Tacitus: The Life and Legacy of the Ancient Rome’s Greatest Historian

Nearly 2,000 years after his death, Tacitus is known solely for his seminal history of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and Pliny the Younger's reference is one of the few moments in Tacitus's personal life for which modern historians have any information. It is certainly paradoxical that a master of the spoken and written word, who wrote the most penetrating contemporaneous history of the Roman emperors ever composed, a work soaked in the psychology of power and fear, wrote virtually nothing about himself. The facts of his own life have to be pieced together from stray remarks in his books, a handful of his friend's letters, one inscription from a provincial city, and a broken slab of stone. Tacitus judged the emperors with a cold and permanent authority, and he did it from inside the system he judged, having climbed its ladder rung by rung under the very emperors he later condemned, yet it's not entirely clear what his actual first name was.

The world gave him a suitable name and then mocked it. Tacitus, in Latin, means the silent one, or the man who holds his tongue. No name ever fit its bearer worse in life and better in the end. In the courts, he was anything but silent, and his works outlived his own voice despite nearly vanishing in the centuries after his death. They survived through a few monks' copies, which in itself is a small miracle given Roman antipathy to early Christians. '

Tacitus's story began with a boy born somewhere in the provinces near the middle of the 1st century A.D., into an empire that was reaching the pinnacle of its power while its subjects were forgetting what freedom felt like. century, into an empire that had just begun to forget what freedom felt like. He went on to marry into the household of a famous general, survived a tyrant, buried his friends, held important offices in Rome, and then went home and wrote what he had seen power do to men. In the process, he became one of the ancient world's most invaluable sources.