The Histories

"Yes, after that dynasty has been extinguished, he gives us the history of it. He’s a fascinating counterpoint to Livy, because in lots of ways, Livy was a booster of Rome and of Augustus. There is nothing patriotic about Tacitus. He is a senator, and he believes that the emperors have infringed on senatorial privilege, which, of course, they have. They slaughtered senators by the dozen. So he’s very critical. You could say that if Polybius is trying to explain the historical inevitability of the Romans replacing the Greeks, and if Livy was giving a home field cheer for Augustus, once we get to Tacitus—who’s coming along much later than Livy—there’s more criticism of the emperors, including Augustus and Livia, his wife, whom Tacitus accuses of murdering Augustus. We don’t have any documentary sources for his claim: it was probably Tacitus’s misogyny that made him believe that a woman who was close to power was this insidious figure. He claims that Livia poisoned Augustus so Tiberius, her son, could become the next emperor. Tacitus is hypercritical of the Roman Empire. His most famous quote is from a Caledonian chieftain called Calgacus , who was captured and taken to Rome. I could never find out if Tacitus actually met him, but talking about the plunder and destruction, he puts in Calgacus’s mouth the words, “They make desolation and call it peace.” Throughout his writing, Tacitus struggles with the fact that the Pax Romana has brought peace to the world—there is prosperity and political stability—but against that, he sees that the ancient liberties of the Romans have been taken away from them. So Tacitus is quite a trenchant critic of his society, writing at the absolute height of the Roman Empire under Trajan and Hadrian. He’s a powerful person: he’s a senator, and his father-in-law is Agricola, the great general. From the podium, he is casting aspersions against everything that the Romans represent. That’s one of the things that makes him so interesting: for the first time, we get this critical interrogation of what Rome is doing. Tacitus seemed to worship his father-in-law and wrote a book about him. Agricola was the general who conquered Britain. If they sailed on Ireland, he was the man who was going to do it. Tacitus celebrates Agricola for that. And yet, he is very critical of imperialism. In some ways, what he says has a very modern ring to it, because you could say he’s anti-colonialist and anti the subjugation of other people. Tacitus is interested in ethnography as well. He’s interested in the British people and their customs. Likewise, he’s interested in the Germans, the barbarians, and is much more sympathetic to them than most Romans. He’s an interesting character from that point of view. But I don’t know enough about his personal life and his senatorial record to be able to say where that dissent and discontent with ancient Rome came from. He gets to Domitian and ends it. He’s not making a criticism of Trajan, for example. That’s a good question: what did he think of Trajan? Trajan is often seen as the best of the emperors, and he was certainly a much better emperor than the Julio-Claudians or the Flavians (and Domitian in particular). So Tacitus might have been a little more sympathetic to Trajan."