Tacitus

Roman historian

• Born: c. 56
• Birthplace: Unknown
• Died: c. 120
• Place of death: Probably Rome (now in Italy)

Combining a successful career in the Roman civil service with a lifelong interest in his nation’s past, Tacitus devoted his mature years to exploring the many facets of history. His portraits of the famous and the infamous, especially during the early years of the Roman Empire, are among the most vivid and influential descriptions in all Roman literature.

Early Life

Cornelius Tacitus (TAS-ih-tuhs), considered by many scholars to be Rome’s greatest historian, is an enigma. Neither the exact date of his birth nor that of his death is known. His praenomen, that name that distinguished each Roman from his relatives, is a mystery, as is his birthplace. Tacitus never mentioned his parents or any siblings in any of his writings. He imparts to his readers much information about his contemporaries and a number of historical personages, but he never reveals a single solid fact about himself.

Almost everything that is known about Tacitus has been gleaned from the writings of his close friend Pliny the Younger, an author in his own right and the nephew of the great scientist and historian Pliny the Elder. The friendship seems to have been of long duration, a fact that has led authorities to speculate that Tacitus was actually the son of one Cornelius Tacitus, who served as a financial agent of the government in Gallia Belgica and was a friend of Pliny the Elder. The public career of Tacitus is a matter of record, and by carefully noting the dates of his terms of office in each position it is possible to place his birth early in the reign of Nero, probably the year 56.

Clearly, Tacitus received an excellent education with special emphasis on rhetoric, because he was recognized in later life as a fine public speaker and an outstanding lawyer. He may have studied with the great Quintilian, who taught Pliny the Younger, but Tacitus never mentions his teachers or his fellow students. The elegance of his prose and his reputation denote one of good birth who received all the advantages belonging to his class, but the actual details must remain speculative. From natural modesty, Tacitus may have thought it unnecessary to repeat facts well known to his readers, or he may have done so out of caution. Most of his youth was spent during troubled times when the slightest notoriety might mean death.

In his late teens Tacitus probably had the opportunity to hold his first public offices. Usually, young men were assigned minor posts in one of the four minor magistracies. During these brief terms of service it was possible to judge their preparation as well as their potential for success in government service. Having tested his mettle as a civilian, a young man then entered the military for a brief time to experience the rigor and discipline of the Roman army. This tour of duty was usually performed under a relative or close friend of the family. If a career in the military were not his choice, a young Roman of good birth reentered civilian life by selecting a wife and offering himself for a place in the civil service. Because a candidate with a wife was given priority, marriage at an early age was not unusual. In 77 Tacitus, his military service completed, was betrothed to the daughter of the noted general Gnaeus Julius Agricola.

Life’s Work

Tacitus took the first step in the cursus honorem, or the Roman civil service, in 82, when he was chosen a quaestor. He was one of twenty young men who for a year had the opportunity to prove their potential for a political career by fulfilling the duties of the lowest regular position in the civil service. If the quaestor’s command of the law earned for him the commendation of the consul under whom he served, he might be offered another year under a proconsul in one of the Imperial provinces.

For Tacitus, the next rung in the ladder of preferment was probably the position of aedile. These magistrates might perform any number of duties in Rome. Some of them saw to the care of the city and supervised the repair of public buildings. Others were responsible for regulating traffic within the capital. The organization of public games or the supervision of the morals of the populace might prove more difficult than the checking of weights and measures, but all these duties could fall to an aedile during his term of office, and each was a test of his ability. Tacitus obviously succeeded, because he was elected a praetor in 88.

By the time of the Roman Empire, the office of praetor, originally a military title, had essentially become a legal position. The experience gleaned during his term as an aedile would prepare the praetor for dealing with offenses from oppression and forgery to murder and treason. During his term as praetor, Tacitus was elected to the priesthood of one of the sacerdotal colleges, quite an honor for one so young. This election may have indicated not only his aristocratic birth but also the patronage of the influential and the powerful, including the emperor. The following year Tacitus left for a tour of duty somewhere in the provinces.

He probably spent the next three years serving in the army, and he may have commanded a legion. During his last year abroad, Tacitus may have served as a proconsul in one of the lesser provinces of the Empire. In 93, the year that he returned to Rome, his father-in-law, Agricola, died. Requesting permission to write a biography of Agricola, Tacitus was rebuffed by Domitian, who had already begun the judicial murder of anyone who he believed threatened his position or his life. While many of his friends and colleagues were slaughtered, Tacitus buried himself in his research and the subsequent writing of the forbidden biography, which he finished in 96, the year in which Domitian was assassinated.

De vita Julii Agricolae (c. 98; The Life of Agricola, 1591) was more than a simple biography. While recounting the various stages in the career of Agricola and imparting to the reader varied details about the Britons, their history, and their country, Tacitus began to examine a theme on which he would comment for the next twenty years: the conflict between liberty and the power of the state. He also had the opportunity to serve the state in the aftermath of the reign of terror of Domitian. In 97 he was elected consul during the first year of the reign of Nerva, a distinguished and respected senator.

In 99 Tacitus’s public career reached its zenith when he and Pliny the Younger successfully prosecuted the case of Marius Priscus, who had used his government position to abuse the provincials of Africa. Both men received a special vote of thanks from the senate for their preparation of the case for the state. Tacitus also received much attention for his second book, De origine et situ Germanorum (c. 98, also known as Germania; The Description of Germanie, 1598). Based on his observation and research while serving with the army, it was an immediate success. While Tacitus saw the Germans as a potential threat to the security of the Empire, he was impressed with their love of freedom and the simplicity of their lives when contrasted to the servility and decadence of his fellow Romans. With few flaws, Germania is an impressive and persuasive work of scholarship.

Having embarked on the study of the past, Tacitus devoted his next work, Dialogus de oratoribus (c. 98-102; A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, 1754), to the apparent decay of the art of oratory. Quintilian had addressed the problem a generation earlier, and while he may have had a strong influence on Tacitus’s thoughts on the subject, it was to Cicero whom Tacitus turned for stylistic inspiration. The culprit appeared to be the decline of education, but as Tacitus developed his theme using the time-honored device of the dialogue, it became apparent that the age of the Antonines was not suited to great oratory because it lacked the tension and turmoil that inspires great public speakers. The consolation for the decline of this discipline was the universal peace that had replaced the chaos of the reign of Domitian.

In 115, after serving as proconsul of the province of Asia, Tacitus finished his narration of the events between 69, when Servius Sulpicius Galba assumed the imperium, and the death of Domitian in 96. Historiae (c. 109; Histories, 1731) was followed the next year by Ab excessu divi Augusti (c. 116, also known as Annales; Annals, 1598), which concentrated on the period from the beginning of the reign of Tiberius in 14 through the death of Nero in 68. As examples of historical scholarship, these works are flawed, punctuated with misinformation that might have been easily corrected had Tacitus troubled to do so. Tacitus was a student of human nature, not of politics, a moralist who sometimes reshaped history to suit his narrative. Having chosen the most turbulent period in Rome’s history for his subject, Tacitus filled both works with his own prejudices, but his delineation of his characters is at times brilliant and redeems the Histories and the Annals from being mere gossip. Unfortunately, neither work exists intact. Tacitus died several years after completing the Annals, around 120, probably in Rome.

Significance

Raised in the tradition of sacrifice and service to Rome that had characterized the Republic, Tacitus dedicated himself to the best interests of the state, and he distinguished himself as a man of great promise from the beginning. At the age of forty, he witnessed the beginning of a three-year-long nightmare in which many of his friends and colleagues were murdered on the orders of Domitian because they espoused and publicly proclaimed many of those same principles that Tacitus held dear. For the rest of his life, Tacitus was haunted by the events of those years, and their memory runs like a dark thread through everything he wrote.

Either consciously or unconsciously, Tacitus sought to ease his fears, his guilt, and his confusion through the study and writing of history. The past held the key to Rome’s gradual decay as well as the source of her possible salvation, and to reveal both was a duty Tacitus could not avoid. In his first book, The Life of Agricola, Tacitus not only celebrated the deeds of his father-in-law but also explored for the first time the conflict between liberty and the power of the state. The theme of freedom is also a strong element in his second book, Germania. Much of what is known about the early Britons and Germans is found in these two works, and while there may be some doubt about the accuracy of some facts, it would be hard to question the admiration of Tacitus for those who prized liberty above life.

His third work, A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, seems a pleasant interlude between his earlier works and his histories of contemporary Rome, the Histories and the Annals. Tacitus was able to unleash a flood of criticism of the Imperial system and question the character of a number of his fellow countrymen, because the Antonine emperors under whom he served, Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian, tolerated free inquiry. Thus, his vivid portraits have colored the opinions of countless generations of writers and historians. They are boldly drawn to serve not only as records of past deeds but also as warnings to the future leaders of the Roman state. Tacitus accepted the Imperial system as inevitable, but he believed that it could be revitalized by a return to the noble virtues that had made the Republic unique. It is as a moralist more than as a historian that Tacitus has had his most positive and enduring effect.

In the years following his death, the scholars and writers who succeeded Tacitus as the guardians of the traditions of the Roman state created a vogue for everything pre-Imperial, and the Republic, despite its violent history, was idealized as a golden age. The emperor Marcus Claudius Tacitus, who reigned briefly at the end of the third century, sought to claim descent from the great historian. As an act of filial piety, he ordered statues of his supposed ancestor to be erected in every public library and ten copies of his works to be produced every year. The latter edict certainly was a fitting memorial to Rome’s great historian.

Bibliography

Chilver, G. E. F. A Historical Commentary on Tacitus’s Histories I and II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Containing a wealth of information, this work will prove very helpful to students of the period, because the author takes great care to trace each source and reference used by Tacitus.

Luce, T. J., and A. J. Woodman. Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. A collection of essays from a symposium on Tacitus, addressing both his major and his minor works as they may originally have been composed and as they survive.

Mellor, Ronald. Tacitus. New York: Routledge, 1993. Argues for reclaiming an ironic genius whose cynicism is suited to an analysis of the brutality of the current age.

O’Gorman, Ellen. Irony and Misreading in the Annals of Tacitus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Literary analysis and close reading of the language and style of the Annals, in the political context of first and second century Rome. Includes a full translation of the Latin.

Sinclair, Patrick. Tacitus the Sententious Historian: A Sociology of Rhetoric in Annales. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Examines Greek and Latin rhetorical and historical culture, centering on Tacitus’s use of aphorisms and maxims (sententiae).

Syme, Ronald. Tacitus. 2 vols. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1963. This superb biography is a remarkable work of scholarship that examines the life and work of Tacitus against the background of Rome in the first century. Its bibliography is an excellent resource for the student.

Tacitus, Cornelius. Agricola. Translated by Anthony R. Birley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. With the original Latin as well as line-by-line English translations. Enriched with excellent notes and scholarly essays.

Tacitus, Cornelius. The Annals of Imperial Rome. Translated by Michael Grant. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Contained in these volumes are books 4 through 6 and books 11 through 14 of the Annals. Also included is an index to the other volumes in the Loeb Classical Library containing parts of the Histories and the Annals. With excellent maps.

Tacitus, Cornelius. Histories. Translated by W. H. Fyfe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. This bilingual text contains an excellent introductory essay to the life and works of Tacitus.

Woodman, A. J. Tacitus Reviewed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Collects the great Tacitus scholar’s thoughts on the historian over twenty-five years, with emphasis on the Annals.