Were the Germans physically superior?

[Robert Vermaat]

Back to Tacitus. I understand healthy scepticism, but I suppose that I am with the backlash against the school of ancient sources hyper-criticism.

As am I. That backlash happened during the early 1970s and was directed against those who took every source literally. I think at the time it was quite healthy. But since that backlash, hisory has com a long way and the pendulum has swung back again.

Some of the proponents of radical scepticism seem to think that no ancient writer can be trusted and they were all making up things out of their own imagination. Some things can be shown, with a high degree of confidence, to be fabrications. Speeches stuck in the mouths of people centuries removed from the writer are the best example.

Well, that's quite harsh and you'd be hard put to find many of those among current historical viws. It's certainly not how I treat Tacitus.

Cornell says that “there is always a distinction to be drawn between the structural data on which it is based and the narrative superstructure.” The narrative superstructure can be quite extensive, such as with Dionysius of Halicarnassus who had a theme that Romans were Greek.
But do we have reason to believe that Tacitus’ statement that Germans were taller than Romans is a fabrication or was part of a “narrative superstructure”? So far I’m not seeing much that convinces me. To reject something he says we have to replace it with something of our own construction, which is coloured by our own prejudices just like their work was coloured with theirs.

Tacitus also had a theme, which is well-recognised, that of the loss of the Republic and loss of Roman values.
No, we need not see Tacitus' statements as farbrications, that's far too radical. But ancient historians are incomparable to modern historians in tthe way they wrote - they did not mean to write down facts for posterity, but with a reason: why things happened. It's no big leap from Tacitus to the early Christian historians of Antiquity.
Tacitus is also a man of his age in the way that he used stereotypes, like I wrote earlier. Ancient historians also never had a scientific need for fact-finding, as we have today. It was not expected of them and they did not seek it. Which means that obvious wrong statements were not willfull fabrications, but just how they used information available to them. And Finni without horses was just a fact that Romans recognised: the further away from me, the more savage they get. Even when WE know it's nonsense.

I suppose that I am a believer in what the writers say as long as there is no concrete reason to doubt them. [..]If someone can show a reason why Tacitus should be disbelieved – such as studies on German remains of the same time period or a demonstration that tall Germans fit into some Roman belief system then I’ll change my tune. :wink:

It's not a question of believing an ancient writer or not, but understanding how to read him. You have to try to understand where he came from, what his purpose of writing in the first place was, which knowledge was available to him, did he travel at all or rely on previous reports. That sort of stuff. Historial research. :wink: