Livius, Titus. The History of Rome, Vol. I

Titus Livius (59 BC – AD 17)  was a Roman historian who wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people.  “Chapters from the Foundation of the City,” covers the period from the earliest legends of Rome  through the reign of Augustus in Livy’s own time. He was on familiar terms with the Julio-Claudian family, advising Augustus’s grandnephew, the future emperor Claudius, as a young man not long before 14 BCE in a letter to take up the writing of history.

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How Tacitus' Germania became the bible of German nationalism

It is no wonder, then, that the sense of being “not-Rome,” for good and ill, did so much to shape modern German identity. But the great irony, as Christopher Krebs shows in A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania From the Roman Empire to the Third Reich, is that it was a Roman who did most to define and crystallize that proud German otherness. Cornelius Tacitus, best known for his grimly disillusioned history of Rome’s wicked emperors, was also the author of a short ethnographic treatise on the German tribes, known as the Germania. This book, written in 98 A.D., was almost lost during the Middle Ages. But when it was rediscovered and disseminated in the 15th century, just as the Renaissance and Reformation were gathering force, it became something like the bible of German nationalism.

Read more of this book review at Slate

Here are some well-culled excerpts from Germania from the Modern History Sourcebook.