30.01.13
It may be tempting to use quotes such as the one above to make inferences about what life must have been like for the German women Tacitus wrote about. However, ethnographies such as the Germania are more useful in garnering information about Tacitus’ Rome than they are accurate accounts of Roman Germany. When constructing the cultural geography of the world they lived in, the Romans often defined themselves,
like the Greeks before them, in contrast to a cultural “Other” or “barbarian.” This dichotomy between Roman and non-Roman, West and East, civilized and uncivilized, is a regular theme throughout Classical literature and art. The use of the social construct of
the cultural “Other” in Roman ethnographies was both an exercise in Roman selfdefinition and a means of social control. This rhetoric of “Otherness” often uses constructs of gender in order to delineate cultural distinctions between the dominant group and the “Others.” In this paper I will examine how two Roman authors, Julius Caesar and Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, use the social constructions of gender and the
“barbaric Other” in their ethnographies of Germans to construct ethnocentric and inverseethnocentric worldviews. I will demonstrate that the two ethnographies are political commentaries about the Roman world, not accurate depictions of “real life” for German women during the Roman period.
Autoria e outros dados (tags, etc)