Literary sources and archaeology in the construction of Germanic otherness in the Late Iron Age

Abstract

This article analyzes the construction of Germanic otherness in Roman literature, focusing on Julius Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum and Tacitus’ Germania. Based on these sources, it discusses how the Greco-Roman ethnographic tradition employed reductionist categories and moral metaphors to represent the peoples located beyond the Roman limes, especially the Germanic tribes. It is argued that these descriptions, despite their apparent neutrality, were intrinsically tied to political, military, and identity-related interests, legitimizing territorial expansion and the construction of a Roman identity. The study also incorporates a discussion of the ethnonyms employed by ancient sources – such as Keltoi, Galli, and Germani – understood as exogenous discursive categories that express the symbolic strategies of differentiation and cultural domination devised by Greeks and Romans. It further examines the rhetorical and moralizing character of these representations, in which notions such as “primitivism” and “tribalism” function as political and moral metaphors. The article seeks to confront these literary narratives with archaeological data from the Late Iron Age, the period immediately preceding the consolidation of Roman presence in the region, which reveal a reality far more diverse and complex than that suggested by textual sources. Archaeological research points to multifaceted social structures, regional settlement patterns, sophisticated exchange networks, and local identity expressions, challenging the stereotypes disseminated by Roman ethnography. By privileging the study of Germania in the Late Iron Age, the article demonstrates how archaeology allows for a critical reassessment of ancient representations and for the repositioning of the peoples of Western and Central-Western Europe as historical agents. In doing so, it proposes a reflection on the epistemological limits of classical literary sources and on the role of discourse in the historical construction of otherness in Antiquity.