by Gwyn Morgan
The Jewish War takes seven books to cover events from the outbreak of the revolt in 66 through the fall of Masada in 73/74. Like Tacitus’ Histories, it opens with a statement insisting that this was a truly formidable war, and that it had been described incompetently by all previous historians (BJ 1.1–2). The first two books cover the period before Vespasian’s arrival, but they include an enormous speech against rebellion by Herod Agrippa II (BJ 2.345–401), and a laudatory appreciation of Roman military discipline (BJ 2.577–82; cf. also 3.71–75 and 107). Vespasian appears at the start of Book 3 and is treated forthwith to a fulsome eulogy (BJ 3.3–8). Then the work settles down to a more straightforward narrative. The references to contemporary events in Rome are sparse, brief, and usually incidental, but as Vespasian, Titus, and Josephus himself are pictured in the best possible light, there has been a widespread tendency to dismiss Josephus as a Flavian hack, and to invent a chimaera entitled “Flavian propaganda.”
There are two difficulties in this approach. First, there is very little evidence that Vespasian or his sons pressured the writers active during their reigns to follow a “party line,” even if a modicum of caution was advisable in Domitian’s later years. If Josephus was a toady and a lickspittle, therefore, it was largely by choice. This as much as his vulnerability to charges of being a renegade, leveled at him by both Romans and Jews, would have opened him up to the attacks to which the Life and the Against Apion ultimately respond. Second, “Flavian propaganda” is invoked far too often as a cure-all. It is one thing to puncture the grandiose claims made by Vespasian and his followers before and after their victory. It is quite another to use “Flavian propaganda” as a way of rescuing Vitellius from the criticisms modern historians would rather not accept. Since Vitellius was hardly up to the job of being emperor, and his reign lasted less than a year, it is unlikely that systematic denigration was ever thought necessary, of him, or of his two predecessors for that matter. Neither Vespasian nor his adherents stood to gain from negative advertising about the past, and Vespasian even allowed senators to criticize him to his face.
The best and most straightforward assessments of Josephus in English are probably those by Tessa Rajak, Josephus, the Historian and His Society (Philadelphia 1984) and S. J. D. Cohen, Josephus in Galilee and Rome. His Vita and Development as a Historian (Leiden 1979).
Plutarch
Born only a few years later than Josephus, probably around 40, Plutarch came from a family prominent in Chaeronea, a small town in Boeotia, a heavily agricultural region in eastern Greece. His parents gave him the best education money could buy, including a thorough training in rhetoric. Not that he chose to advertise his expertise in this area, once he had decided to devote himself to philosophy, a decision he took in his early twenties—and yet to pair a Greek life with a Roman one is itself a rhetorical device, no matter what larger purpose it serves. In any event, Plutarch seems to have traveled fairly widely through the east during his formative years, spending time in Athens, Smyrna (Izmir), and Alexandria in Egypt. He visited Rome more than once, and since he had the wealth needed for equestrian status, he secured Roman citizenship through the efforts of Lucius Mestrius Florus. He also toured the battlefield of Bedriacum with Florus at some point before he wrote his Lives of Galba and Otho (Otho 14.2). And since Florus was one of the senators taken north by Otho early in 69 (under constraint, as he hastened to assure his protégé), it has been conjectured that Florus also provided Plutarch with reminiscences for his account. Even if this is correct, the material need not have been valuable: Florus was a politician and a pedant. In later life, Plutarch seldom moved far from his home town, and much effort has been devoted to proving that this decision to become “the sage of Chaeronea,” or a big fish in a little pool, did not cut him off from contact with prominent Greeks and Romans or with the lastest trends in Hellenistic culture. But what we know is that he held various local magistracies and priesthoods, and when Trajan awarded him “consular ornaments,” it was in recognition of his services to literature (Quintilian had received the same honor from Domitian).
Plutarch was a prolific writer. He specialized in moral-cum-philosophical essays (known collectively as the Moralia), which he churned out in enormous numbers from early life until his death as he was nearing his eightieth year. To moderns, however, he is better known for his paired or parallel Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans, one of the works Shakespeare plundered for his Roman plays. In these, written and published on and off between Nerva’s accession in 96 and his own death around 120, he paired a Greek “hero,” from mythological through Hellenistic times, with a Roman figure, drawn half the time from the city’s first six centuries, and half the time from the last century of the republic. In one of the Lives he wrote early in the sequence he allows that he began reading Latin fluently only late in life (Demosthenes 2.2), and this has been used sometimes as a lever with which to undermine his reliability as a historical source. In fact, it is much less significant than his unrelenting preoccupation with ethics and philosophy. A conservative through and through, he had a low opinion of females in general but took as much delight in virtuous women as Tacitus derived from describing their “naughty” sisters. A firm defender of the “haves” against the “have-nots,” he was a champion not only of law and order over individual liberty (anarchy in his estimation), but also of Rome’s empire. As he put it, his fellow countrymen would do well to remember that the legions’ boots were just above their heads.
The Lives of Galba and Otho are the only surviving items from a series that covered the eight emperors from Augustus through Vitellius. We know that Plutarch wrote them before he embarked on his Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans, but we cannot be certain how much earlier they were composed (as a rule they are set in the first half of the nineties, during Domitian’s reign), nor whether we should engage in linear thinking and regard them as some kind of dry run for the Parallel Lives. Though little study has been devoted to these imperial Lives, it is enough here to stress two respects in which they differ significantly from the Parallel Lives (both points are discussed in more detail in Appendix 2). First, they are less unified, since Plutarch provides us with slices of history rather than with proper biographies. Second, he does not follow the principle he enunciates in one of the earliest of the Parallel Lives (Cimon 2.4), that a biographer—like a portrait painter—should neither suppress any blemishes in his subject nor draw attention to them. He is far too favorable to Galba, and far too harsh with Otho.
The best book on Plutarch the man is C. P. Jones, Plutarch and Rome (Oxford 1971). Scholarship on Plutarch the biographer has appeared mostly in scholarly articles, but there are two books the reader can consult with profit: T. A. Dorey (ed.), Latin Biography (Routledge 1967) and, much more up-to-date, Barbara Scardigli (ed.), Essays on Plutarch’s Lives (Oxford 1995).
Tacitus
Tacitus brings up the details of his own life and career, as a rule, only to make some other point. It is generally agreed that his full name was Publius Cornelius Tacitus, that he was born around 59 (where is disputed), and that his father was the knight Cornelius Tacitus, mentioned by the Elder Pliny as the procurator of Belgica (Natural History 7.76). To back up his claims to impartiality, Tacitus declares in the preface to the Histories that he became a senator under Vespasian, was promoted by Titus, and was advanced much further by Domitian. In the Annals (11.11.1) he adds that when Domitian celebrated the Secular Games in 88, he participated as praetor and as a member of the quindecimviri sacris faciundis (“the board of fifteen priests for carrying out sacred rites”). It was probably to Domitian too that he owed his designation as consul for 97. But the main source for his term of office is a letter by the Younger Pliny, recording that as consul Tacitus—the foremost orator of his day—delivered the funeral speech over Verginius Rufus (Epistles 2.1.6). Finally, an inscription shows that around 112/113 Tacitus became proconsular governor of the province Asia, one of the two highest posts a senator could achieve. The date of h
is death is uncertain. Some scholars maintain that he predeceased Trajan (117), others that he lived into the reign of Hadrian, dying between 120 and 123. For the rest, he tells us in the Agricola (9.6) that “while still a young man,” i.e., around 76, he married the daughter of Gnaeus Julius Agricola. This was a highly advantageous match since his new father-in-law had just reached the consulship. We do not know whether the couple had children, but the emperor Claudius Tacitus had no justification for claiming to be his descendant two centuries later.
To this outline a few details have been added recently by the reattribution to Tacitus of a fragmentary funerary inscription found long ago in Rome. This has sparked fresh conjectures to fill gaps in his career. In particular, as Theodor Mommsen once denounced Tacitus as “the most unmilitary of historians,” much effort has been expended on finding him official posts where he could have gained military experience. So the inscription has been restored to suggest that he was a military tribune in a legion, possibly in Britain under Agricola, between 77 and 79. Similarly, his absence from Rome between 89/90 and 93 (Agr. 45.5) has long been taken to suggest that he was a legionary legate in some province. But no matter how much military experience Tacitus gained, the conventions of Latin literature would hardly have allowed him to write differently than he does. The best way to defend him against Mommsen, in fact, is to adopt a comment by M. L. W. Laistner, that the verdict is grossly unfair to Tacitus’ predecessor Livy.
Before Tacitus embarked on his major historical works he composed three monographs. First came the Agricola, to all appearances a eulogistic biography of his father-in-law and a harsh denunciation of Domitian, the emperor who had refused to appreciate his merits. Published in 98, when Domitian was safely dead, this was devoted largely to Agricola’s years as governor of Britain and, in good measure, conqueror of Scotland. On this there followed in that same year the Germania. It looks like an ethnography, but since it lacks a preface we cannot be sure of its purpose. The work falls into two halves. In the first Tacitus gives a general description of the origins of the many tribes beyond the Rhine and of the customs they had in common (sometimes contrasted favorably, sometimes unfavorably, with Roman behavior). The second half is a catalogue of the tribes, from those nearest to and best known to the Romans to those furthest away. Some hold that Tacitus was motivated by contemporary pressures, for example, the hope that the new emperor, Trajan, would undertake a war of conquest in Germany. But as ethnography was fashionable at the time (Seneca had written “On India”), this is not compelling. His final minor work was the Dialogus or Dialogue on Oratory, the dramatic date of which is set in 75, the sixth year of Vespasian’s reign (Dial. 17.3). This and the very different, almost Ciceronian style in which it is written, used to be taken as evidence that the Dialogus was Tacitus’ first foray into literature. In fact, it was composed around 102, and as its subject is the question whether there is a place for political oratory under the principate, a question that the work does not actually answer, it has been seen as his farewell to oratory before embarking on the writing of history on a grand scale.
Tacitus certainly turned next to a major undertaking, the Histories, an account of the period from 1 January 69 through the death of the last Flavian emperor, Domitian, on 18 September 96. This was composed either in 12 or in 14 books. (The manuscripts tell us that his two major works, the Histories and the Annals, added up to 30 books, but scholars still argue whether we should allocate 12 or 14 to the Histories and 18 or 16 to the Annals.) Only the first four and somewhere between a quarter and a third of the fifth book of the Histories survive. Together these carry the story from the start of Galba’s second consulship to a point late in the year 70. So they cover the last two weeks of Galba’s life, the entire reigns of Otho and Vitellius, and the opening months of Vespasian’s ten-year stint as emperor. There is also a detailed account of much of the war against the rebellious German tribes sparked by Julius Civilis (this is the main theme of Book 4), and the surviving fragment of Book 5 is largely occupied with the Jewish Revolt and the siege of Jerusalem. How long it took Tacitus to compose the Histories is unknown, but the first three books had been published by 106. In that year Pliny the Younger sent Tacitus a letter that described the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 and the death in that disaster of his uncle, the Elder Pliny, purportedly because Tacitus had asked him for material to include in the Histories (Epist. 6.16).
In the preface to the Histories Tacitus announces also that he has set aside for his old age an account of the reigns of Nerva and Trajan, “a subject both richer in material and safer to handle, thanks to the rare happiness of times in which you can feel what you like and say what you feel.” This is more than a conventional compliment to the two emperors who succeeded the supposedly tyrannical Domitian, but it cannot be taken literally. In essence, it explains only why Tacitus decided to write near-contemporary history and yet to stop before bringing the story down to his own day. He wanted, that is, to focus on a period when contemporary historians could not feel what they liked or say what they felt. So it is no real surprise that for his next work, the Annals, Tacitus decided to go back to the Julio-Claudian emperors, and to write an account of the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. Once again, we have no idea when he began the work, whether he finished it, or—if he finished it—when he did so. What survives is most of the first six books, covering the reign of Tiberius (much of Book 5, on the years 29 to 31, is lost), and, in a separate manuscript that is our main source also for the Histories, Books 11–16. As the beginning of 11 and the conclusion of 16 are missing, what remains covers the latter half of Claudius’ reign (47 to 54) and the first 12 years of Nero’s principate (54 to 66).
Why Tacitus wrote the Histories and the Annals has been discussed almost endlessly. Until the 1950s it was customary to argue that he was so scarred by his own experiences—and those of his father-in-law Agricola—during the reign of Domitian that he undertook the Histories in an attempt to understand how such a monster could ever have become emperor. On this interpretation, Tacitus’ study of the years between 69 and 96 must have failed to yield an adequate explanation (otherwise, supposedly, he would have gone ahead with his announced plan to write about Nerva and Trajan). So he resolved to carry his research back into the Julio-Claudian period, and there he found the prototype and the explanation for Domitian in the no less monstrous Tiberius. In 1958, however, Sir Ronald Syme published his massive two-volume study of Tacitus, as great a work of history as anything Tacitus ever wrote and—it must be added—just as self-willed. Syme set out to cut the ties between Tacitus and Domitian. He argued instead that Tacitus was responding to contemporary events. Thus the Histories, the opening books especially, constituted a meditation on what might have happened in 97, when a mutiny by the praetorian guard helped precipitate the aged Nerva’s decision to adopt Trajan as his successor; and the Annals were prompted above all by events at the start of Hadrian’s reign. Despite the enormous learning Syme deployed to make his case, he failed to persuade many other scholars on anything save the dating of the Dialogus. But he deserves full credit for disposing of the theory that Tacitus was disabled by a Domitianic trauma. To embrace that view was always to confuse rhetoric and reality. However pungently Tacitus expressed himself on the last of the Flavians, he had worked closely with Domitian.
If this leaves up in the air the question why Tacitus wrote the Histories, an answer these days can be found in more down-to-earth considerations. For a start, a senator might well give up a career as an orator, simply because being the foremost speaker of his day made inordinate demands on his time and energy. In such circumstances, it would be natural for him to turn to literature, the writing of history or of philosophy, these being the particular pursuits of elder statesmen. Since Tacitus had no patience with philosophers, history was bound to be the subject he chose. Next, there is the point that no matter how much Tacitus praised the republic when it suited his purposes, he was not just born under the empire but accep
ted the principate as an institution. His problem, insofar as he had a problem, was with the character and behavior patterns of individual emperors. And since he seems to have believed his own claim that he alone could write, without fear or favor, an accurate account of the Flavian dynasty, a dynasty that had risen and fallen within his own lifetime, there is no need to suppose that he was responding to anything other than his own familiarity with the period. As a member of the governing class for 20 of the Flavians’ 27 years (76 to 96), he possessed an intimate knowledge of the era. He could revisit themes he had covered from different angles in the Agricola, the Germania, and the Dialogus. As the foremost orator of his day, he had the gifts needed to bring out the difficulties of a time dominated by a massive gap between appearances and realities. And he could write up the results in less time than would be required for the study of another period, and so make his mark as a historian that much sooner. If there is one thing clear about the Histories, it is that the work was intended literally to stun its immediate audience.
Modern readers are often stunned by another aspect of the work, its pessimism. This was to some degree a pose, forced on Tacitus by his criticism of the earlier historians whose works he meant to eclipse. As he points out, they had praised each emperor during his lifetime and vilified him after his death. In a rhetorical world, however, there can be no “heroes” if there are no “villains.” The logical corollary is simply stated: when the living emperor was the hero, the senatorial class must then have been the villains, and when the dead emperor became the villain, the heroes then must have been the senators. This set Tacitus’ predecessors on the same level as the urban mob that had fawned on Vitellius while he lived and turned against him the moment he was dead. No historian worth his salt could follow in their footsteps. Either he could think the best of everyone, as Livy had done when his material on the early republic gave him the opportunity—and Livy admitted in his Preface that this was escapism. Or he could think the worst of everybody, even the three emperors who had raised him to the highest level in the senate. This was Tacitus’ choice, a pose perhaps, but logical in light of the subject matter, and probably congenial too.