European intellectuals built racial origin myths on Tacitus’s Germania contrast

Evidence

The break in historical and cultural continuity that took place between the disintegration of Greco-Roman civilization and the rise of Germanic civilization had at one time immense significance to western European intelligentsias. Following Germania, written by the first-century Roman historian Tacitus, which contrasted the decadence of Rome to the martial virility of the Germanic tribes, they constructed myths of origin that distinguished superior cultures and races from inferior ones. At the latest, from the sixteenth century and well into the twentieth century, English, German, and French scholars generally distinguished “their” own Germanic cultural, racial, and philological roots from earlier (e.g., Celtic, Greco-Roman) and putatively later (the Normans) peoples. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1468

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how ideologies of racial hierarchy were constructed in Western thought.