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Tacitus's Germania (De origine et situ Germanorum, c. AD 98) is a short ethnographic treatise on the geography, tribes, and customs of the Germanic peoples beyond the Roman frontier. Composed by the greatest of Roman historians, it is our single most important literary source for the ancient Germans, and is admired for its vivid portrait of 'barbarian' virtue held up as an implicit reproach to the decadence of imperial Rome. The translation is Thomas Gordon's, first published in the early eighteenth century.

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