peoples have certain instincts and drives in common, although they may go about achieving them in different ways; and third, as he seeks to understand those practices that are very different from his own, Tacitus tries to think as the Germans do -- we detect, as J.G.C. Anderson noted in his 1938 commentary, “a palpable feeling of sympathy” (xv).  All of this is not to downplay the limits of the ethnographer’s perspective -- that certainly merits lengthy discussion too -- but rather to suggest that our students might nevertheless learn curiosity, respect, and indeed something about the humane impulse via this work.