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Which Roman frontier is the focus of Tacitus’s Germania?
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Tacitus
Tacitus, statue at the Parliament building in Vienna.
The Roman frontier that serves as the primary context for Tacitus’s Germania is the Rhine River.
Following a failed attempt to extend the Roman frontier eastward to the Elbe River in 9 CE, the border was withdrawn to the Rhine. By the time Tacitus published his work in 98 CE, this river functioned as the established boundary between the Roman Empire and the free Germanic peoples living beyond it. While the text also discusses the Danube River as a frontier, the Rhine remains the central focus of the geopolitical and ethnographic landscape described in his account.1