Germania. In latino, english, italiano

Tacito

• Publisher: Go Ware
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9788867974276
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

Christopher Krebs, un classicista dell'Università di Stanford, ha definito Germania di Tacito "un libro molto pericoloso" e ha dedicato alla fortuna di questo classico della storiografia latina, di appena 30 pagine, un libro di oltre 300 pagine. Lo scritto di Tacito è divenuto una miniera di tropi. Heine, Herder, Grimm se ne sono occupati ampiamente. Marinetti lo tradusse come un testo futurista e Gramsci si beffò della sua traduzione. Il nazismo ne fece la sua bibbia. Himmler ne era ossessionato al tal punto da mandare nel 1943 un commando delle SS in Italia a trafugare il manoscritto, vanamente. Il paradosso più grande è che Tacito ha scritto Germania senza aver mai conosciuto, né visitato quei luoghi. Ma lui vedeva la storia come un'astrazione.
Oggi la Germania è tornata in primo piano nella politica e nella storia europea. Il volto dei suoi leader suscita sentimenti forti. Rileggere oggi questa sintetica monografia antropologica, fuori dalle passate querelle e dagli innumerevoli tropi che l'hanno piagata, può essere un buon impiego del proprio tempo.
Oltre al testo originale, un latino che raggiunge i suoi più alti vertici di sinteticità e pregnanza, offriamo al lettore la traduzione italiana e quella inglese. Conoscere la storia è magistrale, altrimenti, come dice Hegel, chi dimentica il passato lo ripete.
Christopher Krebs, a classicist from Stanford University, defined Germania by Tacitus as "a most dangerous book" in literature. Krebs himself studied the fortune of this classic from Latin historiography in a book of over 300 pages based on a piece barely 30 pages long. Actually Germania can be read in a half an hour.
Through history Germania has been a constant source of tropes. Heine, Herder, Grimm all wrote extensively about it. Tommaso Marinetti translated it as a futurist text and Antonio Gramsci mocked his translation. Germania became a sort of bible for the Nazis. Himmler was so obsessed with it that in 1943 he dispatched a commando to Italy in an unsuccessful attempt to steal the manuscript. The superb paradox is Tacitus never stepped foot in Germany. For Tacitus, history was only an abstraction.
Once again we find Germany in the spotlight. German leaders arouse strong emotions and feelings. Reading this book today would serve us all well. It can help us to untangle the European puzzle. In any case The Germania is a classic. A first example of an anthropological monograph written in Latin at the peak of conciseness and poignancy.
This ebook contains the Latin text, English, and Italian translations linked and intertwined.
Historia magistra vitae, otherways, in Hegel's words: "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it".

Tacitus
The Germania
Translated into English by R. B. Townshend

1

[LT] C [IT]

Germany taken as a whole is divided from Gaul, Rhaetia and Pannonia by the Rhine and the Danube. Mountains divide it from Sarmatia and Dacia, and mutual fear is also a barrier between the peoples. On the far side it is encircled by the ocean, which sweeps around broad promontories and islands of unknown extent, where dwell kings and tribes, whose existence has only been recently revealed to us by war. Rising amid the untrodden fastnesses of the Rhaetian Alps the Rhine flows with a slight westerly curve down to its outlet in the North Sea. The Danube, issuing from the gentle slopes of the Black Forest, visits many peoples in its course until it forces its way into the Black Sea through six mouths, whilst a seventh channel loses itself in the marshes.

2

[LT] C [IT]

In my opinion the Germans are the original inhabitants of the country, and are almost entirely unalloyed by admixture with immigrant tribes from without. I ground this opinion upon the fact that ancient migrations took place not by land but by sea, and that seldom indeed are those vast and, I may say, hostile seas that encompass them visited by a ship from our part of the world. And, moreover, apart from the perils of that terrible unknown ocean, no man would think of abandoning Asia or Africa or Italy and seeking a home in Germany, with its uninviting lands and ungenial climate, its dreary aspect and its social gloom, if it were not his native place. The sagas, which are the sole record of their past history, say that the God Tuisto sprang from the earth, and that he and his son Mannus were the authors and founders of the race. To Mannus they ascribe three sons, whose names are borne respectively by the Ingaevones next to the ocean, the Herminones in the middle of the country, and the Iscaevones in the rest of it. Others, with true mythological license, give the deity several more sons, from whom are derived more tribal names, such as Marsians, Gambrivians, Swabians, and Vandals; and these names are both genuine and ancient. The name Germany, however, is new and of recent application, owing to the fact that the first of these peoples to cross the Rhine and dispossess the Gauls, a tribe now known as the Tungrians, then got the name of “Germans”. Thus what was originally a name given to a tribe and not that of a race gradually came to be accepted, so that all men of the race were called Germans, by the victorious tribe first as a name of fear, and by themselves afterwards when the name had once been coined.

3

[LT] C [IT]

Tradition goes so far as to say that Hercules visited their country, and they raise a hymn in his praise, as the pattern of all valiant men, as they approach the field of battle. They have also a kind of song which they chaunt to fire their courage (they call it “barding”), and from this chaunt they draw an augury of the issue of the coming fray. For they inspire terror in the foe, or become flurried themselves according to the sound that goes up from the host. It is not so much any articulate expression of words as a warlike chorus. The great aim is to produce a hoarse tempestuous roar, every man holding his shield before his mouth to increase the volume and the depth of tone by reverberation. Ulysses also, as some think, sailed into the northern ocean, in the course of his long mythical wanderings, and trod on German soil, and they maintain that Asburg on the Rhine, which is an inhabited place at the present day, was both founded and named by him; nay, more, they assert that an altar, consecrated to Ulysses, with the name of his father, Laertes, also on it, was once found on this very spot, and that certain monuments and tombs inscribed with Greek characters are still to be seen on the confines of Germany and Rhaetia. I have no intention of bringing forward evidence either in order to confirm these statements or to refute them; every man must give or withhold his assent as he is inclined.

4

[LT] C [IT]

For myself I am disposed to side with those who hold that the German peoples have never intermarried with alien stocks, but have always stood forth as a race rooted in the soil, pure and unlike every other. This is why, extraordinarily numerous as the Germans are, they all possess precisely the same physical characteristics, fierce blue eyes, red hair, and large frames which are good only for a spurt; they certainly have not a corresponding power of endurance for hard work, while, although inured by the nature of their climate and soil to hunger and cold, they have never learnt to support heat and thirst.

5

[LT] C [IT]

Their land, notwithstanding considerable local diversities, as a rule consists of tangled forests and dismal swamps, the rainfall being greater on the side towards Gaul, while the side facing Noricum and Pannonia is more exposed to winds. It is fairly fertile, though fruit trees do not flourish, and it is a good grazing country, but the cattle are usually stunted; our fine powerful oxen with their spreading horns are positively unknown; their pride is in large herds, which constitute their sole and most highly prized form of wealth. Silver and gold the gods have denied them, but whether in mercy or in anger I hesitate to say; neither would I be understood to affirm that Germany possesses no veins of silver or gold, for nobody has ever looked for them. They make a difference in the value they set upon the precious metals for use and for commerce. One may see amongst them vessels of silver, that have been officially presented to their envoys and chiefs, put to the same common uses as pots of clay, although those tribes that are on our border highly appreciate gold and silver for the purposes of trade, and recognize and preferentially accept some varieties of our coins. The interior tribes still exchange by barter after the more primitive and ancient fashion. They like money that is old and familiar, in the form of pieces having deeply indented rims, and bearing the impression of a two-horse chariot. Silver, too, rather than gold attracts them, not that they are any fonder of it as a metal, but because the reckoning of silver coins is easier for men who deal in a variety of cheap articles.

6

[LT] C [IT]

Even iron is by no means abundant with them, as we may gather from the character of their weapons. Only a few have swords and heavy spears. They carry lances, “frameae” as they call them, with the iron point narrow and short, but so sharp and so easy to handle that they employ them either for stabbing or for throwing as occasion demands. A lance and a shield are arms enough for a horseman; the footmen have also darts to hurl: each man carries several, and, being naked or only lightly clad with a little cloak, they can hurl them to an immense distance. They make no display of ornament, only they are very careful in the colours they use for the devices on their shields. Few possess such a thing as a breastplate, and only a man or two here and there a helmet or headpiece. Their horses are not remarkable for beauty or speed, neither are they trained to complex evolutio...

Table of contents

• Copertina
• Frontespizio
• Colophon
• Description
• Presentazione
• Publius Cornelius Tacitus
• Publius Cornelius Tacitus, De origine et situ Germanorum (Germania) [Latino]
• Tacitus, The Germania [English]
• Tacito, Germania [Italiano]
• goWare <e-book> team
• Manifesto di goWare