The Raiders of the Lost Manuscript E-Book

Nicola Bizzi

• Herausgeber: Edizioni Aurora Boreale
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A compelling story like an adventure novel, yet incredibly true, is that of the De Origine et Situ Germanorum, better known as Germania, one of the most important historical and ethnographic works of antiquity, written by the great Roman author Publius Cornelius Tacitus. Since 1425, when the oldest known manuscript of this classical masterpiece, included in a 9th-century Carolingian codex, was discovered, forgotten for centuries in a dusty archive of the German Abbey of Hersfeld, it has been at the center of a genuine spy story that stretched from the Renaissance to modern times. The object of a surprising treasure hunt, since its discovery, the Codex Hersfeldensis was coveted and contested by humanists, literati, popes, secret agents, initiates, and important Italian and European dynasties, including the Medici of Florence, until the Second World War, when Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler attempted to take possession of it, considering it, in a mystical and esoteric key, a true "object of power" sacred to the Aryan race.

Leseprobe

SYMBOLS & MYTHS

NICOLA BIZZI

THE RAIDERS OF THE LOST MANUSCRIPT

In Search of Tacitus' Germania

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Title: The Raiders of the Lost Manuscript. In Search of Tacitus' Germania

Author: Nicola Bizzi

Publishing series: Symbols & Myths

Editing, cover and illustrations by Nicola Bizzi

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

© 2025 Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Via del Fiordaliso 14 - 59100 Prato - Italia

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www.auroraboreale-edizioni.com

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CHAPTER I

DE ORIGINE ET SITU GERMANORUM:

HISTORY AND GENESIS OF A LITERARY WORK

The De Origine et Situ Germanorum, commonly known as Germania, is a historical-ethnographic work written around 98 A.D. by Publius Cornelius Tacitus, a Roman historian, orator, and senator, unanimously considered by modern historians and philologists to be the greatest exponent of the historiographical genre of Latin literature. Entirely focused on the history, customs, institutions, and religious traditions of the various Germanic tribes who lived outside the borders of the Empire, the Germania is in fact the only exquisitely ethnographic work on a foreign people to have survived intact from Roman antiquity (excluding other works which, in their context, also contain fleeting excursus of a similar nature). It fits perfectly within that consolidated ancient ethnographic tradition that goes from Herodotus and Xenophon, up to Julius Caesar, Strabo, and Pausanias, and which had its roots in authors like Hellanicus of Lesbos and Dionysius of Miletus, whose works are (at least “officially”) lost. This does not take away from the fact that Tacitus' work also reveals itself as an original creation within the traditional genres of classical literatures, also including historical and geographical, but above all “ideological”, parts, almost like a pamphlet.

The text of De origine et situ Germanorum begins with the description of the lands, laws, and modus vivendi of the tribes traceable to a vast number of barbarian peoples, starting from those bordering the imperial limes, and then continues with the descriptions of the individual tribes, starting with those closest to Roman territories and ending with those at the furthest northern borders, on the Baltic Sea, with a description of the primitive and savage Fenni and unknown tribes beyond them.

The work is divided into two parts: from chapter I to XXVII Tacitus describes transrhenane Germania, with a wealth of detail regarding the climate, landscape, and social structure of the various peoples who were stationed there at that time, recounting their origin. From chapter XXVIII to XLVI there is a more specific review of the individual populations following a geographical criterion, that is to say, starting from the West, then proceeding to the North, South, and finally to the East.

It seems established now that the De Origine et Situ Germanorum, which contains not only purely descriptive passages but also moralizing and political ones, most likely had, in the author's intentions, the not secondary purpose of highlighting the potential danger represented for Roman civilization by fierce and untameable peoples whom the imperial legions had never managed to conquer and subjugate. History in fact teaches us how the Germanic populations have always represented a thorn in the side of an Empire, the Roman one, which already at the time of Tacitus had conquered a good part of the world then known, from the Gauls to Egypt, from Britain to Greece, from Asia Minor to Arabia, but which was still far from having defeated (and, in fact, never would be) those belligerent and untamable peoples who lived and prospered beyond the fateful northern limes of the imperial domains. Peoples who would fatedly reveal themselves, in the following centuries, as the last civil and military resource of an imperial pars occidentis now in full and unstoppable decline and, at the same time, also the protagonists of its final and tragic collapse. Peoples who, finally, in the early Middle Ages, would in fact inherit and make their own the very Latin tradition in Western Europe, as the Carolingian events and the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire teach us.

Geographical map from 1832 depicting German territory at the time of the Roman Empire

In the time of Tacitus, who lived between the second half of the 1st and the first two decades of the 2nd century A.D., therefore in a tumultuous and interesting historical period included between the reign of Nero and that of Hadrian, that wound represented by the fateful military defeat of the Teutoburg Forest, when, between September 9 and 11, 9 A.D., three entire legions and numerous auxiliary cohorts of the Roman army commanded by General Publius Quinctilius Varus were completely annihilated in an ambush set for them by the Germanic leader Arminius, was still wide open in the popular consciousness and collective memory of the Romans (and would never completely heal). A defeat, to say the least, scorching, an indelible disgrace in the myth of Rome's invincibility, even greater in its implications than the setbacks taken by the imperial legions from the unbeaten Parthians, which led Varus himself to take his own life on the battlefield and which, in fact, forever shattered the dreams of glory of a Roman conquest of those northern lands between the Rhine and the Baltic.