SOURCE: Grant, Michael. “Translator's Introduction.” In The Annals of Imperial Rome, by Tacitus, translated by Michael Grant, pp. 7-28. 1956. Revised. London: Penguin Books, 1996.

[In the following essay, Grant examines the tradition of historiography that preceded Tacitus, his moral sense and how it influenced his writing, and the difficulties a translator faces in trying to do justice to his Latin.]

1. THE LIFE AND WORKS OF TACITUS

The powerful personality of Cornelius Tacitus has survived in his writings, but we know extremely little of his life or his origin. Indeed, we are not even sure whether the first of his three names was Publius or Gaius. His family probably came from the south of France or from northern Italy (Cisalpine Gaul). If so, Tacitus—like other leading Latin writers—may not have been of wholly Italian ancestry. But we have no conclusive evidence. His father may have been an imperial agent at Trier or at Cologne, and paymaster-general for the armies on the Rhine; but again we are not certain.

At all events, Tacitus was born in about a.d. 56 or 57 (when Nero was emperor),¹ and was a member of the provincial upper class who found new prospects of careers open to them under the imperial regime. He lived and worked until the end of the emperor Trajan's reign (a.d. 98-117), and probably for some years into the reign of Hadrian (117-138). Much of the official career of Tacitus as a senator took place in a time of unhappiness and even terror for high officials, the black years of Domitian (a.d. 81-96). But Tacitus survived to enjoy the highest metropolitan post, the consulship, in a.d. 97 (during the short reign of Nerva, 96-8), and the governorship of the great province of western Anatolia (‘Asia’)—the climax of a senator's career—some fifteen years later.

He had received a careful Roman education. In his day that meant, particularly, an elaborate series of exercises in different kinds of public speaking, studied in the remarkable detail which we learn about from the treatises of Cicero and Quintilian; for advocacy in the courts was traditionally the most respected civil career. As a young man, Tacitus evidently studied at Rome with the leading orators of the day. He himself became one of the best known speakers of his time, and a life-long interest in oratory emerges clearly from his writings.² Indeed, one of them—if, as is highly probable, Tacitus is its author—deals explicitly with the subject. This is the Dialogue on Orators, in which four historical characters, two lawyers and two literary men, very interestingly discuss the claims of oratory against those of literature, and the reasons why eloquence had declined during the century and more that had elapsed since Cicero's death. One reason of course—as is pointed out—was that this sort of impassioned disputation had much less part to play under emperors than amid the clashes of the outgoing Republic.

The Dialogue is dedicated to a consul of a.d. 102, and is likely to have been published then or soon after. Meanwhile, however, Tacitus had already begun to make it clear to the world that, even if oratory could never achieve its past glories again, the same was by no means true of history. The monographs with which he initiated his career as historian, the Agricola and Germania, were published within a short time of one another in c. a.d. 98. The Agricola to some extent recalls a familiar Greek tradition—that of the semi-biographical, moral eulogy of a personage;³ here the personage is his own father-in-law. But Tacitus, giving the work an original structure of its own, inserts history and includes descriptive material about Britain. The Germania is an ethnographical study of Central Europe. Its purpose is not completely understood. But it does seem to contain recurrent moral contrasts, or implied contrasts, between the decadence of Rome and the crude vigour of the teeming, and potentially threatening, peoples beyond the Rhine. And indeed, eventually, these Germanic peoples played a large part in the eclipse of the Roman Empire in the West. But that was not until many years later.

Next followed Tacitus' two principal historical works. They told the story of the Roman emperors from a.d. 14 to 96. The Histories, which cover the later part of this epoch (from the death of Nero in a.d. 68), were written first. We have about a third of them, describing the terrible civil wars with which the period began.⁴ Tacitus' last and greatest creation was his Annals, translated in this book. The Annals tell of the Julio-Claudian emperors from just before the death of Augustus (a.d. 14) to the death of Nero. That is to say, they deal with the reigns of Tiberius, Gaius (Caligula), Claudius, and Nero. Not everything has survived; we lack more than two years of Tiberius, the whole of the short reign of Gaius, half of the reign of Claudius, and the last two years of Nero. We have lost some of the highlights. But we have kept forty years out of fifty-four; by far the greater part of the Annals has come down to us.

The period with which they deal is still of infinite significance. For the first and last time in world history, the entire Mediterranean region belonged to the same unit. The Roman Republic had begun to acquire overseas territories in the third century b.c. From its first two Punic Wars against Semitic Carthage (264-201) Rome had emerged as the strongest Mediterranean power; and it spent the next 150 years extending its dominion in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The other great empire of the world at this time, China of the Han dynasty, was too far away for any rivalry to occur. Besides, they were separated—and, later, for commercial reasons, jealously separated—by Parthia. That loose feudal empire, stretching from the Euphrates to the Hindu Kush, receives frequent attention in the pages of Tacitus. For its rulers were the only foreign monarchs with whom Rome had to compete on anything like equal terms; and Rome had received a shock when its armies were heavily defeated by Parthian cavalry at Carrhae (Haran) in 53 b.c.

But this was only one of many problems in the century preceding the period considered by Tacitus. It had already, in that last century before our era, become clear that in various ways Rome's small-town Republican constitution was—for all its famous ‘balance’ between the classes, stressed by the Greek historian Polybius—unfitted for imperial responsibilities. The solution which imposed itself was the autocracy of the dictators Sulla (81-79 b.c.) and Julius Caesar (48-44 b.c.). This autocracy was stabilized by Augustus, forcibly but with decorous façade, as the Principate; and his Roman peace and reorganization enormously increased the prosperity of his vast realms. The present book begins at the end of his long life, and tells us of the able and bizarre men who took on this immense task from him, and continued to lay the foundations of modern Europe.

Tacitus' story is the earliest account of this decisive period that has come down to us. Indeed it is almost the only Latin account. Our other main literary sources are the far less serious Latin biographies of his contemporary Suetonius, and the Greek history of Dio Cassius who wrote a whole century later. As an artistic and spiritual achievement his work eclipses theirs. Dio is pedestrian, and Suetonius, for all his vividness, accepts the traditional assumption that biography is a less important genre than history and falls infinitely short of the unique qualities of Tacitus. If we leave literature out of it and concentrate on that elusive commodity the historical ‘fact’, the situation is a little different. Suetonius was an imperial secretary and amassed much curious and irreplaceable material, and Dio lived close to the imperial court of his day and possessed more personal experience of exalted affairs than Tacitus. Yet Suetonius is often no sort of a critic of his material, and Dio lacks the imagination to grasp the affairs of the early empire. Tacitus is more dependable than either. He is the best literary source for the events of the early principate that we possess. There are, of course, other significant sources, provided by archaeology, and coins, and papyri, and art. But it is chiefly upon Tacitus that we have to rely for our knowledge of a critical epoch in the history of western civilization.

2. WHAT TACITUS INHERITED

What he attempted in this work is hard to follow without at least a brief glance at the historians who had gone before him. The world's first historians had been Greeks. Rome's cultural debt to Greece was incalculably great, and Tacitus cannot be wholly understood without bearing in mind certain peculiar, perhaps surprising, features of Greek historical writing. In the first place, the Greeks had begun by thinking of history as extremely close to epic poetry. Indeed, history owed its technique and its very existence to Homer and other Greek epic poets. Again, when Athenian tragic drama became great in the fifth century b.c., that also influenced Greek historical writing. These two facts emerge clearly from the works of Herodotus and Thucydides. And history never quite forgot its early links with poetry. As the great Roman educationalist Quintilian (an older contemporary of Tacitus) remarked, ‘history is very near to poetry, and may be considered in some sense as poetry in prose’.

He may have been intending to make a point of style rather than content, yet the analogies went farther than that. Being so close to poetry, ancient history was often intended to arouse emotion. For one thing, it had habitually been read aloud to audiences, from the time of Herodotus onwards, and, even after silent or sotto voce reading gradually became more customary, the practice never ceased. Isocrates (436-338 b.c.) caused his pupils to see history as a branch of eloquence, and Greek historians after the time of Alexander the Great, such as Duris of Samos, carried the emotional, pathetic tendency to extreme lengths. This whole trend was sternly denounced by the great Polybius of Megalopolis (c. 203-120 b.c.), whose theme, although he too wrote in Greek, was nothing less than the universality of Rome. All historians of the age were influenced in one way or another by Aristotle (384-322 b.c.), who, even if his direct effect on historiography was not so extensive as has recently been supposed, enormously stimulated, through his own example and the work of his pupils, the development of a scientific attitude towards research.

Nevertheless, the emotional approach had come to stay, and particularly flourished in the Hellenistic age of later Greece when interest in biography became increasingly strong. As Roman history developed, patriotic emotion gained in importance as a factor in the situation. It is powerful, in a nostalgic way, in Sallust (86-c. 34 b.c.), who first gave the subject a magnificent Latin style, and its expression reached its zenith in Livy (59 b.c.-a.d. 17).

But patriotism is only one aspect of the moral tone that pervades Roman historians. This goes back to the very earliest of their Greek predecessors, since even Herodotus, for all his relaxed manner, had seen ethical lessons in the past. The task of edification seemed to become particularly imperative from the fourth century b.c. onwards, when philosophers had turned their main attention from speculations about the universe to the exploration of the soul of man. Decisive influences in this direction were Socrates' interest in the human personality, and the dialogues of Plato, and the Ethics of Aristotle. The schools of philosophy which descended from Aristotle all persisted with this moral emphasis, and none more than the Stoics whose doctrines were laid down in c. 300 b.c. by Zeno of Citium in Cyprus. He and his successors taught that Virtue is the Supreme Good; and this idea appealed to the Romans who, if often nasty, included, at their best, men of strong moral interests and preoccupations. Indeed, Stoicism of a sort, somewhat modified by Panaetius (c. 185-? 95 b.c.) to suit the practical requirements of society, came to pervade the general culture of the Greco-Roman world.⁵ And so it affected most historians. Among them, too, there is a vigorous atmosphere of moralizing.

A moralist seeks to persuade, to teach, and to guide. ‘The art of persuasion’ is one of the definitions of the ancient Art—some called it a Science—of Rhetoric. This Art or Science continued to permeate ancient culture until, as has already been mentioned, it became the staple higher education of a Roman under the empire.

Greek educational theorists, trying to map out Rhetoric in systematic terms, had actually thought of history as part of it. We find this a strange idea, living as we do in an age when ‘fine writing’ and grand speaking are unfashionable, and when anything of the kind among historians is particularly suspect. Cicero, who was sympathetic to the rhetorical ideals of Isocrates (p. 11), regarded the two studies as mutually beneficial. Not only, he asserted, should orators be well versed in history, but history, in its turn, needs the sort of composition practised by public speakers.⁶ Even if its first law is truth, it possesses an especially close relation to oratory⁷—by which he apparently means to convey, again, that it needs rhetorical techniques for its expression.

This has certain results which we find puzzling. For instance ancient historians are very much inclined to credit their personages with speeches which they clearly did not deliver, at least not in such a shape. These speeches provide background, in rhetorical form often accentuated by a balance between two opposing theses. ‘I have put into each speaker's mouth’, says Thucydides, ‘sentiments proper to the occasion, expressed as I thought he would be likely to express them.’⁸ Similar to these masterly but imaginative reconstructions of atmosphere are certain battle-scenes. Sometimes these are not realistic narratives so much as brilliant evocations of heroism, panic, reversals of fortune, and the like. One can imagine how the battle-scenes of Tacitus were declaimed to an appreciative audience. With that in mind, a historian had to write effectively—that is, persuasively. In other words he had to write well. Cicero was convinced that a historian must not be only a scholar; he must be an artist too, and must endow his historical writing with every possible device of stylistic attractiveness.

Cicero also felt that Roman historians of earlier generations had failed to meet this requirement of a good style. For in his day (106-43 b.c.) history already had a fairly long, if not very distinguished, pedigree at Rome. As early as the third century b.c. the serious business of Roman politics—supremely important in the educated life of the Republic—had permitted and included the study and writing of history. The ‘senatorial historians’ combined varying amounts of Greek culture (the first of these writers even wrote in Greek) with a reverence for Roman traditions and institutions. This mixture must have been apparent in the lost work in which, in the second century b.c., Cato the Censor told the story of Rome from mythical times to his own day. In theory, he was opposed to the artificiality and stylistic self-consciousness of the Greeks, and he set out to demonstrate that Rome could do as well as them. In the process, he borrowed some of their stylistic devices—and indeed the very title of his book, the Origins, follows a Greek tradition.

Some generations before Cato, the Roman State had made a decisive contribution to history by instituting the publication of annual notices called the Records of the Priests. These were primarily concerned with the religious ritual which played such an immense part in Roman life. But this ritual involved references to political events—victories, declarations of war and peace, etc. So the Records began to summarize certain historical events. They left their mark on historians of Cato's century. Some of these, because they too followed an annual pattern, were called Annalists; and their influence on the annalistic arrangement of Tacitus' work is so clear that his book which is here translated was quite early known by its present title, the Annals.

Records of the sort that the Republican historians used were collected in an official publication of eighty volumes published in c. 123 b.c. Such records were sometimes authentic; but they were often legendary, for many myths had gathered round the origins of the great families. And next came a generation of Annalists who expanded this sort of material in the light of rhetorical ideas imbibed from Greece.

Despite such embellishments Cicero, as I have said, found them all inadequate as artists.

The stylistic shortcomings of Roman history were amply remedied by Julius Caesar (102/100-44 b.c.), Sallust (86-c. 34 b.c.), Livy (59 b.c.-a.d. 17),⁹ and finally, in the most remarkable fashion of all, by Tacitus.

Caesar's ‘Commentaries’ include the Gallic War and the Civil War, with supplements by his staff officers. Caesar was a first-rate orator, and he wrote beautifully lucid Latin—which effectively clothed unremitting political justification. His work was far from being the unshaped raw material it might seem at first sight. It was, rather, a deliberate attempt to get away from the rhetorical history of Isocrates in favour of a tougher sort of history (reminiscent rather of Thucydides), written by someone who was not a professor but a leading actor in events. Yet because of his unadorned style he was less read by the ancients than his younger contemporary Sallust. Sallust's important Histories have only survived in relatively small portions, notably certain speeches. But we have his Catiline, about that fierce nobleman's conspiracy in the sixties b.c., and his Jugurtha, named after a North African king against whom Rome had fought fifty years earlier. These are the first important Roman historical monographs that have come down to us. The genre owed a good deal to Greece, but it was Sallust who attracted to it the attention of his compatriots.

Tacitus owes Sallust something of his vivid but careful abruptness, also his mask of austere impartiality, and his habit of digressions—often including speeches to clarify character. Echoes of Sallust, too, are apparent in Tacitus' pessimistic sketch of early civilization, and in other pieces of rhetorical moralizing; he is markedly Sallustian in his trenchant attitude. As a historian of events Sallust leaves a good deal to be desired, and it was said that he ought to be read not as a historian but as an orator.¹⁰ Yet the wonderful vigour and dramatic power with which he presented action and discussion made men feel that at last Roman history was being treated with the eloquence and stylistic skill which Cicero had demanded of it.

So it was again in the next generation, when Livy spent forty years writing that superb history of Rome which, if it had all survived (less than a quarter of it has), would have filled thirty modern volumes. Livy possessed the true antiquarian spirit, but no taste for profound research. His first ten Books are a brilliant, mythical Virgilian evocation of Rome's past.

Although Tacitus is far removed from this romantic enthusiasm and rich florid style, Livy's power to stir the emotions left a legacy to him as well as to other historians. So did Livy's rhetoric—already beginning to become a potent force in Roman education. Like Tacitus after him, Livy's chief aim was to draw from the past its moral lessons. They were based on current ethical ideas; and, encouraged by the Stoic interpretation of the Roman Empire as the vehicle of human brotherhood,¹¹ these lessons were directed to the supreme purpose of Rome's greater glory. And with Rome was associated Italy. For Livy, like Virgil and perhaps like Tacitus, came from Italy's fringes and felt the emotional patriotism which people of the frontier so often feel. All three men—Virgil, Livy and Tacitus—possessed a metropolitan bias which was both aristocratic and conservative; and Virgil, like Livy, is deliberately echoed by Tacitus.

In the three-quarters of a century following the deaths of Augustus and Livy (a.d. 17) there were a number of historical writers. Most of their works, however, are lost, and this makes it difficult to assess their influence on Tacitus. But he must have owed much of his material to them, and notably to Pliny the elder (c. a.d. 23-79), whose Natural History we possess though his account of his own times is lost. Probably Tacitus' stylistic debts to this and other missing works were a good deal larger than has been realized. However, these first-century historians do not seem to have possessed talents comparable with those of Caesar, Sallust, and Livy. Besides, circumstances were less favourable to them. Certain of the emperors, as readers of Tacitus will find it easy to appreciate, were touchy. Their suspicions, as he suggests, may have prevented contemporary historians from doing themselves full justice.

But there may also have been quite different reasons for the apparent decline of historiography during this period. For one thing, there seems to have been an enlargement, a wider dispersal, of historical interest. To an increased extent, writers and thinkers now devoted themselves to subjects such as geography, science, and ethnography.

3. TACITUS ON EMPIRE AND EMPERORS

Such tendencies are apparent in the earliest historical writings of the greatest post-Augustan historian, Tacitus. In his later publications, and particularly in the work that I have translated here, he incorporates and blends in a single structure all the traditional features of historical writing. The manuscript heading reads only ‘From the death of the divine Augustus’, but the title soon given to the work, the Annals, recalls that Roman traditions are ever apparent. Here, too, are the interests of the later, Hellenistic, Greeks: ethnology, biography, psychology, rhetorical types and situations (his battle-scenes, for example, often create more factual problems than they solve), and emotional effects, aiming at pathetic stress and seeking to make events seem tragic and terrible.

Moral purpose, too, is never absent from Tacitus' mind. The sequence of events on which he chooses to focus his attention provoked the sternest moral reflections. To him, as to many others, decline and disaster seemed due to vice. Virtue and vice are continually emphasized and contrasted. As Tacitus himself says, ‘It seems to me a historian's foremost duty to ensure that merit is recorded, and to confront evil words and deeds with the fear of posterity's denunciations.’¹²

That was the trend of Tacitus' mind; it was also the trend of ancient historiography as a whole, with its epic, tragic, and moralizing background. These influences combined to inspire Tacitus with an exalted conception of his task. To him, history is a conspicuously elevated theme. He deliberately concentrates on subjects which contribute to his dramatic, meaningful whole.

Now the highest and most significant drama appeared to be centred on the all-powerful, glamorous, sinister imperial court. So we hear much of the emperors and their entourages. The Roman imperial personages do not, in our own day, any longer play an integral part in general culture, or exercise the fascination which once placed their lifesize marble busts in every mansion. True, the melodramatic novels of earlier days have not altogether ceased, and are now supplemented by even more spectacular burlesques in the cinema. But the Palace of the Caesars, like its picturesque evocations in Piranesi's eighteenth-century etchings, seems too outrageously remote from an age of quieter artistic tastes and economic aspirations. Or it may be that the even more formidable absolute rulers whom some countries have experienced in our lifetimes have made antique autocrats vieux jeu. Yet not only did the imperial tragedies give a permanently admirable historian his greatest opportunities, but the workings of a Roman emperor's power and influence, and his varying attitudes to problems of loyalty, have great relevance to the modern world.

The outlying territories are given a partial, tantalizing record; for example, Tacitus is interested in Asia, which he governed, and in Germany, which, again from personal experience, he saw as the source of the greatest future hazards.¹³ Yet he remains the heir to the traditionally centripetal view of Roman history. The emperor into whose reign he may have lived, Hadrian (a.d. 117-38), was to develop the idea of a Roman Commonwealth in which the provinces had a proud role as constituent parts, anticipatory of the national states to come. But to Tacitus, perhaps implying a criticism of the new imperial ideas, Rome is all-important. It is towards Rome that the most lurid light is generally directed. When we read of the faults or fate of an occasional visitor or governor in the provinces, Rome is in mind. And Tacitus, thinking of Rome, thinks of its emperor. Indeed the provinces, too, chiefly figure as parts of the immense structure which conferred on its ruler the heaviest responsibility that man had ever had to bear.

He had once intended to cap his earlier major work, the Histories, with an account of his own happier times under Trajan and Hadrian. But he shelved this task provisionally—and as it turned out, permanently—in favour of the earlier period. For that contained the sources of recent evils; and on those evils, for all the improved conditions of his own day, he still brooded.

Tacitus claims that he is unmoved by indignation or partisanship, since in his case ‘the customary incentives to these are lacking’¹⁴—he has nothing to gain from them or to lose from their absence. Such protestations were conventional. Yet he was utterly sincere. So perhaps it must be said that to some extent (as we all do frequently) he deceived himself. For his famous character-study of Tiberius does not seem to us free from indignation or partisanship. The reign of Tiberius (a.d. 14-37) had ended nearly eighty years before Tacitus wrote about him. But the historian's hostile attitude reflects the fact that, when he wrote his major works, he had recently lived through the equally or even more sombre and—to senators—terrifying last years of Domitian (a.d. 81-96). The mental disturbance that this experience had caused was probably all the worse because Domitian was on Tacitus' conscience. For as a senator and high official he had been obliged or induced, as he hints in the Agricola, not merely to accept promotion but to acquiesce in purges undertaken by the emperor in circles close to the historian himself.

So Tacitus was obsessed by the real or imaginary Domitians of past history. Domitian had admired Tiberius. But there were many other reasons, too, why Tacitus decided that the evils which had proliferated under Domitian had their roots under Tiberius. Nowadays we believe that Tiberius was a gloomy but apparently honest ruler—a man who owed many of the tragedies of his reign to his inability to conduct personal and public relations. Augustus had conducted them excellently. Indeed Augustus' whole régime, with its elaborate constitutional fictions indicating that the autocracy was a restoration of the Republic, had depended not only on force but also on his delicate handling of people, individually and in the mass. The glum Tiberius did not handle them delicately. He does not seem to have been too keen to tackle the task at all. Perhaps he was too honest for it.

But Tacitus regards him as anything but honest. To him, Tiberius is the arch-hypocrite. Tacitus is always deeply preoccupied with the discrepancy between fact and impression, and he lays continual stress on the duplicity and concealment of Tiberius. In a series of terrible incidents and comments, he is depicted in the role of the stock tyrant of the ancient literatures, unjust, sensual, ruthless, and—above all—suspicious and cunning. His mother Livia, also, to the indignation of most modern historians, emerges as a fearsome intriguer and multiple murderess. To blacken her and Tiberius all the more effectively, their young, attractive kinsman Germanicus is portrayed as a brilliant prince who can do no wrong; and his war in Germany is painted in glowing colours which almost conceal its expensive uselessness.

Tacitus suggests that Tiberius possessed a radically vicious nature which only became apparent by degrees. It is surmised, too, that the flaws might never have been apparent at all if he had not become all-powerful. The characters of other significant and powerful men are depicted by brief, passing, parenthetical observations: by this means a huge array of contemporary figures are isolated from the anonymous mass and vividly illuminated. They are of all degrees of power and significance. But they are mostly senators, and often leaders. Tacitus chiefly displays his art in the gradual, piece-by-piece presentation—or occasionally the full-length portrayal—of the dominant and mighty. And no one has ever equalled the might of a Roman emperor. Tacitus' study of Tiberius, with its ulterior preoccupations, is hardly a psychological study. But it is an indelible and unforgettable picture of a great man as another great man saw him.

Every resource of Tacitus' talent is devoted to painting this picture. One of his favourite devices, one of the touches by which he builds up a character, is the damning ‘aside’. But he utilizes every possible sort of suggestion to imply the worst. For the facts do not always seem to confirm the sinister interpretations which he places upon them. Miss B. Walker¹⁵ has invoked Jung's distinction between ‘sensational’ and ‘intuitive’ types—the former perceive things as they are, the latter pass details over carelessly, but are well able to appreciate the inner meaning of occurrences, and their potential relations and consequences. Tacitus, asserts this author, is of the latter, intuitive type; and that may help to explain his occasional distortion of the facts in arriving at his vivid impressions.

After Tiberius, his accounts of Claudius and Nero, viewed as character studies, can afford to be more straightforward. Though Claudius is now believed to have been a painstaking and bold administrator and reformer, his faults and those of his terrifying women Messalina and Agrippina, and the other evils of his court, spring readily to the eye. So do the tragedies and bad jokes of Nero's régime. It is true that Tacitus, with the old Roman love of aggressive glory, hardly refers to the Neronian Peace except in a sneering parenthesis—for aggression was again fashionable in his own day, under Trajan—and we have learned from Sir Ronald Syme's Tacitus to be much more vigilant for contemporary references. Yet Nero himself was as ‘vulgar, timid, and sanguinary’ as Merivale called him. Merivale was following Tacitus. But Tacitus' accounts of these more straightforward reigns did not need to revive the techniques of damning suggestion lavished on Tiberius. Instead we can enjoy the writer's extraordinary, and very Roman, gift for pictorial description. We can read of the Great Fire, or of Agrippina's murder, or Tigellinus' party—those highlighted major descriptions at which Tacitus excels—without worrying whether he is playing fair. It is rather his account of Tiberius which seems to us to convict him of the hatred and partiality which he denies. But it is so enthralling that it carries conviction as a work of art—and very nearly carries conviction as history.

His interpretation of facts, then, whether unconsciously or through deliberate fervid intention, is often invidious, but the actual facts which he records are generally accurate—so accurate that they involuntarily contradict his sinister innuendoes. There is no doubt that he took a great deal of care in selecting his material. But where did he find it? Here we are lost. We often have no external check on what he says. And we still know very little about his sources. He himself does not greatly enlighten us. It must be granted that he mentions certain predecessors, for example the historian and literary historian Pliny the elder. But systematic, careful references are a modern invention. Ancient historians only specified their sources in a fragmentary and unsystematic fashion. Sometimes it seems as if pride impels them to mention only those on whom they have least relied—and this might almost be suspected of Tacitus. So when he claims judicious selection, this can, it is true, sometimes be taken at its face value, but often it proves to be another means towards a censorious hint, a damning delineation.

His attitude to the political structure of the State reveals, if not the split personality which some have identified, at least a very difficult and fundamental dilemma, which is as relevant to our world as to his. For Tacitus greatly admired, perhaps almost to the point of obsession, the traditional virtues of Rome and its antique Republic. Yet at the same time he fully understood that the Republic was a thing of the past and could never be revived. As the Histories are succeeded by the Annals, he even comes to regard political opposition to the autocrats, if it goes beyond passive, resigned disapproval, as theatrical and immoderate. Rome has declined so far, he seems to feel, that there is no room any longer for traditional valour. Passivity has become the only honourable course, and the decorous middle path followed by men like his father-in-law Agricola—as described in the biography Tacitus devoted to him—or by Marcus Lepidus or Seneca as they are summed up in the Annals,¹⁶ is what now wins his admiration.

Again, when he is talking of post-Augustan tyrants, he appears, by way of contrast, to admire Augustus. Yet his introductory survey of Augustus' own reign (exceedingly valuable as a check on the official versions which had blared forth from the chancery) is one long list of sneers. He was writing under enlightened emperors, and, though some detect traces that he was disappointed even with Trajan,¹⁷ he expresses grateful awareness of this relative good fortune. Yet it seems that he is not really able to believe that an autocrat can be good. For he constantly stresses the evils of rule by one man. Perhaps this conviction is the central point of his philosophy. No amount of experience, he infers, can stand up against the corrupting effects of autocratic authority. ‘In spite of all his experience of public affairs,’ he makes Arruntius say, ‘Tiberius was transformed and deranged by absolute power’.¹⁸ So it was under Tiberius that freedom suffered its most fatal losses. As these are remorselessly described we do not feel two thousand years distant.

Tacitus is deeply interested not only in the characters of individuals but in the whole range of group psychology, with all its cross-currents and irrationalities. A large proportion of the first book of the Annals, like a major part of the Histories, is concerned with the psychology of the army which was playing so sinister a role in this process of disintegration. And Tacitus is also fascinated, for the same reason, by the senate. His picture of this once mighty oligarchic body is intentionally a depressing one. Its powerlessness under the emperors is unsparingly described, for it illustrates the moral theme of degeneracy from the good old days of the past. Although Tacitus is a staunch senator, and a supporter of the traditional oligarchic view of society, he places no reliance on the senate of imperial times. For he knows that the senate is helpless against the ruler: it is he who, through his own direct and indirect means of influence, does everything that matters. That is why Tacitus examines the motives and morals of successive emperors so carefully. That also is why he examines those critical moments when one autocrat died and another began to rule. The Histories, with their detailed account of the Civil Wars of a.d. 68-70, had shown the disasters which could occur when the succession was disputed. This was another dilemma. For civil war, Tacitus felt, was even worse than any autocrat, because of the excesses it engendered and the temptation it offered to potential German and Parthian invaders.

Yet rule by one man was also utterly hazardous, for Tacitus' experience and temperament make him well aware that man is, and always has been, unreliable; so that, when the State is unified under an omnipotent ruler, human happiness hangs by a thread. When the emperor is a bad man, and rules badly, there is misery. Oppressive rule causes—as it is caused by—moral degeneracy. A series of themes continually reiterated by Tacitus illustrate the insidious increase of both. The idea of Progress was, in any case, alien to the mentality of the ancients, and here, already, is the Decline of the West which has so fascinated Spengler and Toynbee in our own day. Certainly, the emperors under whom Tacitus wrote were enlightened enough. But time had shown, he felt, that under an autocracy there was no certain safeguard against oppression. So he is embittered and pessimistic.

4. TACITUS AND THE WORLD

There are moments and whole epochs when everything seems, to Tacitus, to be at the mercy of a fate which is blind—and even malignant.

On such matters he is as inconsistent as most other ancient historians—and as most people are today. When specific causes for disasters are identifiable—such as moral degradation—he does not generally blame fate for them. Yet it sometimes appears to him that what has blighted events is anger from heaven: from the gods, as a Roman would put it (or he might also say, from God). Tacitus, spasmodically and with reserves, is a believer in prophecy and portents. At other times he is not certain whether there are any interested divine powers at all. And he is often afraid that mankind may be doomed. The existence of such an attitude suggests a reason why subsequent generations would increasingly turn to religion—why they withdrew into an other-worldliness which led to the prevalence of mystics, the victory of Christianity, and the proliferation of monks and nuns.

Human fate often looks black to Tacitus. So does human nature. Yet he is far from sceptical about the potentialities of the human spirit. Even in times of civil war and tyrannical government, he is able to point to human actions of extraordinary virtue, bravery, and pertinacity. Indeed he is a humanist, and one whose contribution to our western tradition of humanism has been immense and singularly inspiring.

Yet the Annals of Tacitus were almost unappreciated for nearly fourteen hundred years.¹⁹ Indeed, they only survived by a narrow chance. Our knowledge of the work is based on a single medieval manuscript of the first half of the work and another of its second half—the two Medicean codices, now both at Florence. Boccaccio (1313-1375) seems to have known one of them. But certain aspects of their rediscovery in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are veiled in obscurity. The High Renaissance was less attentive to Tacitus than to Livy, who provided it with suitable heroes. However, before 1500, Tacitus—for the first time since his death—was beginning to exercise a rapidly growing influence. At that time ancient history was a favourite field for translation and study; and the fame of Tacitus reached sensational proportions.

The first complete edition of his surviving works was published at Rome in 1515. In the same century Machiavelli and Montaigne were greatly moved by him. Later, a committee of Venetian scholars was to blame Tacitus for the attitude of Machiavelli ‘who would destroy public virtues’. This may seem an unfair judgement of Tacitus. But, if so, its unexpectedness illustrates a conspicuous feature of his reputation. He was so versatile, and his personality so complex, that he seemed to provide slogans for—and against—every section of political opinion. Everybody saw in him an adherent of something different. Thus, while the Venetians attacked him for political cynicism, a French royalist praised him as a supporter of autocratic law and order; and, in reaction, he was attacked by John Milton as one who had despaired of the Republic. Towards the end of the seventeenth century Tacitus' reputation temporarily declined, because of two opposite factors: the impact of religious scruples, and the growth of rationalism, neither of which phenomena was in harmony with the historian's attitude. After 1700, however, he found new followers. They were particularly numerous in England, where, ever since Francis Bacon, he had been admired as the enemy of despots. In France, too, he exercised a profound influence on thinkers of the Revolutionary age. ‘The utterance of his name,’ declared André Chénier, ‘turns tyrants pale.’ Madame Roland was reading him in prison before her execution, and the echoes of Tacitus in Le Vieux Cordelier, the journal of Camille Desmoulins, caused Robespierre to have the paper burned. And the Founding Fathers of the United States of America studied him with equal care—deeply concerned with his warning against a constitution of mixed type,²⁰ which was what they hoped to establish.

Such impassioned discussion, during the last four hundred years, affords a striking contrast to the neglect of Tacitus in the Middle Ages, when all references to him are of the most tenuous character; and in the latter part of antiquity itself, to which he left no school. Why, for much more than a millennium after his death, was he so little regarded?

5. THE STYLE OF TACITUS: TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

The principal cause of this neglect was unquestionably the unusual and difficult Latin in which he wrote. The outstanding quality of Tacitus is his brilliance as a literary artist. Racine called him ‘the greatest painter of antiquity’. Others have compared his work not so much to a series of pictures as to a continuous frieze. But of his supreme artistic genius there can be no doubt. A large part of this artistry resides in his style—the aspect of his talent which a translator has least hope of reproducing. Now ancient readers usually recognized stylistic talent, and by no means found that it interfered with their enjoyment when history contained a strong infusion of rhetoric. But the style of Tacitus, as it had developed to its culminating point in these Annals, was indeed extraordinary. It displays a sharp, astringent and certainly deliberate contrast to the rotund periods of Cicero and to the flowing, ‘milky’ diction of Livy (p. 15).

For one thing, since Livy's day rhetoric had gained mightily in strength as the basis of Roman education and taste. Under the influence of rhetorical declamations in school and society, the rounded fluency of classical style had been superseded by the pointed brevity of Silver Latin writers, such as Seneca (p. 12), who was not only one of the chief political figures of the age described in the Annals but a very clever moralizing epigrammatist—and the son of a leading professor of rhetoric. But the mature prose of Tacitus, besides undergoing all the influence of Silver Latin, has added to them his own formidable individuality.

The colour of his prose differs greatly in accordance with the varied intensity of his feeling. Sometimes, to give us a rest, there is a pedestrian factual passage. His style is at its most idiosyncratic when the subject-matter is not factual but emotional. When Tacitus ponders on oppression or moral decline, he writes in short, abrupt sentences, in staccato phrases, in trenchant, surprising epigrams far removed from our Ciceronian grammar-books. The vividness of his words and phrases often has a semi-poetical quality. If he borrowed much (p. 15), he made it his own; though the traditional and original elements in his style are notoriously hard to disengage, there is no doubt about its peculiarity. Much Latin literature is remote from the spoken tongue, but never had it been as remote as this. Tacitus is known to have become a fine orator (p. 7). In his writings, and especially in these Annals, he has transformed the rhetoric and ‘point’ of the Silver Age from the second-rate quality of all too many of its exponents into an unequalled brilliance.

But what a problem this brilliant style sets to the translator! The task has been attempted many times. But the more prudent translators have prefaced their efforts by apologetic reminders that ‘Tacitus has never been translated, and probably never will be’—that he is ‘the despair of the translator’; it is ‘une œuvre impossible’.

To begin with, textual ambiguities quite often make it hard even to decide what Tacitus wrote. Since the text of each half of the work depends entirely on a single medieval manuscript, there is ample room for suspicions that error may have crept in. However, let us now assume, optimistically, that the meaning is understood. The next problem is to convey, in such minute degree as is practicable, the heart of the matter—that is to say, to reproduce the meaning in English; to convey, as faithfully as possible, the essential thought and significance of what tacitus wrote. But ought one not also to attempt to reproduce his expression? In theory a translator, as opposed to a mere paraphraser, ought to do so. In practice, too, he ought to attempt to do so—at least to a limited extent. For example, a translation of Tacitus must aim at conciseness. It will be too far from his spirit altogether if it succumbs to our national inclination ‘that the writer shall set out his ideas with some space between them’. But any attempt to render Tacitus' peculiar Latin into peculiar English would mean abysmal failure in another most peremptory requirement. For, in our mid-twentieth century, it would not be readable—and, except as a mere crib, an unreadable translation of a great master has obviously not done its job.

In translating in this series the fantastic Apuleius, Robert Graves remarked: ‘Paradoxically, the effect of oddness is best achieved in convulsed times like the present by writing in as easy and sedate an English as possible.’ ‘Sedate’ is surely not an ambitious enough epithet for a good rendering of Apuleius, or of Tacitus; but his reminder that twentieth-century English has to be plain is still relevant. No amount of colourful or fanciful language will make the strange personality of Tacitus understandable to contemporary readers, who find rhetoric and the grand style unnatural and unreadable. Today the only faint hope of rendering his complexity lies in as pungent a simplicity as the translator can achieve.

Unlike Tacitus, I have sought to avoid confusion by giving names in full, and also by placing (I), (II), etc., after them when more than one person of the same name is mentioned in the course of the book. I have only withheld these numerals in the case of the two Agrippinas:²¹ in Part 1 ‘Agrippina’ means Agrippina the elder, in Part 2 her daughter. ‘Gaius’ is the emperor (Caligula), ‘Gaius Caesar’ is Augustus' grandson. ‘Nero Drusus’ is Tiberius' brother, ‘Drusus’ his son, ‘Drusus Caesar’ his grandnephew. Yet in spite of all these precautions the Imperial House can only be disentangled by employing the genealogical tables which are at the back of the book.

Wherever possible I have avoided or translated technical phraseology. For example, I have tried to Anglicize words relating to the Roman army—most of which are wholly incomprehensible without an effort at modernization. I am very grateful to Mr Eric Birley for supplying me with equivalents for Roman military terms which he, with his great experience of this subject, regards as close enough to be serviceable. Some may miss a few familiar words, military and otherwise; I preferred not to keep them, in the interests of throwing off the more misleading parts of the traditional apparatus.

Thus I have revolted against the outworn ‘freedman’ and ‘colony’. ‘Freedman’ means nothing in modern English, so I have preferred ‘ex-slave’, ‘freed slave’, or ‘former slave’. ‘Colony’ is misleading (partly because Roman colonies were towns, not countries), so I have used the word ‘settlement’.²² Also included are those few basic Roman official terms for which even the broadest or vaguest equivalent in English does not exist, such as ‘consul’ and ‘praetor’—and ‘sestertius’ or sesterce, on which my note owes part of its information to the late Professor A. H. M. Jones.

I have translated the names of rivers and mountains (when these are identifiable), but it has not seemed possible to do so in the case of towns, of which the modern designations are sometimes Christian or Moslem and would sound anachronistic. Instead I have marshalled the ancient and modern names alongside each other in a list at the end. Almost every place-name mentioned by Tacitus is included (in its ancient form) in one of the maps.

Throughout the centuries it has been disputed whether translators ought, or ought not, to borrow felicitous words or phrases from their forerunners. There have been so many versions of Tacitus that strict avoidance of precedent would have added a further and almost insuperable difficulty to my task. Indeed, it would sometimes have meant that the only possible happy rendering would have to be avoided—too high a price to pay for the illusory advantage of complete independence. I owe a debt of gratitude to those translators into English whose thoughts I have, on occasion, consciously or unconsciously appropriated.

I owe an acknowledgement to the Cambridge University Press for allowing me to include in this Introduction certain passages from my book Roman Literature. Amendments incorporated in reprints are owed to Professor M. I. Finley, Professor E. N. Lane, Professor Sir Ronald Syme, Mr K. Wellesley and Professor E. C. Woodcock. I am also very grateful to Dr E. V. Rieu and Mrs Betty Radice, successive editors of Penguin Classics, for their help.

Notes

1. A list of Roman emperors will be found at the end of the book.

2. For the special relation between Roman oratory and history, see also below, p. 12.

3. This type of literature goes back at least as far as the Euagoras of Isocrates and the Agesilaus of Xenophon in the fourth century b.c.

4. For English translations of Tacitus' works see p. 437.

5. Stoic thought, as expanded by Seneca (c. 5 b.c.-a.d. 65), can be read in a Penguin Classic (R. Campbell, Letters from a Stoic, 1969).

6. Cicero, De Oratore, ll. 62.

7. Cicero, De Legibus, l, 5. 3.

8. Thucydides, l, 22.

9. For their works in English, see p. 437.

10. Granius Licinianus, XXXVI.

11. By Panaetius (p. 12) and especially Posidonius of Apamea (c. 135-50 b.c.).

12. Annals, III, 65.

13. His inadequate picture of other important areas, notably Spain, may have been partially remedied in the missing parts of his work.

14. Annals, I, 1.

15. The Annals of Tacitus (1952, reprinted 1968), p. 189.

16. Annals, IV, 20; XIII, 2; etc.

17. The circumstances in which Trajan came to the throne, after a brief threat of chaos under the weak Nerva, came as a shock.

18. Annals, VI, 48.

19. For his attitude to the Christians and Jews, see below, p. 366.

20. Tacitus, Annals, IV, 33, 1.

21. And for the various kings called Cotys and Mithridates, unless they belong to a numbered sequence of monarchs in their own kingdoms; but most of those mentioned belong to different kingdoms along Rome's cordon sanitaire.

22. See List of Technical Terms at end of book (Ex-Slave, Settlement).