CORNELIVS TACITVS

Tacitus was born about A.D. 56 and probably died some time after A.D. 117. We don't know a lot about him. Though he wrote quite a bit, he was very "taciturn" when it came to writing about himself.

His birthplace may have been somewhere in the vicinity of Massilia (modern Marseilles, in southern France). It was an old Greek city-colony, a centre of sophisticated Greek culture and philosophy in a Roman empire that thought such things effeminate and unworthy.

Tacitus was an aristocrat through and through, the son of a member of the privileged Roman "knight" class. He eventually became a Roman senator. This position brought him great wealth and power. Despite his social advantages and very high rank, he complained bitterly about the tyrany of the elitist, autocratic political system and the lack of political and personal freedom in the dictatorship of the Empire.

Like many people in such situations, however, he led a very successful public career. This could have been the result of several factors. Perhaps he could deal with the obvious hypocrisy of his position. Perhaps he was personally ambitious or cynical. He may have had a sense of duty to his state, his people or to the idealism of Rome and its "destiny". It may have been a combination of all these.

He was consul in A.D. 97. He became the provincial governor of the Roman province of Asia (the western part of modern Turkey) in A.D. 112-113. This was considered the height of anysenatorial career because of the staggering wealth of that ancientprovince.

He was a friend of many prominent Romans, some of whom are remembered even today. One of his close friends was Pliny the Younger, a student of his, and some of their correspondence is preserved through Pliny's letters.

Tacitus was a practitioner of the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism. For him, duty, honour and personal conduct were of the highest importance. This wasn't just an abstract philosophy, but a way of life. He was a consummate "Career-Man" who served his state partly because of his sense of obligation and duty. A comparable model might have been the stereotypical 19th-century British Empire senior bureaucrat, an authoritarian, somewhat arrogant manager of major state affairs who served his State and nation rather than any single individual. Of course, we know little about Tacitus besides what he wrote, and he wrote nothing about himself, so it's impossible to really know.

He was born and bred to the upper-crust, however, and was entirely Patrician in his outlook. He probably shared the opinions of many of his contemporaries, who held that status, class and personal character were based on social standing and the "proper" background, including having "respectable" families and parents. In this way, too, his world was probably very similar to the mainstream of opinion in the 19th-century British Empire. It's not therefore impossible to imagine what living, for him, in the Early Roman Empire was like.

He was an ardent admirer of the long-dead Roman Republic. He hated the Empire, but even so, he remained a devoted Roman patriot. He was an admirer of the old Senatorial system and what he thought were the more stoic, dignified and respectable ancient Roman virtues.

He was aristocratic and no advocate of democracy in Rome, to be sure. But as time went on, he seemed to realize that the dictatorial monarchy that the Roman Empire had become, with its gutted Senate, was ultimately incompatible with the ancient and much more noble ideals of the Republic. In his time, the upper class had degenerated into a self-serving collection of Imperial toadies and social cowards.

He came to loathe the system of government under which he served. He had a distaste for violence and civil strife, and he had records and personal experiences with civil war . So he had some limited respect for the order that a ruler could impose on people, but he was under no illusions: it was an order of brute force, manipulation and fear. This can be read in his impassioned, almost voyeuristic descriptions of the various civil wars that engulfed the early empire.

Tacitus seemed to suffer from an internal struggle between his meagre respect for public order and his growing hatred of the evils of authoritarianism and power-politics. The conflict of social order, tradition, self-interest and security versus liberty, freedom and justice is still a vital factor in modern politics today.

Tacitus' feelings about his world come out in his eloquent writing. In his books, he raged about the corrupt decadence of the Empire and lamented the loss of the Republic and its freedom. His later writing, especially, seethes with this passionate hatred of absolute rule and the power of the autocracy, though noble-born Tacitus never did quite lose his contempt for the common person.

He wrote several books in a literate but down-to-earth style of Latin. Some of them came to us through pure chance. One was found encased in wood in an old, ruined and abandoned church in Eastern Europe in the middle ages, and it remains the only known copy of the book that survived. Other works were copied and distributed throughout the Roman Empire, preserved by luck and the diligent work of scribes and copiers down through the ages.

One of his books was a fantastic biography of Agrippa, his father-in-law, who Tacitus greatly admired. Agrippa was the general who finally managed to occupy Britain and firmly establish Roman control over the cold, northern island. Britain was one of the of the last holdouts of the independent Celts. After Britain, only Hibernia (Ireland) and Pictish territory (Scotland) remained free.

This biography is vital for our understanding of the history Britain during the Celtic period, before the coming of the Romans and later the Germanic peoples (in the A.D. 450's), who were the linguistic ancestors of the modern English. But it's also a great piece of writing, and worth reading forits insight into human character and the attitudes of historians.

Tacitus wrote one of the first ever comprehensive ethnographies. It detailed the peoples, customs and tribes of what today is Germany and Eastern Europe. It's a fascinating collection of facts, myths and half-truths about these "barbarians" outside the Roman Empire. He portrayed the Germanic hunting and cattle-herding tribes as noble, militaristic, fiercely martial and freedom-loving, and characterized the Roman Empireof his time as corrupt and degenerate. He felt that the only thing preventing the Germanic peoples from over-running the Roman Empire was their almost total lack of political sophistication, unity and military organization. His thoughts and attitudes turned out to be somewhat prophetic; the Germans would, as he contemplated, finally burst into the moribund Empire and destroy it, some 350 years later, after the Roman Empire had largely decayed and the Germanic peoples had learned clever tricks from their Romanized neighbours.

If you read the Germania very carefully it even mentions, in a casual list of minor tribes, an obscure people known as the Anglii. They lived in the marshes and forests on the harsh Baltic coast of southern Denmark. 400 years after Tacitus, this small bunch of Germanic wanderers would go on to invade Britain, absorb or exterminate the Romanized Celts, rename the country Angla-land (England), and become pretty famous themselves.

His Annals of Imperial Rome are swashbuckling historical accounts of the Roman Empire's birth up to the death of Nero, that wacky (but misunderstood) emperor. Tacitus had the advantage of some perspective; he wrote some time after the events in question, and had access to state Roman records as well as the memories of some of the people involved.

His "Histories" are a gripping set of stories about the tumultuous years A.D. 68-69. In this time, Nero committed suicide, there were 4 separate emperors, some pretty ugly civil wars, riots and assassinations. It was a while before things settled down again, under the iron fist of the keen Emperor Vespasian. It's a classic adventure story filled with human tragedy, triumph, corrupt politics, betrayals, great plans and schemes, irony and vice. A good read.