Tacitus

” Therefore Ananias, the Jew, as we find in the history of Josephus, very properly taught Tzates, or as Tacitus calls him, Ezates, the Adiabenian, that even without circumcision, God might be rightly worshipped and rendered propitious.

This is well expressed by Tacitus:

Otho, as Tacitus relates, gave the cities of the Moors to the Province of Baetia.

This decree passed, according to Tacitus, under Claudius (Annales, 11, 13), according to Suetonius, under Vespasian (Suet.

Vitellius is carped at by Tacitus for his lavish grants of Latinity (Latium vulgo dilargiri, Hist.

as far as the sixth degree, for Tacitus mentions that second cousins were once incapable of intermarriage, sobrinarum diu ignorata matrimonia, Ann.

Cui simile est quod in Mosis historia et inde apud Augustinum legimus, iusta bella Israelitas contra Amorrhaeos gessisse, quia innoxius transitus denegabatur; qui IVRE HVMANAE SOCIETATIS aequissimo patere debebat. Et hoc nomine Hercules Orchomeniorum, Graeci sub Agamemnone Mysorum Regi arma intulerunt, quasi libera essent naturaliter itinera, ut Baldus dixit. Accusanturque a Germanis apud Tacitum …

Again, as we read in Tacitus, the Germans accused the Romans of ‘preventing all intercourse between them and of closing up to them the rivers and roads, and almost the very air of heaven’.

Tacitus, Historiae IV, 64.

’ Tacitus plainly distinguished the noble from the non-noble freeman in the Germanic societies which he observed;

Tacitus describes the companions of the Germanic chief as living with him in his house and supported by his bounty.

Some such system as that represented by the Irish Tanistry belonged probably at one time to all the tribal communities which overran the Roman Empire, but no precise assertion can be made as to the stage in their history at which it began to be modified, especially since Sohm’s investigations (in his ‘Fränkische Reichs-und Gerichtsverfassung’) have shown us how considerably the social organisation …

and the same picture of a fierce and bold liberty, which is drawn by the masterly pen of Tacitus, will suit those founders of the English government.

and while we endeavor to unfold their political institutions, we must perpetually turn our observation to that masterly picture in which the Roman historian has described these nations.

’ (The princes are chosen in the assemblies, who administer the laws throughout the towns and villages, and with each one are associated an hundred companions, taken from the people, for purposes both of counsel and authority.

The description of Tacitus is familiar:

and it is more than probable that in the Germans Tacitus found a living image of regretted virtues which were believed to have flourished under the Roman republic.

8) is so brief as to leave in some obscurity both what the facts were and how Tacitus understood them.

The rudiments of the social state, so far as they are known to us at all, are known through testimony of three sorts—accounts by contemporary observers of civilisation less advanced than their own, the records which particular races have preserved concerning their primitive history, and ancient law.

Now, we know that among the Germans observed by Tacitus or his informants the chiefs were rewarded by King or Commonwealth with assignments of cattle and corn;

Plainly your god Saturn altogether is reviewed, in the records of the ancients, on earth, of human quality.