Germanic PeoplesEssay Preview: Germanic PeoplesReport this essayIn two texts, The Complete Works of Tacitus and The Ancient History Sourcebook: Procopius of Caesarea, a noticeable difference can be seen in the descriptions of the Germanic peoples through the time period of 422 years.
In Tacitus, the Romans view the Germans as outsiders in a land far removed from civilized society. They live in a region that no man would want to travel to on foot or by horse, where the country side is wild and the seas are raging, where these Germanic people are forced to intermix with one another and stay within their culture (Church and Brodribb, p. 709). At this time when trading in Rome is at an all time high, its unthinkable that a society would not know the value of the gold or silver coin, and rather use the commodities one finds in their own region to barter with each other (Church and Brodribb, p. 711). They are a warring group of people who would rather pillage and raid for what they need, rather than do the work for themselves to get it. The children adopt feuds and friendships with whomever their father was aligned with or against (Church and Brodribb, p. 719), they are taught that going armed to every encounter is necessary. From the Roman standpoint, these would be viewed at this time in the game as a group of people not to be worried about, for they are on the outskirts of the civilization.
As can be seen later in Procopius though, the “barbarians” were pressed to move from their original inhabitance in quest for food and better quality of living. This sends the Germanic people, now called Vandals, into Roman territory, in the region of Hispania (Procopius, p. 119). At this point in history, the Romans are fighting to keep their empire together, and the Vandals are look for land to invade. Through the work of Procopius, a more power hungry group of people can be seen. They were still a warring nation, who rather than staying in one place and had their battles, moved from territory to territory at whim (Procopius, p. 125). The Germanic people of this time found great love in money and pillaging, and had figured out the value of it finally. This group of people were no longer on the outside of society, they were right in the middle, running the show.
The Romans of this period had many strong connections to the early English. This may be because the English wanted the Roman Army to invade and hold back an aggressive Anglo-Saxon, so that they would gain control of their country. As noted before, this was also a time when the Roman authorities were beginning to be influenced by Britain’s political influence. Procopius mentioned that if England had invaded the Roman frontier, Britain could “finally take control of the whole of England” (p. 128). After the “controversy” began, however, there was no political settlement (Procopius, pp. 77-78) or even a formal union. In the end, the English didn’t have any significant influence, just a small military force that made up of loyal citizens of the land (Procopius, p. 127).
Conceptualizing the Roman Empire
The first thing we would see in modern time is the growing and increasing number of European nations that we will eventually find in the world (and there are a number of other places in which this is happening too) (procopius, p. 129). That is, at the end of the 20th century, the majority of European nations were in one way or another culturally, and the majority were economically isolated. We still see so many European nations that they are almost almost indistinguishable from the European world today. Even the British look quite different as far as the European continent’s geographical representation was concerned.
The American colonies, for example, were relatively prosperous in many ways. They had great manufacturing centers and plentiful domestic resources. Their foreign currency, the dollar, was cheap at the time. In fact, in some ways, it was the most valuable currency there was in the entire world at the time. The country was also populated with high-quality workers (there was also a lot of work at Union Square).
The American colonists were mostly the early adopters of the European concept of free enterprise, being able to move about freely without having to deal with bureaucracy. While both the American and European colonists were working hard to develop their own ideas and policies, other European nations, like Italy and the Netherlands, did not. In the end, they settled on a different notion of the “free government”. They gave up their dependence on government to move freely (Procopius, p. 144), but at the same time there were few laws that specifically prevented them from doing so.
In order to maintain the European unity and to expand their control over territories, which they felt they lacked, the colonists had to have an independent plan of government. They were therefore able to form a new government that ruled more independently, even in the absence of such new people, and in doing so they gradually developed its democratic and social structure. In other words, these groups, based upon their own ideas and policies, eventually found their way into the Federal government. It took the early Americans much longer to see this idea of free enterprise as in place of the colonial model of government they had been living under during the 17th century (Procopius, p. 119). In fact, a few of these ideas, including the principle of individual liberty (which they believed to be at least partially justified for the colonists because they were based as an independent nation in a free society), were
An overall change can be seen from the Romans side because they are no longer the all powerful empire they had been in the writings of Tacitus, but rather an empire at the end of an era by the time Procopius was writing about the