INSTRUCTIONS FOR FIRST SECTION, FRIDAY JANUARY 11 ON TACITUS:

READING:           Tacitus' Germania, in the Geary anthology, Readings in Medieval History,
3rd ed., pp. 69-82 will be discussed in sections.  Be sure to read Germania before section;
come prepared with questions and issues to bring up.
Link to on-line text of Germania: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/tacitus-germanygord.html

PURPOSE OF FIRST DISCUSSION:     
This first assignment will introduce two basic historical skills:
1) how to approach the reading historical sources, and
2) how to understand the context in which these sources were written.

Because this is a history course, one of our goals is to learn how to interpret and analyze historical
documents.  The documents we will read in this course come out of a specific historical context, a time,
and place and author. Some understanding of that context is crucial to their historical analysis. 

Historical documents all approach their subject matter from a perspective which the historian needs to take
into account.  This does not mean that documents with a clear perspective should be dismissed as "biased,"
or useless for the objective study of history.  Rather historians must incorporate the perspective of a text into
their analysis.  We will use Tacitus' Germania to see how an author's attitude or perspective influences the
depiction of his subject matter.
    
Ethnography refers to the analysis of cultures, especially the study of similarities and dissimilarities between
them.  In the modern world, ethnography is a part of anthropology, the branch of the social sciences which
studies the range of human cultures.  But in the classical world, it was usually historians like Tacitus who wrote
about cultures different from their own.

Tacitus wrote about the Germans as a kind of early ethnographer, an external observer gathering information from
written accounts, and from eye-witnessess who had travelled or fought in German lands.  It is important to note that
he wrote in Latin for a Roman audience, because this affects the manner in which he presents his information about
the Germans. 

There are three aspects of this work that need to be kept in mind:
1) the author, Tacitus;
2) his topic, Germans and their way of life;
3) his audience, literate Romans of 98 AD. 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:      

What is Tacitus’ social and political position?
What genre (or type of writing) is the Germania?
How does Tacitus present the Germans to his Roman audience?
Is Tacitus writing as a neutral observer? 
Does he display either positive or negative attitudes towards the Germans? 
What kind of points is he making for his Roman audience?

Be prepared to discuss these issues with respect to the following topics.
all of which are presented in the Germania:           
   war, political organization, religion, economics, inheritance customs
   position of women, marriage, child rearing, other Germanic behaviors.