Tacitus

• 1. Introduction

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  Tacitus, the Roman historian and senator who lived from roughly 56 to 120 AD, left behind a body of work so dense and so unsettling that readers have been arguing about his true allegiances for nearly two thousand years. He declared his purpose in the opening of the Annals: to write "without either anger or zeal, motives from which I am far removed." Yet every page of his surviving histories crackles with irony, bitterness, and a penetrating eye for the gap between what powerful men say and what they actually do. How did a man who rose to the highest rungs of Roman public life end up writing its most withering indictment? And what, exactly, survived of his work, and how?

• 2. A Life in the Cursus Honorum

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  Tacitus was born, probably in 56 or 57 AD, to an equestrian family whose province of origin remains genuinely unknown. Gallia Belgica, Gallia Narbonensis, and northern Italy have all been proposed. A telling exchange survives in a letter by his friend Pliny the Younger: asked by a stranger whether he was Italian or provincial, Tacitus gave an unclear answer, leading the man to ask if he was Tacitus or Pliny. Since Pliny was from Italy, the inference runs that Tacitus was from the provinces.

  His father may have been the Cornelius Tacitus who served as procurator of Belgica and Germania, a man mentioned by Pliny the Elder. His praenomen, his first name, is itself uncertain: the main surviving manuscript gives it as Publius, the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris give it as Gaius, and one scholar's suggestion of Sextus has been largely dismissed.

  As a young man he studied rhetoric in Rome, possibly under Quintilian, the great teacher of oratory who lived from around 35 to around 100 AD. In 77 or 78 he married Julia Agricola, daughter of the general Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who would later become the subject of one of his major works. He entered political life as a quaestor in 81 or 82 under Titus, then became praetor in 88, and joined the priestly college responsible for the Sibylline Books and the Secular Games. He gained considerable fame as a lawyer and orator, which makes his cognomen, Tacitus, meaning "silent," something of a standing irony.

• 3. Domitian's Shadow

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  From roughly 89 to 93, Tacitus served in the provinces, either commanding a legion or holding a civilian post. He returned to find Rome under the increasingly oppressive grip of Domitian, whose reign ran from 81 to 96. He and his property survived, but the period left a permanent mark.

  He wrote about those years in the Agricola with a candor that is striking even now. Describing the fate of senators under Domitian, he wrote: "It was not long before our hands dragged Helvidius to prison, before we gazed on the dying looks of Mauricus and Rusticus, before we were steeped in Senecio's innocent blood." The passage ends with a distinction between Nero, who at least turned his eyes away from the atrocities he ordered, and Domitian, for whom watching and being watched was itself a feature of the terror. Tacitus was present for all of it, and he knew it.

  His ascent continued despite the climate. In 97, during the reign of Nerva, he became suffect consul, the first of his family to hold that office. During his tenure he delivered the funeral oration for Lucius Verginius Rufus, a famous veteran soldier, reaching what Pliny identified as the height of his fame as a speaker. In 100, he and Pliny jointly prosecuted Marius Priscus, proconsul of Africa, on corruption charges. Priscus was found guilty and sent into exile. Pliny wrote a few days afterward that Tacitus had spoken "with all the majesty which characterizes his usual style of oratory."

• 4. What the Works Cover

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  Five works attributed to Tacitus survive, though all with gaps. The Agricola appeared around 98, followed by the Germania in the same year, then the Dialogus de oratoribus around 102, the Histories around 105, and finally the Annals, completed around 117.

  The Histories and the Annals were intended to form a single thirty-book edition covering the Roman Empire from the death of Augustus in 14 AD to the death of Domitian in 96. Tacitus wrote the Histories first, but the events of the Annals precede them. The Histories, of which only the first four books and twenty-six chapters of the fifth book survive, cover the year 69 and the first part of 70. The fifth book includes a short ethnographic survey of the ancient Jews, written as a prelude to the account of Titus's suppression of the First Jewish-Roman War. That section is considered an invaluable record of Roman attitudes toward Jews in that period.

  The Annals runs from the death of Augustus and covers, in its surviving portions, the reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, and the turbulent Year of the Four Emperors in 69 AD. Books 7 through 10 are entirely missing, along with parts of several others. It is not known whether Tacitus ever completed the work. He had planned to write histories of both Nerva and Trajan, and also to cover Augustus and the beginnings of the Empire, but no record of either survives. A passage in the Annals places 116 as the earliest possible date for his death; he may have lived until 125 or even 130, surviving both Pliny, who died around 113, and Trajan, who died in 117.

  The Annals holds a particular distinction outside Roman history: it is one of the earliest secular texts to mention Jesus of Nazareth, in the context of Nero's persecution of Christians.

• 5. The Monographs

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  The Germania, whose full Latin title is De Origine et situ Germanorum, is an ethnographic account of the tribes living outside the Roman Empire to the north. Tacitus placed it within a classical tradition stretching back to Herodotus and Julius Caesar. The first twenty-seven chapters describe the lands, laws, and customs of the Germanic peoples as a whole. Later chapters turn to specific tribes, moving outward from those closest to the Roman frontier to those living along the shores of the Baltic Sea, including the Fenni.

  The Agricola covers the life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who was responsible for much of the Roman conquest of Britain. It also includes a brief geography and ethnography of ancient Britain. Tacitus uses the Agricola to contrast the liberty of the native Britons with the tyranny of Rome, and the book contains one of antiquity's most quoted denunciations of imperial conquest. In a speech Tacitus attributes to the British leader Calgacus, the text reads: "To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

  The Dialogus de oratoribus treats the art of rhetoric in dialogue form, and its style is noticeably different from Tacitus's mature historical writing. Its closest model is Cicero. The Dialogus is dedicated to Fabius Iustus, who was consul in 102 AD, and because its style so differs from his other works, its authenticity was questioned for a long time, though most scholars today accept it as his early writing.

• 6. Style and Historical Method

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  Tacitus's Latin is among the most demanding in classical literature. Critics over the centuries have called it "harsh, unpleasant, and thorny" and also "grave, concise, and pithily eloquent." Both verdicts contain truth. Where a Ciceronian sentence might stretch across an entire paragraph, dense with matched phrases and careful sonority, a sentence by Tacitus tends to be short, compressed, almost epigrammatic. A passage in Annals 1.1 captures this: "The histories of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero, while they were in power, were falsified through terror and after their death were written under the irritation of a recent hatred."

  His account of how Romans nearly lost a major engagement in Annals 1.63 illustrates the method in practice: he writes with brevity rather than embellishment, leaving the reader to feel the weight of the event rather than spelling it out.

  His closest model in both language and method is Sallust. Like Sallust, he keeps largely to chronological order but seldom steps back to give the broad picture, trusting readers to assemble it for themselves. His openings to major sections are exceptions: the opening paragraphs of the Annals deploy condensed phrases that carry the reader quickly to the heart of the matter.

  His declared aim was to write without anger or zeal, but his method was never neutral in the way a modern journalist might claim. He was preoccupied, across all his works, with the balance of power between the Senate and the emperors, and with what he saw as the slow ruin of the senatorial class. In his view, senators had forfeited the tradition of free speech in order to survive and please their rulers. His portrait of Tiberius in the first six books of the Annals is notably complex. Most scholars find it predominantly positive in the earlier books, then increasingly negative after the intrigues of the praetorian prefect Sejanus took hold. Tacitus rarely resolves a figure into hero or villain; his hallmark is precisely the refusal to take a final side.

• 7. Survival and Legacy

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  The survival of Tacitus's writings is itself a story of narrow margins. The first half of the Annals came down to the modern world through a single manuscript kept at Corvey Abbey in Germany. The second half survived in a single manuscript from Monte Cassino in Italy. That both halves exist at all is, as scholars have noted, remarkable.

  The Augustan History, a late antique collection of imperial biographies, claims that the Emperor Marcus Claudius Tacitus, who reigned in 275-276, considered the historian an ancestor and arranged for the preservation and copying of his works. Scholars treat this claim with considerable skepticism, since much of the Augustan History is considered unreliable or outright invented. But whether or not the story is true, the works did survive, scarred by the gaps and losses that accumulated over many centuries.

  At Mylasa in Caria, in what is now Turkey, an inscription was found that records Tacitus's governorship of the Roman province of Asia between 112 and 113, the highest civilian post he held. That inscription is one of very few external documents that confirm anything about his life. Everything else comes from scattered hints in his own writing, from the letters of Pliny the Younger, and from deductions scholars have drawn from whom he married and whom he dedicated his books to. The historian who wrote so searchingly about the difficulty of recording truth left almost no reliable record of himself.