Tacitus Writes the Histories and Annals Under Trajan
Publius Cornelius Tacitus was born around 56 CE. He rose through the standard senatorial cursus honorum and reached the consulship in 97 CE under Nerva, the first emperor after Domitian's assassination. He had been present throughout Domitian's reign of terror, had served in its administration, had watched colleagues condemned and executed, had remained silent when silence was the price of survival. This experience — he explicitly calls it fifteen years of shame — charged his mature work with an anger kept deliberately cold. The Agricola (98 CE), his biography of his father-in-law Gnaeus Julius Agricola who had conquered much of Britain, is also a meditation on how a good man survives under bad government. The Germania (also 98 CE) describes the Germanic tribes with the thinly veiled implication that these uncorrupted barbarians possess the virtues Rome has lost. The Histories covered the years 69-96 CE. What we can read is extraordinary: the civil war of 69, the burning of the Capitol, the murder of Galba, the brief reign of Otho — all rendered in prose of ferocious compression, where every sentence contains an implicit indictment. The Annals covered 14-68 CE — Tiberius, Caligula (lost), Claudius, and Nero. Tacitus built his portrait of Tiberius as perhaps the most sustained psychological study of political corruption in ancient literature. Tacitus never states his verdict in propria persona; he selects, juxtaposes, and frames so that the reader draws the conclusion without being told. Gibbon called him 'the first of historians who applied the science of philosophy to the study of facts.'
- Year: 98 CE
- Category: Cultural
