I am searching through all of Tacitus’s writings in search of a reference for a line about wolf-like dogs around. I have seen this quoted in several very credible texts, but I would like to see the actual source.
D0es anyone know of where Tacitus mentions these dogs that lived around the Rhine?
did you try google books?
Well, if *you* can’t find it…
A quick skim of Tacticus’ ‘Germany’ couldn’t find any reference to dogs or wolves.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/tac/g01000.htm
Google books turns up nothing as well.
http://tinyurl.com/2flbnxf
Do you think it’s something somebody just made up and it ended up getting repeated all over the place? Major Mackenzie and his stupid carvings in caves in Balkh province (which don’t exist) have been following the Afghan hound forever, even after being refuted by Margaret Niblock in ‘the Afghan Hound, a Definitive Study.’ They even mention the caves on Dogs 101. (Their researcher should be fired.)
I actually found a source from 1924 that mentions that the “Alsatian wolf dog” was derived from the wolf dogs of the Rhine that Tacitus wrote about.
But it is the early source I can find on google in English.
Alsatian wolf dog is a racist term– against my ethnicity. It’s a bit like calling the Kelb tal-Fenek of Malta a Pharaoh hound and then claiming they come from Ancient Egypt.
That’s very insulting to the Maltese people.
I’m afraid I’ve sent Scotty on this goose chase by researching a post on the GSD. There are numerous GSD sources that quote Tacitus, but I have yet to find the actual Latin.
Tacitus speaks briefly of cattle and sheep but only as payments for punishment, no mention of a shepherd’s dog. And the passages I think are being referenced as “wolflike dog” are nothing of the sort.
They actually say that the Germans dress themselves in the skins of wild animals.
I believe this is the complete text in Latin. No words for dog nor wolf that I can find. Feras/ferarum is best translated as wild beast.
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/tacitus/tac.ger.shtml
German shepherds are derived from the wolf-like dogs of the greater German herding dog landrac– from Thuringia (which used to be in East Germany) and Württemberg.
Neither of those places is near Alsace-Lorraine (the German speaking part of France). Thuringia is nowhere near the Rhine and Württemberg is in the south of the country. I thought the dogs Tacitus wrote about were in the mid- to lower part of the Rhineland.
I think I’ve uncovered another B.S. origin story that some fancier in the age before the internet thought “who will ever bother to check this?”
I will, because they all said Queen Victoria loved collies.
The reference could yet exist, but without documentation so that we can view the original Latin, this is another lesson in how no one does their own fact checking and just plagiarize their “facts.”
Tacitus wrote about other things relating to the Germanic peoples besides his ethnography in Germania.
It could be somewhere else– maybe in the Annals or the Histories. That’s where I’m looking next.
The other thing to consider is sometimes the original documents are lost, so students and scholars who remember the original documents would often attribute phrases and ideas to a certain person.
Kind of like how there’s no writings of Socrates in existence, but Plato and Aristotle wrote about some of Socrates’ ideas and works. Yet in history books, it’s usually phrased as “Socrates wrote…” rather than “Plato carried on Socrates’s idea…”
The most plagiarized phrase is “the wolf-like dog of the country around the Rhine.” And the idiots always manage to put the quotes around it.
I can’t find that quote anywhere else. And some of the sites even suggest that Von Stephanitz is the one who quotes Tacitus. I’m sure this would be in German, and I’m not sure his writings exist on the interenet as almost all of Tacitus’ writings do.
“country”
Sounds like something was lost in translation.
LOL
Here is one of the idiots:
http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/the-wolfish-dogs-identity/
I’ve mentioned it many times.
I have also searched for it– many times.
It still could be there, but it is not in Germania.
Wolf dog of the Rhine?
[...] Given how integral Tactius’ work was to the intellectual foundations of the new German state, it’s not a far leap for advocates of this new breed to seek similar ancient roots for their new concoction. While almost every modern GSD website fails to mention the Nazi’s role in the history of the breed, almost all of them evoke Tacitus mentioning the “the wolf-like dog of the country around the Rhine.” [...]