with the Cherusci, the Goths, or the Vandals, as they could communicate with one another, speaking related dialects, worshiping the same or similar gods, and practicing similar forms of social organization. But they were not a unified group. They fought wars against one another, there is no record of a majority of them ever coming together in one political formation, and they generally maintained their autonomy, although there is record of members of one tribe referring to other tribes as kinsmen, especially in the face of Roman hostility.
The process of an empire constructing the barbarians is by no means unique to the Germans. Empires habitually manufacture ethnicities at their frontiers. Ethnicity begins where sovereignty ends, to cite James C. Scott.35 In order to control an uncontrollable, it must first be named. All domination flows from an original categorical enclosure. The very category of “tribe,” so influential in classical anthropology and pregnant with a sense of the primitive and pristine, is in fact an imperial creation. In the Roman Empire, tribes were administrative units for populations that defied direct rule but could be intimidated into paying protection money (or “tribute”), participating in “tribunes,” and taking part in other aspects of imperial business. Over time, they were increasingly integrated into the Roman state, holding on to a semi-autonomous status. Clearly, the tribes were never intended to remain autonomous forever. Identification and constitution as a tribe were early rungs on the ladder of colonization.
Germany as an entity existed in the Roman imagination, whence it was transposed to a German imagination (nor is this a unique process: Benedict Anderson and Alfred Kroeber describe how colonial state administration was able to create separate ethnic “tribes” that eventually became self-identifying, in the case of a separate Chinese ethnicity in Dutch Batavia or distinct ethnic tribes as understood in the Western sense in North America).36 Germany as a political reality was not born until 1871, created by Chancellor Bismarck on the grave of the Paris Commune. But its imaginary existence up until that point was by no means insubstantial. It reflects greatly on the worldview of the Germanic tribes in the era of the Roman collapse that they named the greatest state they eventually built the Holy Roman Empire. This would be the first Reich referred to by the Third Reich, whose ideologues also found great validation in the fact that Tacitus casually referred to the tribes across the Rheine as having “pure blood.”
What else did Tacitus find among the Germanic tribes? At the time he published Germania, in 98 CE, there was little to suggest the German ethnicity as a state-making technology. The different German peoples were stateless. Many of them had chiefs or kings, though it was often the Romans who appointed these among the conquered tribes or allied tribes living along the border. The chief, however, was not a coercive figure. Tribes made decisions in open assemblies, generally held after drunken debates during feasting. Tacitus, with both pleasure and irony, records the almost constant feasting and the unlimited hospitality of the Germans. Both of these are common features of stateless societies.
Tacitus refers to the Germans as a “free people,” in contrast to the “autocratic” or “despotic” nations Rome was at war with in the east. He himself notes that the self-organized, decentralized Germans presented a much greater military threat to the Roman Empire, and over a period of two hundred years at that, than the despotic empires on their eastern border ever had. The three hundred years of history after his account bear out the assertion a hundredfold. Again, the evidence shows that stateless societies have an even greater capacity for self-defense than statist ones.
While Tacitus’s classification of the Germans as a “free” people sometimes uses the same criteria as anarchists might—general participation in decision-making, the lack of coercive authorities—we have to be aware that the Roman historian entertains a patrician’s notion of freedom. Consider the following passage:
Bordering on the Suiones [the predecessors of the Swedes] we have the nations of the Sitones. They resemble them in all respects except one—woman is the ruling sex. That is the measure of their decline, I will not say below freedom, but even below decent slavery.37
In comparison to the Roman patriarchy, we know that Germanic societies were relatively egalitarian in their gender relations. In a clearly androcentric way (for we cannot doubt which gender the Roman talked to, whose activities he granted legitimacy, and on whom he focused his attention), Tacitus gives some indication of this: “they [the German men] believe that there resides in women an element of holiness and a gift of prophecy; and so they do not scorn to ask their advice, or lightly disregard their replies.” Tacitus moderates what he sees as a contemptible respect for women by amending that the German men do not shower any women with “servile flattery or any pretence of turning women into goddesses” as some contemporaneous Roman cults did the wives of emperors. However, according to his own account they did not shower anyone with servile flattery, and they did worship goddesses and consider some earthly women divine.38
Although Tacitus talks of “noble families” and “slaves,” there is little evident class differentiation. “In every home the children go naked and dirty, and develop that strength of limb and tall stature which excite our admiration […] The young master is not distinguished by the slave by any pampering in his upbringing. They live together among the same flocks and on the same earthen floor.”39
The class of people among the Germanic tribes whom Tacitus calls “slaves,” referring back to a well defined class in Roman society, are probably better understood as dependents, in that they had their own homes, land, and families, they were rarely flogged or otherwise punished, they were not given specific duties but instead were expected to pay a sort of rent or tithe, contributing to the household economy of their master or patron, who in turn had the responsibility to protect them. In large part, the determining factor separating slaves from free men was the obligation to go to war. By honoring warriors, Germanic tribes were able to create a soft hierarchy, largely non-coercive, that provided additional sustenance for a specialized warrior class. However, these warriors were not entirely freed from the obligation to toil, as were Roman patricians, and they could not subject their dependents to conditions of misery or hyper-exploitation. We could even imagine this history from a different perspective, in which the so-called slaves preferred to spend more time farming in order to liberate themselves from dangerous military duties. Tacitus recorded a value hierarchy among the warriors that honored bravery, but perhaps the toilers, whose voices were never recorded, reproduced another set of values that honored sharing and fertility. We have no way to know if this is true; the hypothesis simply illustrates how statist ethnographers can distort their subjects and record reflections of their own cultural prejudices.
Tacitus claims that the Germans were lacking in gold and silver, though discoveries that postdate his account would demonstrate this was due to the local disinterest in these substances, and not to their absence beneath the soil. He also notes that “the employment of capital in order to increase it by usury is unknown in Germany.” In a number of passages that contrast with modern stereotypes (and that contradict the anthropomorphism of climate, in which geographical conditions determine social character, literally hot weather leading to metaphorically hot blood), the Roman chastises the Germans for their laziness, their lack of discipline, their preference for gambling and feasting over labor and husbandry, and—most hilariously from a present-day standpoint—their utter unpunctuality.40
To put it bluntly, how did this lazy, hospitable, sharing, egalitarian, decentralized, uncapitalistic smattering of tribes turn into one of the principal producers of states across an entire subcontinent?
The answer I propose lies in the one characteristic of these tribes that interested Tacitus the most. His curiosity, after all, was motivated by state interests, as tends to be the case with ethnographers. This interesting characteristic was their militarism. Though the armies of Germanic tribes were voluntary, mobilized by collective notions of honor rather than the coercive powers of a military apparatus, these tribes proved a major threat to Roman power. A large part of Roman affairs in the north of their empire centered on allying with particular tribes and playing them against one another to prevent their turning against Rome.
Tacitus talks almost exclusively
