What one reviewer at amazon said about The Agricola and the Germania: And the Germania (Penguin Classics):
It's rather rare to find a book whose introduction is half as long as the book itself...But here we have one...Tacitus' prose reminds me of Julius Caesar's and that of Marcus Aurelius. These Romans didn't go for redundant verbiage. A curious parallel in English is, of course, Ernest Hemingway.-His laudatory description of Agricola interlaced with philosophy is superb. My favorite quote is, "...he always remembered the hardest lesson that philosophy teaches-a sense of proportion." The same can be said of Tacitus and his prose-I found the section on Germania a bit less interesting because, well, that sort of anthropology just doesn't flow as well with Tacitus' terse prose. I was reminded of Caesar and his description of the Gauls. This discrepancy can't really be helped of course, and "anthropology," as such, didn't exist at the time.- It was interesting to note the esteem in which the Germans held their women. I suppose my disappontment stems from the modern approach to the analysis of societes and their psychology. But Tacitus' unvarying faithfulness to the facts as he knows them without the vagaries of, say, the fantastical accounts of Herodotus is refreshing, and, to use a word currently fallen into disrepute, courageously manly.-A must read for history buffs and those interested in Latin prose without a thorough schooling in Latin itself. I haven't seen the original Latin of Tacitus, but the style as here translated is nearly equivalent to that of Caesar's Letters which I translated in my second of four years of Latin in high school.-In any case, you don't have much to lose. You can finish it in a sunny afternoon.
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