Maps Of The Roman Empire

Christopher Krebs'

Perhaps the most fateful decision in all of European history was made by Augustus Caesar, when he chose to fix the border of the Roman Empire at the Rhine. As a result, the region known to the Romans as Germania would go without the products of Roman civilization—good roads and big cities and the Latin language and Christianity. But it would also remain vigorous and untamed enough to threaten Roman power, and finally destroy it in the fifth century A.D. For the next 1,500 years, the line where Roman writ ended would remain visible on the political and cultural map of Europe. The border between Romance and Germanic languages, between Catholicism and Protestantism, even between the Entente and the Central Powers in the First World War, all shadowed the border between Germania and Rome.

century, just as the Renaissance and Reformation were gathering force, it became something like the bible of German nationalism.

Given where that nationalism led, Krebs is quite justified in the title of his clever, learned new study, which synthesizes a great deal of classical scholarship and intellectual history into a concise, accessible story. To drive the point home, the book opens with a vignette from 1943, when SS troops were dispatched by Heinrich Himmler to a villa in Italy, ordered to retrieve the oldest extant copy of the Germania 's afterlife, he does not say enough about what it actually contains—this might seem surprising. Tacitus is hardly flattering about either the land or its people. It is "a region hideous and rude, under a rigorous climate, dismal to behold or to cultivate." The men are undisciplined and lazy, leaving all manual labor to the women, and they drink so much that "if you will but humor their excess in drinking, and supply them with as much as they covet, it will be no less easy to vanquish them by vices than by arms."

Yet if these are the vices of primitives, the Germans are also credited with the primitive virtues. They are tall, handsome, and vigorous, excellent warriors, jealous of their liberty, and sexually chaste. In short, they are the diametric opposites of the luxurious aristocrats of Rome, who were Tacitus' original readers. The historian turned the Germans into noble savages, just as later European writers would do with the American Indians, in order to reproach the excesses of his own society.