By inference Tacitus was criticizing his own Roman culture for getting away from its roots - which was the perennial function of such comparisons .
In the first century CE , all of these qualities had been attributed by Tacitus to the German barbarians in his Germania , in which he contrasted them repeatedly with the softened , Romanized , corrupted Gauls , by inference criticizing his own Roman culture for getting away from its roots-which was the perennial function of such comparisons .