No More Learning

He had reached the goal of a politician's
ambition and had become known as one of the best speakers of his time,
but he seems to have realized that under the Principate politics was a
dull farce, and that oratory was of little value in a time of peace
and strong government. The rest of his life was to be spent in writing
history. In the year of his consulship or immediately after it, he
published the _Agricola_ and _Germania_, short monographs in which he
practised the transition from the style of the speaker to that of the
writer. In the preface to the _Agricola_ he foreshadows the larger
work on which he is engaged. 'I shall find it a pleasant task to put
together, though in rough and unfinished style, a memorial of our
former slavery and a record of our present happiness. ' His intention
was to write a history of the Principate from Augustus to Trajan. He
began with his own times, and wrote in twelve or fourteen books a full
account of the period from Nero's death in 68 A. D. to the death of
Domitian in 96 A. D. These were published, probably in successive
books, between 106 and 109 A. D. Only the first four and a half books
survive to us. They deal with the years 69 and 70, and are known as
_The Histories_. _The Annals_, which soon followed, dealt with the
Julian dynasty after the death of Augustus.
Of Augustus' constitution
of the principate and of Rome's 'present happiness' under Trajan,
Tacitus did not live to write.

_The Histories_, as they survive to us, describe in a style that has
made them immortal one of the most terrible and crucial moments of
Roman history. The deadly struggle for the throne demonstrated finally
the real nature of the Principate--based not on constitutional
fictions but on armed force--and the supple inefficiency of the
senatorial class. The revolt on the Rhine foreshadowed the debacle of
the fifth century. Tacitus was peculiarly well qualified to write the
history of this period. He had been the eye-witness of some of the
most terrible scenes: he was acquainted with all the distinguished
survivors: his political experience gave him a statesman's point of
view, and his rhetorical training a style which mirrored both the
terror of the times and his own emotion. More than any other Roman
historian he desired to tell the truth and was not fatally biassed by
prejudice. It is wrong to regard Tacitus as an 'embittered
rhetorician', an 'enemy of the Empire', a 'détracteur de
l'humanité'. [1] He was none of these. As a member of a noble, though
not an ancient, family, and as one who had completed the republican
_cursus honorum_, his sympathies were naturally senatorial. He
regretted that the days were passed when oratory was a real power and
the consuls were the twin towers of the world. But he never hoped to
see such days again. He realized that monarchy was essential to peace,
and that the price of freedom was violence and disorder. He had no
illusions about the senate. Fault and misfortune had reduced them to
nerveless servility, a luxury of self-abasement. Their meekness would
never inherit the earth.