A brilliant successor to the essayist Seneca the Younger, the statesman and chronicler Tacitus mirrored the compression and consciences of the Greek historian Thucydides. A member of the senatorial order at Rome under the early Roman Empire, he lived under a succession of emperors stretching from Nero through to the anti-senatorial Domitian.
Believed to have born in southern Italy or in southern Gaul, he was the son of the governor of Belgic Gaul. In year 77 he married the daughter of Agricola, the future governor of Britain.
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| Publius Cornelius Tacitus |
During consulship, Tacitus had survived the harsh time of Domitian, a period that saw the death of his father-in-law and a regime whose cultivated despotism left a major mark on his writings.
Sometime later he served as proconsular governor in Asia. He died a few years later perhaps early in the reign of Hadrian (117-138).
Tacitus is known primarily for four historical works:
Agricola is a biography of his father-in-law
Dialogus treats the decline of Roman oratory
Histories and Annals
Germania (98) consists of an ethnographical treatise on the people and customs of that region
The Histories and Annals, Tacitus’s major works, survive toady only in partial form -they covered the history of the early principate from the death of the first Emperor Augustus to the end of the reign of Domitian (14-96). The Histories and Annals is a fundamental literary source for the political history of the early empire.
Tacitus is regarded as perhaps the greatest historian and one of the greatest prose stylists to write in Latin.
Publius Cornelius Tacitus (56-117 CE)
