24 1 That the legions could then have been crushed, and that the Germans wished to do so but were craftily dissuaded by him, were claims afterwards made by Civilis; and in fact his claim seems not far from the truth, since his surrender followed a few days later. For while Cerialis by secret messengers was holding out to the Batavians the prospect of peace and to Civilis of pardon, he was also advising Veleda and her relatives to change the fortunes of a war, which repeated disasters had shown to be adverse to them, by rendering a timely service to the Roman people: he reminded them that the Treviri had been cut to pieces, the Ubii had returned to their allegiance, and the Batavians had lost their native land; they had gained nothing from their friendship with Civilis but wounds, banishment, and grief. An exile and homeless he would be only a burden to any who harboured him, and they had already done wrong enough in crossing the Rhine so many times. If they transgressed further, the wrong and guilt would be theirs, but vengeance and the favour of heaven would belong to the Romans.
25 1 These promises were mingled with threats; and when the fidelity of the tribes across the Rhine had been shaken, debates began among the Batavians as well: “We must not extend our ruin further; no single nation can avert the enslavement of the whole world. What have we accomplished by destroying legions with fire and sword except to cause more legions and stronger forces to be brought up? If we have fought for Vespasian, Vespasian is now master of the world; if we are challenging the whole Roman people in arms, we must recognize what a trifling part of mankind we Batavians are. Look at the Raetians, the Noricans, and consider the burdens Rome’s other allies bear: we are not required to pay tribute, but only to furnish valour and men. This is a condition next to freedom; and if we are to choose our masters, we can more honourably bear the rule of Roman emperors than of German women.” So the common people; the chiefs spoke more violently: “We have been drawn into arms by the madness of Civilis; he wished to avert his own misfortunes by the ruin of his country. The gods were hostile to the Batavians on the day when we besieged the legions, murdered their commanders, and began this war that was a necessity only to Civilis, but to us fatal. There is nothing left us, unless we begin to come to our senses and show our repentance by punishing the guilty individual.”
26 1 Civilis was not unaware of this change of feeling and he decided to anticipate it, not only because he was weary of suffering, but also for the hope of life, which often breaks down high courage. When he asked for a conference, the bridge over the Nabalia was cut in two and the leaders advanced to the broken ends; then Civilis began thus: “If I were defending myself before a legate of Vitellius, my acts would deserve no pardon nor my words any credence; there was nothing but hatred between him and me — he began the quarrel, I increased it; toward Vespasian my respect is of long standing, and when he was still a private citizen we were called friends. Primus Antonius knew this when he sent me a letter calling me to arms to keep the legions of Germany and the young men of Gaul from crossing the Alps. What Antonius advised by letter, Hordeonius urged in person; I have begun the same war in Germany that Mucianus began in Syria, Aponius in Moesia, Flavianus in Pannonia.” . . .
At this point the Histories break off. Of the fate of Civilis we know nothing. That the Batavians were treated favourably seems clear from Germ. : manet honos et antiquae societatis insigne; nam nec tributis contemnuntur nec publicanus atterit; exempti oneribus et collationibus et tantum in usum proeliorum sepositi, velut tela atque arma, bellis reservantur.
FRAGMENTS
1 1 The Jews, being closely besieged and given no opportunity to make peace or to surrender, were finally dying of starvation, and the streets began to be filled with corpses everywhere, for they were now unequal to the duty of burying their dead; moreover, made bold to resort to every kind of horrible food, they did not spare even human bodies — save those of which they had been robbed by the wasting that such food had caused.
2 1 It is said that Titus first called a council and deliberated whether he should destroy such a mighty temple. For some thought that a consecrated shrine, which was famous beyond all other works of men, ought not to be razed, arguing that its preservation would bear witness to the moderation of Rome, while its destruction would for ever brand her cruelty. Yet others, including Titus himself, opposed, holding the destruction of this temple to be a prime necessity in order to wipe out more completely the religion of the Jews and the Christians; for they urged that these religions, although hostile to each other, nevertheless sprang from the same sources; the Christians had grown out of the Jews: if the root were destroyed, the stock would easily perish.
3 1 That six hundred thousand Jews were killed in that war is stated by Cornelius and Suetonius.1
4 1 Next, to quote the words of Cornelius Tacitus, "the gate of Janus, that had been opened when Augustus was old, remained so while on the very boundaries of the world new peoples were being attacked, often to our profit and sometimes to our loss, even down to the reign of Vespasian." Thus far Cornelius.
5 1 Gordianus . . . opened the gates of Janus:2 as to the question whether anyone closed them after Vespasian and Titus, I can recall no statement by any historian; yet Cornelius Tacitus reports that they were opened after a year by Vespasian himself.
6 1 For the mighty battles of Diurpaneus, king of the Dacians, with the Roman general Fuscus,3 and the mighty losses of the Romans I should now set forth at length, if Cornelius Tacitus, who composed the history of these times with the greatest care, had not said that Sallustius Crispus and very many other historians had approved of passing over in silence the number of our losses, and that he for his own part had chosen the same course before all others.
7 1 Those vast Scythian peoples whom all our ancestors and even the famous Alexander the Great had feared and avoided according to the testimony of Pompeius4 and Cornelius . . . I mean the Alans, the Huns, and the Goths, Theodosius attacked without hesitation and defeated in many great battles.
8 1 But these (Locrians) who live near Delphi are called the Ozolians . . .; however, those who moved to Libya have the name of Nasamones,º as Cornelius Tacitus reports, being sprung from the Narycii.
MAPS
THE ANNALS
Translated by John Jackson
Generally regarded as Tacitus’ greatest work, The Annals covers the history of the Roman Empire from the reign of Tiberius to the fall of Nero, spanning the years AD 14-68. It is an important source to the modern understanding of the history of the Roman Empire during the first century. Although Tacitus refers to part of his work as ‘my annals’, the title of the work Annals used today was not assigned by Tacitus himself, but derives from its year-by-year structure. Tacitus wrote the Annals in at least 16 books, but sadly books 7-10 and parts of books 5, 6, 11 and 16 are now missing.
Of the eighteen books comprising The Annals, the reign of Tiberius takes up six books, of which only Book 5 is missing. These books are neatly divided into two sets of three, corresponding to the change in the nature of the political climate during the period. Another six books are devoted to the reigns of Gaius and Claudius. Of the remaining six books, three and a half books pertaining to the reign of Nero are extant, and cover the period from his accession to the throne in AD 54 to the middle of the year AD 66. The last four extant books cover all of Nero’s reign except the last two years.
Tacitus documented a Roman Imperial system of government that originated with the Battle of Actium in September 31 BC. Yet Tacitus chose not to begin then, but with the death of Augustus Caesar in AD 14, and his succession by Tiberius. As in The Histories, Tacitus maintains his thesis of the necessity of the principate. He explains again that Augustus gave and warranted peace to the state after years of civil war, but on the other hand he shows us the dark side of life under the Caesars. The history of the Empire is also the history of the sunset of the political freedom of the senatorial aristocracy, which he viewed as morally decadent, corrupt and servile towards the Emperor. During Nero’s reign there had been
a widespread diffusion of literary works in favour of this suicidal exitus illustrium virorum (“end of the illustrious men”). Again, as in his first work, the Agricola, Tacitus is opposed to those who chose useless martyrdom through vain suicides.
Tacitus further improves the style of portraiture that he had developed in The Histories. One of the most accomplished portraits is that of Tiberius, portrayed in an indirect way, painted progressively during the course of a narrative, with observations and commentary, with impressive and realistic details. Tacitus portrays both Tiberius and Nero as tyrants that caused fear in their subjects. But while he views Tiberius as someone that had once been a great man, Tacitus depicts Nero as simply despicable.
Tiberius (42 BC-37 AD) was Emperor from 14 AD to 37. Born Tiberius Claudius Nero, a Claudian, Tiberius was the son of Tiberius Claudius Nero and Livia Drusilla.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
BOOK I
BOOK II
BOOK III
BOOK IV
BOOK V
BOOK VI
BOOK XI
BOOK XII
BOOK XIII
BOOK XIV
BOOK XV
BOOK XVI
MAPS
One of the key events of the work: ‘The Torches of Nero’ as depicted by Henryk Siemiradzki. According to Tacitus, Nero targeted Christians as those responsible for the fire.
INTRODUCTION
Since the life of Tacitus has already been sketched in Mr. Moore’s introduction to the Histories, a brief account may suffice here. Brevity, indeed, is a necessity; for the ancient evidence might almost be compressed into a dozen lines, nor has even the industry or imagination of modern scholars been able to add much that is of value to the exiguous material.
For the parentage of the greatest of Roman historians no witness can be called, nor was the famous name Cornelius, vulgarized by Sulla’s numerous emancipations, a patent of nobility in the first century of the Christian era. The elder Pliny, however, was acquainted with a Roman knight, Cornelius Tacitus, who held a procuratorship in Belgic Gaul, and obviously there is a faint possibility that this may have been the father or an uncle of the historian. Be that as it may, a certain standard of inherited wealth and consequence is presupposed alike by his career and by his prejudices. The exact date of his birth is equally unknown, but he was senior by a few years to his intimate friend and correspondent, the younger Pliny; who states in a letter to him that he was in his eighteenth year at the time of the great eruption of Vesuvius which destroyed Pompeii, Herculaneum, and his uncle, in the late summer of 79 A.D. Certainty is out of the question, yet the provisional date of 55 A.D., which harmonizes with the ascertainable facts of his life, can hardly be far wide of the mark.
Of his early youth nothing can be gathered but that he studied rhetoric “with surprising avidity and a certain juvenile fervour”; his principal heroes and instructors being Marcus Aper and Julius Secundus, two of the characters in the Dialogus de Oratoribus. We have Pliny’s testimony to his mastery of the spoken word, and throughout his works, quite apart from the “Dialogue,” his unabated interest in the art is noticeable.
The first certain date is 77 A.D., the consulate of Cn.º Julius Agricola; who was sufficiently impressed by the character and prospects of the young Tacitus to select him for the husband of his daughter, the marriage taking place on the expiry of his term of office (78 A.D.). Matters are less clear when we come to his official career, which he describes as “owing its inception to Vespasian, its promotion to Titus, and its further advancement to Domitian.” The question is whether the first step mentioned was the quaestorship or a minor office, but the balance of probability seems to be that he was tribunus militum laticlavius under Vespasian, and quaestor under Titus: under Domitian, by his own statement, he took part in the celebration of the Secular Games (88 A.D.), in the double capacity of praetor and quindecimvir. Between the quaestorship and the praetorship, however, must have lain — still in the principate of Domitian — either a tribunate or an aedileship, which may be assigned roughly to 84 A.D.
Some two years after the praetorship, Tacitus with his wife left Rome, and in 93 A.D., when Agricola passed away — felix opportunitate mortis — they were still absent. Service abroad is a natural explanation: that the service consisted in the governorship of a minor imperial province, a highly plausible conjecture. In any case, the return to the capital followed shortly: for the striking references to the three last and most terrible years of Domitian are too clearly that of an eye-witness. He emerged from the Terror with life, also with the indelible memories of the few who “had outlived both others and themselves.” In the happier age of Nerva and Trajan, all — or virtually all — of his literary work was accomplished. His public life was crowned by the consulate in 97 or 98 A.D., when he pronounced the funeral panegyric on Verginius Rufus, who some thirty years before had crushed Vindex and refused the throne proffered by his legions. In 100 A.D. he conducted with Pliny the prosecution of the extortionate governor of Africa, Marius Priscus. This constituted the last recorded fact of his biography until it was revealed by an inscription from the Carian town of Mylasa that he had attained the chief prize of the senatorial career by holding the proconsulate of Asia (probably between 113 and 116 A.D.). The year of his death is unknown, but it is improbable that he long survived the publication of the Annals in 116 A.D.
So much for the man: as to the author, little space can be given here to the three minor works — the Dialogus de Oratoribus, the Agricola, and the Germania. The first of these ostensibly reproduces a conversation held in the house of Curiatius Maternus in the sixth year of Vespasian (74-75 A.D.), the discussion turning on the relative merits of the republican and imperial types of oratory: the author himself — described as admodum adulescens — is assumed to be present. The work, written in the neo-Ciceronian style, offers so sharp a contrast to the later manner of Tacitus that its authenticity was early called into question, first by Beatus Rhenanus, then by Justus Lipsius, with the full weight of his great name. Only in 1811 were the doubts dispelled by Lange’s discovery that a letter from Pliny to Tacitus alludes unmistakably to the Dialogue. The date of composition presents one of those tempting, though ultimately insoluble problems, which hold so great a fascination for many scholars: the years proposed range from 81 A.D. (Gudeman) to 98 A.D. (Schanz), with Norden’s 91 A.D. as a middle term.
For the fifteen years of Domitian historical composition had ranked as a dangerous trade, but in 98 A.D., in the early days of Trajan, Tacitus broke silence with the biography, or panegyric, of his father-in-law, Agricola. Ample justice, to say the least, is measured out to the virtues of the hero; and since he was numbered with those who declined to “challenge fame and fate” under Domitian, the light is naturally enough centred upon his administrative and military achievements in Britain. The brilliant, though perhaps too highly coloured, style shows already the influence of Sallust; and the work is described by its author as the precursor of one which “in artless and rough-hewn language shall chronicle the slavery of the past and attest the felicity of the present.”
But before this undertaking was at least partially fulfilled, the Agricola was followed, still in 98 A.D., by the Germania, a monograph whose fate has been, in Gibbon’s words, “to exercise the diligence of innumerable antiquarians, and to excite the genius and penetration of the philosophic historians of our own times.” Its more immediate raison d’être is probably to be sought in the fact that the German question was, at the time, pressing enough to keep Trajan from the capital during the whole of the period between the death of Nerva and 99 A.D. Judged from the standpoint of the geographer and the ethnologist, the Germania must be pronounced guilty of most of the sins of omission and commission to be expected in a work published before the dawn of the second century; but the materials, written and verbal, at the disposal of the writer must have been considerable, and the book is of equal interest and value as the first extant study of earl
y Teutonic society.
The foundation, however, on which the fame of Tacitus rests, is his history of the principate from the accession of Tiberius to the murder of Domitian. It falls into two halves, the Annals and the Histories (neither of which has descended to us intact), and the chronological order is reversed in the order of composition. To follow the latter, the Histories — as the name, perhaps, indicates — comprise a chronicle of the author’s own time: they are, in fact, the redemption of the promise made in the Agricola; though the incondita ac rudis vox may be sought in vain, and the period there announced for treatment is in part expanded, in part contracted. For the praesentia bona, the golden years of Nerva and Trajan, are now reserved by the writer to be the “theme of his age,” while the proposed account of Domitian’s tyranny swells into the history, first, of the earthquake that upheaved and engulfed Galba, Otho, and Vitellius; then, of the three princes of the Flavian dynasty. Between what years the work was written, when it was published, and whether by instalments or as a whole, the evidence is as inadequate to determine as it is to resolve the endlessly debated question of the relationship between the narrative of Tacitus and that of Plutarch in the Lives of Galba and Otho. Pliny, writing perhaps in 106 A.D., answers the request of his friend for details of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.; and elsewhere, on his own initiative, suggests for inclusion in the book an incident of the year 93 A.D. The exact number of books into which the Histories were divided is not certain, but is more likely to have been twelve than fourteen: the first four survive in entirety, together with twenty-six chapters of the fifth; the rest are known only by a few citations, chiefly from Orosius. The events embraced in the extant part are those of the twenty crowded months from January, 69 A.D., to August, 70 A.D.: we have lost, therefore, virtually the principate of Vespasian, that of Titus, and that of Domitian. The language is now completely “Tacitean.”
Complete Works of Tacitus (Delphi Classics) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 24) Page 44