Cartographie de L’humain dans la Germanie de Tacite

Abstract

The Deleuzian concept of “cartography” should help us demonstrate how, in Tacitus’ Germania, the space settled by German populations is not so much described as built up and invested with meaning: far from drawing a vision of humanity through such notions as the multiplicity, differences and absence of limits, Tacitus conceives a circular and concentric geography in which the human characteristics spread from the centre to the periphery, from Rome to the columns of Hercules. The map is mental and the criteria which define humanitas derive from the Roman ideology of state and war and not from any geographic or ethnographic science.