About this ebook
By translating word-for-word, traditional scholars turned simple Roman intelligence into complicated historical fiction, misinterpreting unarmored warriors as "naked" and giving justification for rigid divisions between Celts, Germans, and Slavs that Tacitus never wrote.
In reality, Tacitus wasn't writing a moral lecture or a field study. He was writing a cold, hard-nosed military risk assessment for Rome’s ruling elite: a warning about a massive, unified warrior culture that outpopulated the people of the first world.
Germania for Everyone strips away two thousand years of translator errors and academic kitsch. Written in plain, direct modern English, this edition brings the latest archaeological insights into focus, dismantling artificial splits between Celts and Germans, correcting misread Latin idioms, and showing just how close our ancestors remain to us today.
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About the author
Publius Cornelius Tacitus (c. 56 – c. 120 AD) was a Roman senator and historian, widely regarded as one of the greatest Latin prose writers of antiquity. His major historical works include the Annals and the Histories, which record the reign of the early Roman emperors. His minor works include Germania (a comprehensive synthesis and critical summary of Roman intelligence and records on the northern frontier), Agricola (a biography of his father-in-law, the Roman general in Britain), and Dialogus de oratoribus (a treatise on classical rhetoric).
R. O. Hershey is a playwright, artist, and specialist in Iron Age, Celtic, and Germanic iconography. Best known for his 2014 decipherment of the Gundestrup Cauldron, his work focuses on visual culture, narrative structure, and the direct translation of classical texts.
