Korea, Australia, and the Pacifi c Islands, with most records
appearing as inscriptions on public monuments such as
megaliths and temples—places where the people who erected
them were unlikely to confess their misdeeds.EUROPE
BY BRADLEY SKEEN
Th e peoples of Europe living outside the Greek and Roman
worlds in a region that scholars oft en call temperate Europe
did not leave behind any signifi cant written records. What is
known about their public aff airs, including what they con-
sidered scandalous, comes only from Roman historians. Of
these historians, Tacitus (56–117 c.e.) is the most important.
Although he wrote during the Pax Romana, the height of the
Roman Empire’s power and prosperity, he was deeply dissat-
isfi ed with the political and social life of the empire. Much
of his criticism is indirect, made in connection with Roman
policies in temperate Europe. He denounces the decadent
and politically and morally ineff ectual life of Roman aris-
tocrats by implicitly contrasting that life with his exagger-
ated account of the virtues of the Germans in his Germania
(Germany), a work devoted to the national character of the
Germanic peoples. In his Annales Tacitus openly criticizes
the cruelty deemed necessary for maintaining imperial power
in his famous aphorism, “Th ey make a deserted land and call
it peace!” referring to the Romans’ tactic of slaughtering civil-
ians and warriors alike in their campaigns in Europe.
Along with his praise of the Germans, Tacitus regularly
describes German kings and chiefs as betraying the cause of
German nationalism, which he considers they should have
taken up in order to resist the decadent infl uence of Rome.
He presents the local leaders as bribed and bullied by Ro-
man offi cials and at the same time greedy for Roman luxu-
ries. He sees these weaknesses on the part of German leaders
as scandalous. Tacitus develops the scandalous weakness of
German leaders as a literary theme to be used in the criti-
cism of his own culture. What he writes cannot be accepted at
face value as objective fact or even as a representation of how
things might have seemed to the Germans themselves. He
never considers alternative interpretations: for example, that
the people outside the Roman Empire might have wanted the
peace and prosperity that existed inside the empire in order
to make their lives better lives. Th is very desire was certainly
present in temperate Europe, as is seen from the works of a
later Roman historian, Ammianus Marcellinus (ca. 325–391
c.e.). Ammianus makes it clear that when the German tribes
invaded the Roman Empire beginning in the fourth century
c.e. (eventually leading to the collapse of the Western Roman
Empire), their initial goal was simply to be allowed to live in-
side t he empire to gain protection from Huns and ot her tribes
pressuring them from the East.
Julius Caesar (100–44 b.c.e.), in his account of his con-
quest of Gaul, establishes the stereotype of the tribal peoples
of temperate Europe when he writes that they possess somekind of innate virtue—characterized as manliness—because
they live simple lives devoted to subsistence agriculture and
warfare. Th is way of life could be corrupted through luxury
by contact with Roman civilization into a morally inferior
condition characterized as eff eminacy. Tacitus takes up this
theme. He treats as a social scandal the fact that the virtuous
barbarian Germans should become corrupted like the eff em-
inate civilized Romans, treating both Germans and Romans
as stereotypes. For example, while the simple German people
in the interior knew nothing of gold and silver, those living
along the borders of the Roman Empire had been corrupted
by the greed and luxury associated with these metals in the
so-called civilized world, and this he considers scandalous.
Similarly Tacitus admires the Germans’ idea of the sanc-
tity of marriage, making a contrast with the adultery that he
fi nds distasteful in his own society. On the other hand, Taci-
tus considers the Germans’ love of gambling scandalous. He
says that it is not uncommon for a German to become a slave
by gambling away his own freedom aft er he has lost all his
possessions. Th ere is no way to verify this, but given the criti-
cism of the Roman love of gambling by contemporar y Roman
authors, this was probably meant to make the Roman reader
think of his own culture. Tacitus seems to move into fantasy
at the end of the Germania, where he claims that the Ger-
mans farthest removed from the Roman world are even worse
than Romans and are actually ruled by women, a condition
that he says is worse than slavery. Th is must be a reference to
the vast infl uence and great freedom of aristocratic Roman
women in Tacitus’s own society and not necessarily a true
statement about ancient Europe.
Tacitus lived during an era in which the imperial govern-
ment had curtailed the political power and even the property
and freedom of his own senatorial class. Th erefore he con-
sidered the greatest good for humanity to be freedom, the
very thing that he and those like him had lost. Accordingly,
he considered the greatest scandal among the Germans to be
their trading of freedom to the Roman government for whatBase-silver radiate of Carausius, with the emperors Diocletian and
Maximian, Roman Britain, late third century c.e.; in the years
287–296 c.e. Britain had its own emperor, Carausius, who had
been accused of corruption and assumed power to save himself from
punishment. (© Th e Trustees of the British Museum)914 scandals and corruption: Europe0895-1194_Soc&Culturev4(s-z).i914 914 10/10/07 2:30:25 PM