Tacitus (Historian is known to us)

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

2026 Editor's Note: This page uses language about other peoples, religions, or nationalities that was commonplace when the book was published and is offensive by today's standards. The text has been left exactly as it was printed, rather than cut or softened, so that the historical record — including how ordinary such language once was — is preserved. (Ed: ET 2026-07-22) the historian, is known to us chiefly from autobiographical touches in his own writings and from allusions in Pliny's letters. His full name is matter of doubt - CORNELIUS TACITUS being his nomen and cognomen; but whether TACITUS his prænomen was PUBLIUS or GAIUS can only be conjectured. Born perhaps in Rome (less probably in Terni), under the Emperor Claudius between A. D. 52 and 54, it is inferred that his family was respectable from his education. his profession, and his marriage. He studied rhetoric in Rome under M. Aper, Julius Secundus, and and, likely enough, Quintilian; rose to eminence as a pleader at the Roman bar; and in 77 or 78 married the daughter of Agricola, the conqueror and governor of Britain. He filled a quætorship under Vespasian, who made him prætor and member of a priestly college. In 89 A. D. he left Rome, probably for Germany, where, doubtless as governor, he must have acquired his knowledge of the features, natural and social, of the country; and he did not return till 93, when he found his father-in-law had recently died. He was an eye-witness of Domitian's reign of terror. We have his own testimony as to the blessed change wrought by the accession of Nerva and Trajan. Under the former emperor he became consul suffectus, succeeding the great and good Virginius Rufus, on whom he delivered in the Senate a splendid oraison funèbre. In A. D. 99, conjointly with the younger Pliny, he prosecuted the political malefactor, Marius Priscus, which won him the thanks of the Senate. After this we lose sight of him, but may assume it as certain that he saw the close of Trajan's reign, if not the opening of Hadrian's. The high reputation he enjoyed in life is attested by the eulogistic mention of him repeatedly made in Pliny's letters, and in the 3d century the Emperor Tacitus, proud to claim kinship with him, built in his honor a tomb which was still standing in the later decades of the 16th century, when it was destroyed by Pope Pius V. The same emperor also issued an edict by which the works of his namesake were to be copied out 10 times yearly for presentation to as_many public libraries. In spite of this multiplication of copies we possess but a moiety of what he wrote. His earliest work, the "Dialogues de Oratoribus," treats, in conversational form, of the decline of eloquence following on the change for the worse in the education of the Roman youth under the empire. It has reached us entire. Next comes the "Agricola," the literary character of which it is difficult to define. Quite a library has accumulated on the question whether it is a "laudatio funegris," or an "apologia" written to shield the memory of Agricola, or a historical panegyric framed for political ends. But it will always be read for its elevation of style, its dramatic force, its invective and its pathos. For English readers its interest is unique. The third work, the "Germania," or "De situ, moribus, et populis Germaniæ," is a monograph of the greatest value on the ethnography of Germany. Fourth in order are the "Historiæ," or the history of the empire from the accession of Galba in A. D. 69 to the assassination of Domitian in 97. of the 12 books originally composing it only the first 4 and a fragment of the 5th are extant. Tacitus is at his strongest in this narrative. His material was drawn from contemporary experience; and though the imperial archives were closed to him, he had at command the personal information open to a man of his posi position, to say nothing of correspondence (as of Pliny). ed for the return of an aristo- He yearned cratic oligarchy-the Rome of the Scipios and the Fabii. He is, on this account, a partisan, but is able to justify the most trenchant contrasts between the greatness of Republican and the deterioration Rome, which latter he con- Rome of Imperial trasts disadvantageously with the freedom and simplicity of even barbarian Germany. To his peculiar satirical gift which often makes him a "Juvenal in prose" he gives free rein from time to time. He had no appreciation of the higher qualities of the Jews, and his attitude to the growth of Christianity is that of a prejudiced, if cultured Roman. The qualities conspicuous in the "Historiæ" are maintained in his last work, the so-called "Annales," a history of the Julian line from Tiberius to Nero (A. D. 14 to 68). Of their 16 books only 8 have come down to us entire, 4 are fragmentary, and the others lost. In these, as in all his writings, his avowed aim was a noble one, to perpetuate virtue, and to stigmatize baseness in word or deed. Among the more obvious defects which lower his value as a historian are his weakness in geography and his carelessness as to strategic details.