P. Cornelius Tacitus
Rome's greatest historian and the scourge of tyrants
c. 56 AD – c. 120 AD
Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus was born around 56 AD, probably in southern Gaul. He rose through the senatorial cursus honorum under the Flavian dynasty, reaching the consulship in 97 AD. He married the daughter of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the governor who conquered much of Britain, and wrote his father-in-law's biography — the Agricola — as one of his first works.
His masterpiece is the Annals, covering the period from the death of Augustus to the death of Nero (14–68 AD). Only about half survives — books 1–6 (with gaps) and books 11–16 (with gaps) — but what survives is the most powerful prose narrative in Latin literature. Tacitus writes with a compressed, allusive, sardonic style unlike anything else in ancient historiography. His portraits of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero are devastating, drawn with an acid pen that finds corruption and hypocrisy in every gesture of imperial power.
The Histories, covering the civil wars of 69 AD and the Flavian dynasty, survives only in its first four and a half books. The Germania, a short ethnographic study of the Germanic peoples, has had an outsized influence on European history — it was used and misused by everyone from Renaissance humanists to Nazi ideologues.
Tacitus is the historian of unfreedom. His subject is what happens to a political class when liberty is extinguished — how senators learn to flatter, how informers flourish, how the best men are destroyed and the worst survive. His relevance to the modern world, unfortunately, requires no explanation.