Tacitus

In the fifteenth book of the Annals, describing the fire that burned Rome in 64 and the rumour that the emperor had started it, Tacitus writes that Nero fastened the blame on a group the crowd called Christians, and that the originator of the name, Christus, had been executed under Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate. Then he describes what was done to them: convicted first for the arson and then, he says, for hatred of the human race, torn by dogs, crucified, burned as lamps in gardens, until pity turned toward them not because they were innocent but because they were being destroyed for one man cruelty.

That paragraph carries more scholarly traffic than almost any other sentence of ancient prose, because it is the earliest surviving notice by a Roman of standing that the founder of the movement was executed by a Roman official under a named emperor. It is examined accordingly. Pilate title is given as procurator, while the inscription found at Caesarea calls him prefect, which may be Tacitus using the term current in his own day. Whether he consulted official records or reported what was commonly said in Rome is argued. The oldest manuscript appears to have read Chrestianos before correction. None of the objections removes the datum, and the atlas cites the passage with the qualifications attached rather than as a plain confirmation.

The Germania is a short ethnographic work about peoples Tacitus never visited, written partly to hold a mirror up to Rome, and it is nonetheless the fullest surviving description of pre Christian Germanic religion. It reports peoples who do not enclose gods within walls or represent them in human likeness, but consecrate groves and woods and give the name of a god to the hidden thing they see only in reverence. It describes divination by cutting a branch into marked slips, scattering them on white cloth and drawing three, and by watching sacred white horses. And it gives the rite of Nerthus, mother earth, carried in a covered cart drawn by cows through the countryside, after which the cart is washed in a secret lake and the slaves who did the washing are drowned in it.

The manuscript came back into circulation in fifteenth century Italy and was received in Germany with enthusiasm, as evidence of an ancient and unmixed national ancestry. Nineteenth and twentieth century readers went considerably further, and a sentence about the Germanic peoples not being mingled with others was put to uses Tacitus could not have imagined and did not intend. The atlas holds the text as a valuable and one sided report by an outsider with a rhetorical purpose, and holds its reception history as a separate matter, because the two have been confused repeatedly and expensively.