Tacitus

About this figure

Tacitus (c. AD 56 - c. 120) was a Roman senator and historian whose surviving works are among the most important sources for the history of the early Roman Empire. Little is known of his early life or exact birthplace, though he is thought to have come from a family of provincial equestrian rank, possibly from Gaul or northern Italy. He pursued a conventional senatorial career under the Flavian emperors, reaching the consulship as a suffect consul in AD 97 and later serving, around 112-113, as proconsul, or governor, of the Roman province of Asia. He married the daughter of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the Roman general and governor of Britain, and his first major work, the "Agricola," is a biographical account of his father-in-law's career and campaigns in Britain. He followed it with "Germania," an ethnographic survey of the tribes living beyond the Rhine, and the "Dialogus de Oratoribus," a treatise on the decline of Roman oratory since the fall of the Republic.

His reputation rests above all on two large historical works: the "Histories," covering the turbulent period from AD 69, the "Year of the Four Emperors," through the reign of Domitian, and the "Annals," which trace the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, from AD 14 to 68. Both works survive only incompletely, with substantial portions lost, but together they form the most detailed continuous narrative of imperial Rome from Augustus's successors to the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Tacitus wrote in a notably compressed, epigrammatic Latin style and brought to his history a consistently skeptical, often bitter view of imperial power and the corrosive effects of absolute rule on both rulers and the senatorial class to which he belonged. The date and circumstances of his death are unknown.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.