Tacitus in front of the Austrian parliament
Credit: AP

For a man who delved into the lives of others, not all that much is known about the life of Cornelius Tacitus, historian of Rome under the empire. He was born in 56 or 57 a.d. and is thought to have died around 125 a.d. His family came from Narbonensis (the modern Provence), or possibly from Northern Italy, and so he was not Roman by birth. He was what the Romans called a novus homo, or new man. He married the daughter of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the Roman general, a man of the provincial nobility who conquered and brought under Roman suzerainty large swaths of Britain. Apart from birth, skillful oratory was one of the main avenues to advancement in Rome, and Tacitus’ brilliance as an orator, attested in a number of letters by his contemporary Pliny the Younger, was of the highest order.

 

Tacitus was made quaestor (one of the lower magistrates), aedile (concerned with the care of the city, its corn supply, water, and games), and praetor (young men put in charge of important administrative tasks). He may have led a Roman legion and governed a province, possibly in Germany, and was later suffect consul, and then proconsul, in Asia. He sat for many years in the Roman senate, an institution much reduced in importance by Augustus, subsequently shredded of its dignity by later emperors—"Men ready to be slaves," Tiberius called Roman senators of his time—and all but emasculated in Tacitus' day by the emperor Domitian. He was close to 45 before he turned to the writing of history.

 

In an infrequent insertion of himself into his historical work, Tacitus, in his Histories, wrote: "I must not deny that my public career was launched by Vespasian, promoted by Titus, and advanced by Domitian." The odd locution—"I must not deny"—is owing to the fact that his rise under these men, especially under the vicious Domitian, was not something of which a man could be unequivocally proud. The disclaimer was also meant to imply that this would in no way render him intellectually hostage to those who had promoted his career.

 

In the Agricola, his panegyrical monograph on the career of his father-in-law, Tacitus wrote:

 

There can be great men even under bad emperors, and that duty and discretion, if coupled with energy and a career of action, will bring a man to no less glorious summits than are obtained by perilous paths and ostentatious deaths that do not benefit the Commonwealth.

 

True, this, of Agricola; less true, probably, of his son-in-law. only the rule of the benevolent emperor Trajan allowed Tacitus the freedom to speak and write as he wished. "Modern times are indeed happy, as few others have been," Tacitus wrote of life under Trajan, "for we can think as we please, and speak as we think." As Pliny the Younger put it of the reign of Trajan, under which he had himself flourished: "Now at last men's merits bring them official recognition instead of the danger of the past."

 

Tacitus has had his critics, among them Voltaire and Napoleon; the latter saw nothing wrong with imperial rule in which the emperor answers to no one. Racine, though, called Tacitus "the finest painter of antiquity." Edward Gibbon, known to slay fellow historians in acidulous footnotes, spoke with unremitting praise of Tacitus, referring to "the discerning eye" and "masterly pencil" and calling him "the first of historians who applied the science of philosophy to the study of facts." Gibbon added that "the expressive conciseness of his descriptions has deserved to exercise the diligence of innumerable antiquarians, and to excite the genius and penetration of the philosophic historians of our own times." High marks, these, from the toughest of all historical graders

.

 

Great swaths of Tacitus' writing have gone missing. What parts of his two major works have been lost is a subject of scholarly speculation. Donald R. Dudley, author of The World of Tacitus, has asserted that Tacitus' original plan was to cover the years between the principate of Augustus (begun in 27 b.c.) to the last year of Domitian (96 a.d.). This would have accounted for both the Julio-Claudian and the Flavian dynasties.
 

As things stand, central subjects and events in the Tacitean oeuvre are lost. These include the pages devoted to the maniacal Emperor Gaius, or Caligula. The first six years of the reign of Claudius are absent. The fate of fascinating figures that Tacitus promises to take up later never return because of missing portions of his manuscripts. Of the destruction of Pompeii, all we get is this: "An earthquake also demolished the populous Campanian city town of Pompeii." Gone, too, is the suicide of Nero and the murder, earlier, of Tiberius' cruel henchman Sejanus. Apart from some excoriating paragraphs at the conclusion of the Agricola, the immitigably cruel Domitian escapes Tacitus' deft literary scalpel.

 

 

Tacitus' two main works are the Histories and the Annals. The first dealt chiefly with the Roman civil wars of 69 a.d., the Year of the Four Emperors, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian; the second is a yearly account, beginning in 14 a.d. (the year of the death of Augustus) and ending in 68 a.d., that takes up the leading Roman events, domestic and foreign, as they occurred. Tacitus remarks that he hoped to go on to recount the reigns of Nerva and Trajan, but whether he did or not, we shall never know. He had earlier published his Agricola and his Germania, the latter a geographical and ethnological study of the German tribes to the west of Rome; "Germany" at that time included what are today the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland,

 

the Baltic countries, and Scandinavia. In part a paean to the barbaric tribes of Germany as noble savages, the Germania was used by the Nazis to glorify the German warrior tradition. Finally, one of his first surviving compositions, the Dialogus, is a treatise, in dialogue form, on the rudiments

 

and principles of oratory and on its value for intellectual development and personal advancement.
 

Modern scholars have found in Tacitus inaccuracies, biases, deep stretches of ignorance—see, especially, his few pages on the Jews—but none of this ultimately has diminished the grandeur of what he wrote. The reason is that Tacitus was as fully a literary artist as he was a historian. His was a style that abandoned the periodic sentence, eschewed the flowery, commanded devastating metaphors, lanced pretensions with exquisite irony, selected the perfect details—a style that meted out the just literary punishment for the multiplicity of egregious crimes of which he was chief chronicler. Sir Ronald Syme, his best biographer, calls Tacitus "the crown and summit of imperial literature," and there is no reason to dispute the claim.

 

About his own motives as a historian, Tacitus was unambiguous. "It seems to me," he wrote in the Annals, "a historian's foremost duty is to ensure that merit is recorded, and to confront evil words and deeds with the fear of posterity's denunciations." Tacitus was, in other words, a moralist, with a pessimist's view of human nature and a talent for describing human nature outraged, which, under the rule of the Roman emperors, it frequently was.

 

 

 

 

 

"I shall write without indignation or partisanship," he claimed, "in my case the customary incentives to these are lacking." Tacitus felt no personal disappointments, bore no grudges, took no partisan positions. Yet he was a man of pitiless insight with a strong sense of honor and distaste for hypocrisy. Montaigne, who claimed to have read the Histories in a single sitting, held that "Tacitus was a great man, upright and courageous, not of a superstitious but of a philosophical and high-minded virtue." This, ipso facto, rendered him a relentless critic of Rome under the emperors.

 

Tacitus understood (as Syme has it) that, since Augustus, "the Roman constitution was a screen and a sham." He never took seriously the pretensions of Augustus, Tiberius, and other emperors that the Roman Republic was still intact. Under the principate, all power rested with one man, the emperor, and the lure of power and its subsequent attainment, with only rare exceptions, brought its own corruptions. In Tacitus, some emperors are better than others; but most soon leave the path of virtue, and all die unhappily.
 

Describing life under the Caesars restricted Tacitus chiefly to recording cowardly betrayals, petty rivalries of courtesans and freedmen and slaves, acts of vengeance, and horrific cruelty. Assassination, execution, enforced suicide, regicide, patricide, matricide, siblicide—in the Roman Empire, during the first century a.d., enormity was business as usual. Recounting the relentless executions and suicides demanded by Nero, Tacitus writes that "this slavish passivity, this torrent of wasted bloodshed far from active service, wearies, depresses, and paralyzes the mind."

 

Tacitus claimed to envy the historians of the Roman Republic. They "told of great wars, of the storming of cities, of kings vanquished and taken captive; and in home affairs, of the contentions of tribunes and consuls, of the land laws and corn laws, of the struggles of the people with the Senate; it was a wide and spacious theme in which they could move with ease." Montaigne disagreed, arguing that in tracing "the lives of the emperors of his time, so strange and extreme in every way, and the many notable actions that their cruelty in particular produced in their subjects, he had a stronger and more attractive matter to treat and narrate than if he had to tell of battles and universal commotions." Most readers would agree with Montaigne.

 

Not that Tacitus was entirely condemnatory. To quote Syme again, he knew that "an evil man may be a sagacious ruler; an autocrat is not omnipotent; a tyrant or a fool may be guided by wise counselors." Good men crop up in his pages, but they are few. Thrasea Paetus, the Stoic philosopher and senator condemned by Nero, was among those Tacitus seems genuinely to have admired; Germanicus, grandson-in-law of Augustus and the adoptive son of Tiberius, and Corbulo, Nero's successful general, are two others. More than once he apologizes for the grim events he is under obligation to record, but such was life in Roman society, "where to corrupt and to yield to corruption is called living in the fashion of the day."

 

The degradation of the senate and other political institutions since the time of the republic is a theme that plays through Tacitus. The cause of this degradation was the enlarged powers of the emperors. "From time immemorial, man has had an instinctive love of power," he wrote in Histories.

 

With the growth of our empire, this instinct has become a dominant and uncontrollable force. It was easy to maintain equality when Rome was weak. Worldwide conquest and the destruction of all rival communities or potentates opened the way to the secure enjoyment of wealth and an overriding appetite for it.
 

Grand themes interest Tacitus less than shoddy behavior. As a moralist, he is less concerned with economic development or the conditions of the populace than in the drama of human nature as played out by people in power, the men (and sometimes the women) who led Rome during the dark years covered by his histories. The personalities of princes, their wives, consorts, counselors, and enemies dominate his pages.

 

During the conga line of emperors in 69 a.d., one finds one's antipathies nicely divided by the comparative wretchedness of each of Rome's rulers. The line begins with Galba, old and feeble, rumored to be brutal and miserly, dominated by counselors whose crimes further tarnished his legacy. Otho ascended the throne after the assassination of the disappointing Galba, who "by common consent possessed the making of a ruler—had he never ruled." Vitellius next contested Otho for the emperorship. Each shamelessly sucked up to the army, which now, in effect, selected Rome's emperors and for whom money was more important than character.

 

"Here then," Tacitus writes of Otho and Vitellius, "were the two most despicable men in the whole world by reason of their unclean, idle and pleasure-loving lives, apparently appointed by fate for the task of destroying the empire." In any struggle between the two, he notes, "the only certainty was that the winner would turn out to be worse." Not that the populace was likely to notice: So debased had Roman society become that "few Romans had any capacity to judge or real desire for the public good."

 

Otho ruled for four months and then, when defeated in battle by Vitellius' troops, took his life by stabbing himself. Not long after, Vitellius was stabbed by one of his own soldiers. His final view was of his jeering troops and the sight of his statues being pulled down from the very spot where Galba was murdered. "Thereupon," writes Tacitus, "he fell lifeless beneath a rain of blows. And still the mob reviled him in death as viciously as they had flattered him while he lived."

 

Character sketches drawn with masterly concision supply some of the most brilliant passages in Tacitus. "In the delineation of character," Macaulay wrote,
 

Tacitus is unrivaled among historians, and has very few superiors among dramatists and novelists. By the delineation of character we do not mean the practice of drawing up epigrammatic catalogues of good and bad qualities, and appending them to the names of eminent men. No writer, indeed, has done this more skillfully than Tacitus; but this is not his peculiar glory. All the persons who occupy a large space in his works have an individuality of character which seems to pervade all their words and actions. We know them as if we lived with them.

 

"Of audacious character and untiring physique, secretive about himself and ever ready to incriminate others, a blend of arrogance and servility," Tacitus writes of Sejanus, to whom Tiberius entrusted the running of Rome while he was off in Caprae, "he concealed behind a carefully modest exterior an unbounded lust for power." Tacitus calls Sejanus a "small-town adulterer" and notes that the cause of this vicious man's rise to power "was rather heaven's anger against Rome—to which the triumph of Sejanus and his downfall, too, were catastrophic." As for heaven's anger, Tacitus' theodicy was encapsulated in his belief that "Rome's unparalleled suffering supplied ample proof that the gods are indifferent to our tranquility, but eager for our punishment."

 

Under the empire, women came to wield greater power than under the republic—not, usually, for the better. Livia, the two Agrippinas (older and younger), Messalina, Poppaea, the empowered Roman women are often subtler, but no less cruel, than the men, and equally shorn of virtue. Men used swords, the women's weapons of choice were seduction and poison. Poppaea, who replaced Octavia as Nero's wife and later plotted her murder, is described by Tacitus as having "every womanly asset except goodness. .  .  . To her, married or bachelor bedfellows were alike. She was indifferent to her reputation—insensible to men's love and unloving herself. Advantage dictated the bestowal of her favors." Poppaea died, pregnant, when, in a fit of anger, Nero kicked her in the stomach.

 

Women in Tacitus are also capable of acts of great courage. A woman named Epicharis, indirectly in on the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero, after a day of excruciating torture strangled herself lest under further torture she betray others. Tacitus writes:

 

What admirable courage in a freed slave, in a woman who, doomed to so awful an ordeal, screened by her fidelity people who were strangers, almost unknown to her, while freeborn men of a stronger sex, Roman knights and senators, waited not for tortures to betray in mutual emulation their nearest and dearest.

 

The violence, the sheer bloodiness, of Roman life Tacitus conveys almost by the way. If a company of Roman troops showed cowardice or other dereliction in battle, they risked decimation, in which 1 of every 10 among them was arbitrarily put to death. If a slave killed his master, under Roman law, all the slaves in the household were executed. Such was his rage against Sejanus that Tiberius ordered his friends and all his family executed, including his son and young daughter. Of the daughter, Tacitus reports: "Because capital punishment of a virgin was unprecedented, she was violated by the executioner with the noose beside her."

 

Tiberius is Tacitus' greatest portrait—a "classic," as Donald R. Dudley calls it, "of denigration." Tiberius is the major figure in the Annals, for he reigned for 22 years, longer than any emperor in the Julio-Claudian line except Augustus, who ruled for 40 years. Tacitus' skill at balancing the emperor's cruelty is nicely set off against his deceptive subtlety. Tiberius' paranoia is at the forefront of Tacitus' portrait. Yet he is given credit for his accomplishments: He kept Rome prosperous and at peace. In the portrait provided by Suetonius in his Lives of the Caesars, Tiberius is a relatively modest ruler who, once he deserts Rome for Caprae, becomes a monstrous pervert. "Some aspects of his criminal obscenity are almost too vile to discuss," Suetonius writes—and then, of course, discusses them: "Imagine training little boys, whom he called his 'minnows,' to chase him while he went swimming and get between his legs to lick and nibble him." Such, according to Suetonius, was "the filthy old man [Tiberius] had become."

 

Tacitus reports that it was in the year 23 a.d. Tiberius, then 65, "turned tyrannical—or gave tyrannical men power." on his perversions, Tacitus omits details, noting only that "his criminal lusts shamed him. Their uncontrollable activity was worthy of an oriental tyrant. Free-born children were his victims. He was fascinated by beauty, youthful innocence, and aristocratic birth. New names for types of perversion were invented." These perversions, as Tacitus the literary artist knew, were better imagined than described. The brief obituary of Tiberius in the Annals is as crushing:

 

While he was a private citizen or holding commands under Augustus, his life was blameless. .  .  . [H]e concealed his real self, cunningly affecting virtuous qualities. However, until his mother [Livia, wife of Augustus] died, there was good in Tiberius as well as evil. Again, as long as he favored (or feared) Sejanus, the cruelty of Tiberius was detested, but his perversions unrevealed. Then fear vanished, and with it shame. Thereafter he expressed his own character by unrestrained crime and infamy.

 

Attempts have been made by modern historians to rehabilitate the reputation of Tiberius, but Tacitus' portrait lives on, persuasive both as history and as great literature.

 

"A degenerate ruler," wrote the historian Sallust (86-35 b.c.), "is always supplanted by better men than himself." Sallust did not live long enough to see his maxim refuted under the principate. Of the emperors who followed Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius had much blood on their hands. Nero, who took up rule at the age of 17 at the death of his adoptive father Claudius, brought Roman decadence to new heights. He was the first Roman emperor to live on borrowed eloquence, for his former tutor, the Stoic philosopher Seneca, was his speechwriter. Nero would eventually order Seneca's suicide. No great crime, this, for an emperor who had earlier arranged for the deaths of his stepbrother Britannicus and his mother Agrippina.

 

Tacitus writes of Nero's reign: "Even in good surroundings people find it difficult to behave well. Here every form of immorality competed for attention, and no chastity, modesty, or vestige of decency could survive." For those who like to discover past history foreshadowing the present, Nero, toward the end of his reign, staged a wedding in which, Tacitus writes, "the emperor, in the presence of witnesses, put on the bridal veil. Dowry, marriage bed, marriage torches, all were there. Indeed everything was public which even in a natural union is veiled by night."

 

Everywhere Tacitus saw "striking proofs of the nature of fortune, whose treacherous surface combines the peak and the abyss." He held that "the more I think about history, ancient or modern, the more ironical all human affairs seem." The Roman notion of the afterlife, murky at best, held that men lived on only in the memory of their accomplishments or of their evil deeds. Recording those accomplishments and deeds in memorable language has also allowed Tacitus to live on, unsurpassed among Roman historians and, alongside Herodotus and Thucydides, one of the three great historians of antiquity.

 

Joseph Epstein is the author, most recently, of Masters of the Game: Essays and Stories on Sport.