Albion's Seedlings

Tacitus Then and Now

Mitch Townsend has posted the quote from Tacitus relevant to several of the recent posts here. Interestingly enough, there is a fairly straight-line descendant of the open-air asemblies Tacitus describes still practiced on the Continent, namely in the smaller cantons of Germanophone Switzerland. Some still vote directly in open-air assemblies, where at least until recetnly the voters brought their arms to the meetings.

This is quite relevant to the converation that is going on here because it backs up the point that many Anglosphere practices and attitudes are survivals or further evolutions of customs that used to prevail all over Northwestern Europe. They also survived in Switzerland because it was poor operational terrain for the big Continental armies, and because the Swiss always fought like hell. But mostly they were wiped out by militarization and bureaucracy on the Continent and only survived and flourished offshore in England and her daughter lands.

The validation of Tacitus by recent historians is part of a larger phenomenon, the rediscovery that much of when is handed down to us actually does have a basis in fact. It is so easy to take for granted something as elementary as writing, but if you step back and think about it for a moment, it is quite something that we can receive an eyewitness account of something that happened two millenia ago.