Ancient Germanic Lifestyle and Hospitality
From Dialogus, Agricola, Germania by Cornelius Tacitus, translated by William Peterson, 1914.
From: Unknown To: 120 C.E.
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
Lifestyle and Hospitality
From Dialogus, Agricola, Germania by Cornelius Tacitus, translated by William Peterson, 1914.
No race indulges more lavishly in hospitality and entertainment: to close the door against any human being is a crime. Every one according to his property receives at a well-spread board: should it fail, he who had been your host points out your place of entertainment and goes with you. You go next door, without an invitation, but it makes no difference; you are received with the same courtesy. Stranger or acquaintance, no one distinguishes them where the right of hospitality is concerned. It is customary to speed the parting guest with anything he fancies. There is the same readiness in turn to ask of him: gifts are their delight, but they neither count upon what they have received.
On waking from sleep, which they generally prolong into the day, they wash, usually in warm water, since winter bulks so large in their lives: after washing they take a meal, seated apart, each at his own table: then, arms in hand, they proceed to business, or, just as often, to revelry. To out-drink the day and night is a reproach to no man: brawls are frequent; naturally, among heavy drinkers: they seldom terminate with abuse, more often in wounds and bloodshed; nevertheless the mutual reconciliation of enemies, the forming of family alliances, the appointment of chiefs.
The question even of war or peace, are usually debated at these banquets; as though at no other time were the mind more open to obvious, or better warmed to larger, thoughts. The people are without craft or cunning, and expose in the freedom of revelry the heart’s previous secrets; so every mind is bared to nakedness: on the next day the matter is handled afresh; so the principle of each debating season is justified: deliberation comes when they are incapable of pretence, but decision when they are secure from illusion.
For drink they use the liquid distilled from barley or wheat, after fermentation has given it a certain resemblance to wine. The tribes nearest the river also buy wine. Their diet is simple: wild fruit, fresh venison, curdled milk. They banish hunger without sauce or ceremony, but there is not the same temperance in facing thirst: if you humour their drunkenness by supplying as much as they crave, they will be vanquished through their vices as easily as on the battlefield.
Their shows are all of one kind, and the same whatever the gathering may be: naked youths, for whom this is a form of professional acting, jump and bound between swords and upturned spears. Practice has made them dexterous and dexterity graceful; yet not for hire or gain: however daring be the sport, the spectator’s pleasure is the only price they ask.
Gambling, one may be surprised to find, they practise in all seriousness in their sober hours, with such recklessness in winning or losing that, when all else has failed, they stake personal liberty on the last and final throw: the loser faces voluntary slavery: though he be the younger and the stronger man, he suffers himself to be bound and sold; such is their persistence in wrong-doing, or their good faith, themselves style it. Slaves so acquired they trade, in order to deliver themselves, as well as the slave, from the humiliation involved in such victory.
Their other slaves are not organised in our fashion: that is, by a division of the services of life among them. Each of them remains master of his own house and home: the master requires from the slave as serf a certain quantity of grain or cattle or clothing. The slave so far is subservient; but the other services of the household are discharged by the master’s wife and children. To beat a slave and coerce him with hard labour and imprisonment is rare: if they are killed, it is not usually to preserve strict discipline, but in a fit of fury, like an enemy, except that there is no penalty to be paid.
Freedmen are not much above slaves: rarely are they of any weight in the household, never in politics, except at least in those states which have kings: then they climb above the free-born and above the nobles: in other states the disabilities of the freedmen are the evidence of freedom
To charge interest and to extend the same to usury is unknown, and the principle accordingly is better observed than if there had been actual prohibition.
Land is taken up by a village as a whole, in quantity according to the number of the cultivators: they then distribute it among themselves on the basis of rank, such distribution being made easy by the extent of domain occupied. They change the arable land yearly, and there is still land to spare, for they do not strain the fertility and resources of the soil by tasking them, through the planting of vineyards, the setting apart of water-meadows, the irrigation of vegetable gardens, Grain is the only harvest required of the land; accordingly the year itself is not divided into as many parts as with us: winter, spring, summer have a meaning and a name; of autumn the name alike and bounties are unknown.
In burial there is no ostentation: the single observance is to burn the bodies of their notables with special kinds of wood. They build a pyre, but do not load it with palls or spices: to each man his armour; to the fire of some his horse also is added. The tomb is a mound of turf: the difficult and tedious tribute of a monument they reject as too heavy on the dead. Weeping and wailing they put away quickly: sorrow and sadness linger. Lamentation becomes women: men must remember.
Tacitus, Cornelius. Dialogus, Agricola, Germania. Edited by T. E. Page and W. H. D. Rouse. Translated by William Peterson, W. Heinemann, 1914.
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