Tacitus 101
Understanding the importance of this Roman Historian
Tacitus is one of the greatest writers of the Roman period, his mark on the world cannot be denied and I have a bit of a soft spot for him because he wrote my A level set text. Let's have a dive into his life and times!
Heads Up: Next week I’ll be doing an analysis of a passage of Tacitus. Subscribe so you don’t miss it!
Publius Cornelius Tacitus
Publius Cornelius Tacitus was many things:
An orator.
He was a fantastic public speaker, which is quite funny because his name “Tacitus” means something like “the quiet one”. However, he was an amazing public speaker.
A great politician.
He was very active in the public life of Rome
A historian.
This is probably why most people have heard of him and this is mainly what we will be focusing on today.
Life & Times
He was born around AD 56 and he died in about 120. We're not entirely certain of the exact years, but they are the agreed upon dates from historians.
He came from an equestrian family, so he wasn't one of the poorer classes in Rome but he also wasn't one of the super wealthy. He wasn't a Patrician or from a senatorial family. His family were in the upper classes, but they were not the super top level. However, he did have a good education. He did very well for himself.
He married a woman called Julia Agricola, and she was important because her father, Julius Agricola, will become very important in Tacitus' life and his writings.
Domitian: Time of Crisis
When Tacitus was a young man, Domitian was the emperor of Rome. Domitian was not a particularly calm and peace-loving emperor. In fact, he had a sort of reign of terror and it caused a time of crisis.
Domitian’s brutal reign consisted of him murdering quite a lot of the Senate and their supporters. Tacitus was quite lucky as a member of the Roman high class to survive his rule with his life. It was not a calm time, and Domitian did not keep things very peaceful in Rome.
Part of the reason that Tacitus is famous is because of his writings about other emperors. Because Tacitus survived the rule of Domitian, he was able to look back on other periods of history with a different view to someone who had been writing in Augustus's very calm era, for example. He has a very positive view of some of the earlier emperors, and a very negative view of others. And this makes his histories very interesting.
Tacitus’ Monographs
He wrote three major monographs (that have survived) between AD 98 and 102.
de vita Iulii Agricola
Do you remember I said that he married a girl called Julia Agricola? Well, this text is about her dad: “the life of Julius Agricola”.
The reason Agricola was important is he was one of the generals who was pacifying Britain, and that's why in modern times, especially in Britain, Tacitus is seen as a really important source because he gives us a lot of information about the peoples of Britain.
de origine et situ Germanorum.
This is about the life of the Germanic tribes, “the beginnings and the situation of the German people”.
Both of these fall into ethnographic history: they tell us about the ethnicities of the people who lived there. This was a really big thing at this time in Roman writing. They were very interested in where the people they were conquering had originally come from. So Julius Caesar was very interested in this.
A lot of people have said, because Tacitus has a very sympathetic view of the people being conquered it is possible that he or his family were originally from Germany or somewhere on the edges of the Roman Empire. There's no evidence of that, but it is just very interesting that he does have a very sympathetic view of these people whose livelihoods and places are being overtaken by the Romans.
dialogus de oratoribus.
“A dialogue about oratory”, a didactic (teaching) essay about how best to give public speeches.
These all have shorter names:
The Agricola
The Germania
The Dialogue or the Dialogus.
Histories
The next surviving work we have of Tacitus is his Histories, and this is published in around AD 105. It is a history of the year AD 69 - 70.
Now, it wasn't supposed to be such a small amount. In fact, it wasn't this short at all when it was published, but much has been lost. It was supposed to start in AD 69, just after the death of Nero, but the original text went all the way through to the assassination of Domitian, which was in 96 AD. So we have lost about 26 years of this history.
The bit we do have is very short, but it's very detailed and very rich evidence for the year of the four Emperors, which starts when Nero was assassinated in 69. It talks about the four emperors who came in very quick succession in the one year following Nero's death. It's a really rich piece of history and historians particularly find it very useful for what happened in that time period, which can be quite confusing because the events happened so rapidly.
Once he'd published this, he then wrote The Annals.
Annals
The Annals were published in around 117 AD. This covers the period ab excessu divi Augusti (“from the Death of the Divine Augustus”), which was in the year AD 14. So it goes as almost a prequel to the Histories. It goes from AD 14 all the way up to AD 68. Again, parts of it are lost, but far more of the Annals remains than the Histories. It basically goes from Tiberius' reign all the way through to Nero.
The whole text is about 16 books long. We know there were at least 16, but we are missing the last half of the 16th, or the last part of it, at least. We don't know if there was a 17th, but most scholars think there were 16 books of the Annals. In comparison, the Histories should have been about 14.
What we do have is still partial. Books six and seven are missing completely. Half of book five is missing. Bits of book 11 are missing. So unfortunately we have lost a great deal, but it's an absolute wonder that so much of it has survived for effectively 1900 years! So we can't be too choosy, can we?
Future plans
But this wasn't the end of Tacitus’ plans. He had a grand future prepared for himself. He wanted to continue writing, to take his Histories further and go past the end of that and talk about Nerva and Trajan who came after Domitian. He also wanted to go back earlier than his Annals and talk about Augustus, and even further back to the founding of Rome.
Unfortunately it didn't get that far and he died before (as far as we know) he could complete any more work. So he had a grand plan to effectively write the entirety of Roman history from the founding of Rome in 753, all the way through to present day when he was alive. Alas, he died just a couple of years after the Annals were published.
Style Icon
The reason Tacitus is so popular is that he has a fantastic style of writing. First of all, he writes these ethnographic accounts where he gives very sympathetic views of the people who are being conquered by the Romans. This wasn’t necessarily the case in Roman writers. They didn’t often give the situation of the peoples who were being conquered. They just celebrated the fact they had been conquered and that the Roman Empire has expanded.
Tacitus is a little bit different, in that he looks deeply into the histories of the people who are being conquered. So for the Britains, he talks about the different tribes. Again, for the Germans, he talks about all the places where they came from and all the skills that they had, and how the Romans effectively wiped that out or took advantage of those things in order to expand their empire. I'm not saying that he doesn't agree with expansion, but he has a very humanitarian view of the people who are being conquered.
He also has a narrative style to his history. He doesn't just give events one after the other. Sometimes he will zoom in on a very specific event and he puts them in a chronological order.
That makes it very interesting, very easy to read. So, for example, in my next post, I'm going to be doing an analysis of a part of Tacitus writing about the Great Fire of Rome. Make sure you’re subscribed to get that straight to your inbox!
His description of these accounts is so moving, but it's such a short snapshot of that time. He gives a very quick overview and then he moves on. He has very rapid narration, but he weaves in some very deep and detailed single scenes, so you really feel like you have been there. It's a very interesting way of writing history.
And he also is very ideological about the emperors he writes about. He wants them to be good people. (I mean, who wouldn't? They're in charge!) But he has a lot to say about the way other people have written about emperors. Take a look at what he says:
Tiberii Gaique et Claudii ac Neronis res florentibus ipsis ob metum falsae, postquam occiderant recentibus odiis compositae sunt.
“The histories of Tiberius, Gaius, and Claudius as well as Nero, while they themselves were flourishing, were falsified on account of fear, and after they had died, [the histories] were composed under the recent hatred.”
He says, when Tiberius, Gaius (who is Caligula), Claudius, and Nero were alive, the people who were writing the histories falsified the accounts because of fear. So they made it too positive. And after the emperors died, the opinion went completely the other way, and because they were so close to the events, the historians became very negative about these emperors.
And Tacitus carries on to say,
... mox Tiberii principatum et cetera, sine ira et studio, quorum causas procul habeo.
... then [I plan to relate] the rule of Tiberius and the others, without anger or zeal, since of those events I am at a distance.
This is his whole point - because I have, you know, a hundred years between myself and Tiberius, I can have a more detached viewpoint, and I'm just going to relate the history without any feelings attached.
Now some people would maybe debate how impartial Tacitus stays in his accounts. However, that's his plan. That's what he says he wants to do. We will have a look next week, and you can see what you think about whether he remains impartial or not.
Next week I’ll be analysing Annals 15.38. It's a fantastic section about the Great Fire of Rome and really shows Tacitus’ style. So make sure that you're subscribed so you don't miss that next week!
If you want to be able to read Tacitus and Suetonius and all the other great authors, why not go and watch my free workshop where you can learn Latin in just one hour! It's completely free, an hour long video to give you the basics of Latin grammar and vocabulary so you can start your Latin journey to be able to read Tacitus. You will also get access to all my free guides.
Thanks so much for joining me today, and I'll see you next time at bambasbat!