![]() ![]() But he would never have imagined that his Germania would have much impact, least of all on the barbarous, illiterate Germans themselves. Since he had experienced the brutal tyranny of the emperor Domitian (AD81-96), Tacitus had surely hoped that his narrative histories ( Histories and Annals) would be a lasting deterrent to tyrants and an encouragement to lovers of liberty. Although few in that Copenhagen audience could have been very surprised, Tacitus would have been deeply shocked. In 1954, less than a decade after the fall of the Third Reich, the great Italian-Jewish historian Arnaldo Momigliano told an important international classical congress that Cornelius Tacitus' brief ethnographical pamphlet on the ancient Germans was among "the one hundred most dangerous books ever written". ![]()
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