The Tacitus Lie
"An observation of the Roman writer Tacitus has sometimes been used to claim the Germanic tribes condemned homosexuality. Tacitus stated that the Germans drowned in swamps those who were ignavos et imbelles et corpore infames, usually translated as "slothful and unwarlike like and infamous in body." The latter expression has been taken by some to mean passive homosexuals, perhaps those above a certain age. However, this seems to be a superficial reading which comports nicely with the anti-homosexual prejudice of its adherents, including the Nazis, who used the passage to justify their persecution of homosexuals. To apply the phrase, "those of infamous bodies" to homosexuals would not have made any sense to readers of the period in which Tacitus wrote, the Roman Empire of the first century A.D., where homosexuality was taken for granted, participated in by a vast majority of the population at some point in their lives, and where male homosexual prostitutes were so well established that their earnings were taxed and they had their own national holiday.
A description of homosexuals as corpore infames, in fact, resembles more the anti-homosexual preaching of ascetic Christian clerics of later periods. The phrase more likely was meant by Tacitus to refer to the deformed, or those who avoided military service by maiming themselves," which would be consistent with the first two categories of individuals named by Tacitus, the slothful and unwarlike, and who would be people who would have no place in the rigidly ordered scheme of things contemplated templated by the Germanic military ethic."
— James Neil, The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies
