While Tacitus’s classification of the Germans as a “free” people sometimes uses the same criteria as anarchists might—general participation in decision-making, the lack of coercive authorities—we have to be aware that the Roman historian entertains a patrician’s notion of freedom. Consider the following passage:
Bordering on the Suiones [the predecessors of the Swedes] we have the nations of the Sitones. They resemble them in all respects except one—woman is the ruling sex. That is the measure of their decline, I will not say below freedom, but even below decent slavery.37
In comparison to the Roman patriarchy, we know that Germanic societies were relatively egalitarian in their gender relations. In a clearly androcentric way (for we cannot doubt which gender the Roman talked to, whose activities he granted legitimacy, and on whom he focused his attention), Tacitus gives some indication of this: “they [the German men] believe that there resides in women an element of holiness and a gift of prophecy; and so they do not scorn to ask their advice, or lightly disregard their replies.” Tacitus moderates what he sees as a contemptible respect for women by amending that the German men do not shower any women with “servile flattery or any pretence of turning women into goddesses” as some contemporaneous Roman cults did the wives of emperors. However, according to his own account they did not shower anyone with servile flattery, and they did worship goddesses and consider some earthly women divine.38
Although Tacitus talks of “noble families” and “slaves,” there is little evident class differentiation. “In every home the children go naked and dirty, and develop that strength of limb and tall stature which excite our admiration […] The young master is not distinguished by the slave by any pampering in his upbringing. They live together among the same flocks and on the same earthen floor.”39
The class of people among the Germanic tribes whom Tacitus calls “slaves,” referring back to a well defined class in Roman society, are probably better understood as dependents, in that they had their own homes, land, and families, they were rarely flogged or otherwise punished, they were not given specific duties but instead were expected to pay a sort of rent or tithe, contributing to the household economy of their master or patron, who in turn had the responsibility to protect them. In large part, the determining factor separating slaves from free men was the obligation to go to war. By honoring warriors, Germanic tribes were able to create a soft hierarchy, largely non-coercive, that provided additional sustenance for a specialized warrior class. However, these warriors were not entirely freed from the obligation to toil, as were Roman patricians, and they could not subject their dependents to conditions of misery or hyper-exploitation. We could even imagine this history from a different perspective, in which the so-called slaves preferred to spend more time farming in order to liberate themselves from dangerous military duties. Tacitus recorded a value hierarchy among the warriors that honored bravery, but perhaps the toilers, whose voices were never recorded, reproduced another set of values that honored sharing and fertility. We have no way to know if this is true; the hypothesis simply illustrates how statist ethnographers can distort their subjects and record reflections of their own cultural prejudices.
Tacitus claims that the Germans were lacking in gold and silver, though discoveries that postdate his account would demonstrate this was due to the local disinterest in these substances, and not to their absence beneath the soil. He also notes that “the employment of capital in order to increase it by usury is unknown in Germany.” In a number of passages that contrast with modern stereotypes (and that contradict the anthropomorphism of climate, in which geographical conditions determine social character, literally hot weather leading to metaphorically hot blood), the Roman chastises the Germans for their laziness, their lack of discipline, their preference for gambling and feasting over labor and husbandry, and—most hilariously from a present-day standpoint—their utter unpunctuality.40
To put it bluntly, how did this lazy, hospitable, sharing, egalitarian, decentralized, uncapitalistic smattering of tribes turn into one of the principal producers of states across an entire subcontinent?
The answer I propose lies in the one characteristic of these tribes that interested Tacitus the most. His curiosity, after all, was motivated by state interests, as tends to be the case with ethnographers. This interesting characteristic was their militarism. Though the armies of Germanic tribes were voluntary, mobilized by collective notions of honor rather than the coercive powers of a military apparatus, these tribes proved a major threat to Roman power. A large part of Roman affairs in the north of their empire centered on allying with particular tribes and playing them against one another to prevent their turning against Rome.
Tacitus talks almost exclusively about the warrior brotherhoods of the tribes, though this was only one segment of their society. Agriculture and nearly all productive activity among the tribes, except for hunting, was carried out by women, dependents, old men, and the non-warriors whom Tacitus terms the “weaklings of the family.”41 Though he places a nearly exclusive emphasis on the warriors, we cannot assume this to be a value generalized in the tribal society itself. The warriors thought it beneath them to dirty their hands in the fields or win wealth by the sweat of their brows rather than by bloodshed, but we do not know what those who did work in the fields thought about such labor or about warfare. We do know, however, that women played an important role in mobilizing the tribe for warfare, urging the warriors on through a mixture of encouragement and shaming. We can also assume that as these tribes fractured and spread into the vacuum left by the collapsing Roman Empire, when bands of warriors colonized populations previously subject to the empire, they generalized their value hierarchy that placed warfare—and by extension affairs of state and ownership—at the top, and labor—what in their societies of origin had been the work of women and war captives—on the bottom. In effect, what was potentially an egalitarian, complementary division of labor between the masculine and the feminine became a hierarchical and patriarchal division of labor when the masculine half of Germanic society was able to spread and conquer other populations. As warfare became the more important activity in the reproduction of Germanic societies, the warrior half was able to impose its own value system, regardless of whether it had truly been the dominant half previously.
(As a useful contrast, we can consider an inverse situation; centuries later, when it was trade and artisanal production rather than warfare that became more important for the spread of the dominant social model, it was the descendants of the servants and dependents—commoners—who began to take power away from the descendants of the warriors—the nobility—though it was also necessary that changes take place in the techniques of warfare favoring the military units of urban citizens over the mounted nobility before this democratization process could reach fruition.)
Roman colonization and contact had a great impact on the Germanic tribes. Highly developed Roman patriarchy encouraged and empowered nascent forms of Germanic patriarchy (ever present as a possibility in a gender-divided society, even an egalitarian one). This in turn is related to a motor of state formation that I will refer to as militarization. The contest of arms made inevitable by Roman expansion found a certain resonance in the warlike German society. For the Germanic tribes, already accustomed to competitive warfare, battle with the Romans was not only a question of winning their freedom, but also of winning. Some warlike societies are fiercely libertarian, but those that exhibit democratic characteristics—such as the Germanic tribes with their warriors’ assemblies presided over by war leaders who introduced proposals for common voting—can operate as a centralized polity and are much more likely to be induced into the competitive aspect of war. David Graeber makes a similar argument with respect to the ancient Greeks, asserting that democratic organization was typical to state-forming warrior societies whereas consensus-based organization was typical to stateless societies.42
It is noteworthy that the Germanic armies that not only defended against but also invaded Rome tended not to be pristine