SOURCE: Hadas, Moses. Introduction to The Complete Works of Tacitus, by Tacitus, edited by Moses Hadas, translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, pp. ix-xxii. New York: The Modern Library, 1942.

[In the following essay, Hadas discusses Tacitus's life, career, and artistry and evaluates his trustworthiness as an historian.]

The apparent insensitivity of the Romans to their greatest historian is an exasperating accident of our faulty tradition or a melancholy commentary upon their civilization. Until the end of the fourth century when Ammianus Marcellinus, an Antiochene Greek, undertook to write a continuation of Tacitus' histories no writer other than his own friend Pliny makes mention of him. It is true that the Emperor Tacitus (275-276 a.d.) is reported, not improbably though the authority is dubious, to have ordered that ten copies of his putative ancestor's works be made annually and that these be deposited in various libraries. In any case the story would indicate that Tacitus had fallen into oblivion; and it is in fact only through a single mutilated manuscript that Tacitus' greatest work has survived the Middle Ages.

The Younger Pliny was associated with Tacitus in important legal pleading and has left us eleven letters addressed to him. These and a single inscription from Asia Minor are the only evidence for Tacitus' life and works we possess outside those works themselves. We know neither the place nor the date of his birth, though it has been suggested that he came from the North of Italy, and Pliny, who was born in 62 a.d., addresses him as somewhat his senior. This combined with the calculation of the probable age at which he held certain offices would give 55 a.d. or somewhat later for Tacitus' birth year. The best manuscript gives his name as Publius Cornelius Tacitus, but we cannot be sure of his given name, for other manuscripts give it as Gaius Cornelius Tacitus. The decidedly aristocratic bias in his works and the fashionable rhetorical education of which he speaks in his Dialogue on Oratory would suggest that his family possessed means and position; his marriage to the daughter of Agricola, governor of Britain, in 78 would point in the same direction. When Agricola died in 93 Tacitus tells us he had been absent from Rome for four years; the natural assumption is that he was engaged in some form of provincial administration, perhaps in Germany. This would suit what he tells us at the beginning of his Histories: “I would not deny that my elevation was begun by Vespasian, augmented by Titus, and still further advanced by Domitian.” From Pliny again we learn that Tacitus as consul under Nerva in 97 pronounced the funeral oration for Verginius Rufus, one of the most admirable characters of his day. Three years later, in association with Pliny, Tacitus won an important case for the Africans against their oppressive governor, Marius Priscus. The inscription mentioned above indicates that Tacitus was governor of Asia Minor under Trajan, probably in 112. The latest event alluded to in Tacitus' extant writings is a reference in the second book of the Annals to the extension of the Empire to the Persian Gulf. This took place in 116, and Tacitus may have died at any subsequent date that will allow time for the completion of the remaining books of the Annals.

Of his works the oldest is probably the Dialogue on Oratory. The authenticity of this treatise has been doubted from time to time, chiefly on the ground of its stylistic divergence from the other writings. Its neo-Ciceronian style, markedly unlike that of his other works, has led some to date it not long after the dramatic date of the Dialogue, which is 75 a.d. But at the beginning of the Dialogue Tacitus states that he is reporting a conversation he overheard as a young man, and at the beginning of the Agricola, written in 98, he deprecates his inexperience in writing; and these considerations have led some scholars to move the date far forward. No other Latin dialogue (and we have many, from Cicero and Seneca) approaches Tacitus' in dramatic verisimilitude, and it would seem reasonable to suppose that even after Tacitus had developed his own unique style he could still represent older rhetoricians in a medium appropriate to them.

This golden booklet, as it has been styled since the Renascence, deals with much of perennial interest: with vocational and humanistic education, with dilettantism and scholarship, with philosophy as a guide in life, with the loss of individual responsibility as the price of good government. The subject of the inquiry is the change in oratory since Cicero's day. The change in educational ideals and in the conditions of life are mentioned as contributory causes; but the factor which overshadows all others is the change in political life. Only the Republic could make oratory vital, for only in the Republic did oratory serve a necessary function in the body politic.

The Agricola, written in 98, is a laudatory biography of the author's father-in-law, who had had a successful military and administrative career in Britain and had then fallen under the displeasure of Domitian. The early chapters tell of Agricola's career to his appointment as governor, and then give an account of Britain and its relations to Rome. The two strands are then combined, until Agricola's recall by the Emperor Domitian. Much is made of Agricola's exemplary conduct while he was the object of the Emperor's jealousy. The biography continues with an account of its hero's last illness and death, and closes with an address to the survivors. This epilogue is one of the finest passages in Latin and one of the best condolences in any literature. It is true that the life is eulogy rather than history, and that the eulogy might be applicable not to its subject alone but to any virtuous Roman. But for us, as for Tacitus' first readers, it is important to know that a good Roman could live through Domitian's Terror without becoming either an accessory to the Emperor's crimes or his compliant tool, “that great men can exist even under evil rulers” (posse etiam sub malis principibus magnos viros esse).

The fullest form of the title of the Germania, also written in 98, is On the Origin, Geography, Institutions, and Tribes of the Germans, and this indicates the book's character. It is a geographic and ethnologic treatise, artistic in form and scientific by contemporary standards. It has become a sort of ethnologic Bible for the Germans, and is studied in modern Germany more than any other ancient book. The early chapters deal with the public and private usages of the Germans in general, and then we have a more or less systematic account of the various tribes, with individual characteristics and other information given incidentally. The twenty-odd pages of this treatise constitute the most exhaustive and valuable work of its character preserved to us from antiquity. More than six hundred items of information are recorded, of a credibility, to be sure, varying with that of Tacitus' sources. The sources were undoubtedly the best available, and included eye-witness accounts as well as written material, and Tacitus was a conscientious workman; but it is as absurd to credit Tacitus with the ideals of nineteenth-century scholarship as it is to despise the work as uninformed journalism. The latter was the view of the great Mommsen, and is certainly as wide of the mark as is Gibbon's praise of the work as the result of “accurate observation and diligent inquiries.”

It is a temptation to which many have succumbed to look upon the Germania as a sort of Utopia, a conscious idealization of a primitive and unspoiled people calculated to chasten and reform the decadent Romans. This view is justified in the degree that a strong moralizing strain runs through all Tacitus' work. It has been wittily remarked that no one in Tacitus is good except Agricola and the Germans. But the fact is that too many unlovely traits are reported of the Germans along with the idealization to justify making moral improvement the main end of the book.

We come now to the specifically historical works. Of these we know there were thirty books, and it is now generally assumed that there were twelve of the Histories and eighteen of the Annals. Mention should be made of the alternative theory current until recently which gave the Histories and the Annals fourteen and sixteen books respectively. The Histories covered the period from 69, the year of the four Emperors, to the death of Domitian in 96. Only the first four books and a fragment of the fifth have been preserved. The extant portion includes the melodramatic events of 69 and most of 70. The work was written and published during the reign of Trajan; more precise dating is impossible. The only title given in the manuscript of Tacitus' greatest work is From the Death of Deified Augustus, but the customary Annals is justified on other grounds. This work covered the period from the death of Augustus in 14 a.d. to that of Nero in 68. The extant portion includes the first four books, a fragment of the fifth, most of the sixth (the first part is missing), and books eleven to sixteen, with the beginning of the eleventh and the end of the sixteenth missing. These extant books cover the reign of Tiberius (14-37), the latter seven years of Claudius (47-54), and the first twelve years of Nero (54-66). We have noted above that a passage in the second book indicates that it was written about 116. The Annals and Histories together covered the period from 14 to 96. In Annals 3.24 Tacitus promises a work on the reign of Augustus if life should permit, and in Histories 1.1 he reserves for his old age a study of the reigns of Nerva and Trajan. It may be significant of Tacitus' interests that the eighty-two years which his history covers included the frightful half of the period he proposed to deal with (and for this half it is, indeed, our best source), and that he did not find time for the happy reigns at either end of the span; the usual assumption is, of course, that Tacitus did not live to complete these projected works.

An account of Tacitus' career must be meagre, but fuller knowledge would, after all, be useful only insofar as it might contribute to a fuller understanding of his work; and here we are not so badly off, for his books show vividly what manner of man he was. No other ancient author has so impregnated his works with his own personality. It is easy enough to see what Tacitus thought of the world in which he lived, what his convictions and his prejudices were. The illustration and enforcement of certain convictions seem to him to be, in fact, the prime purpose in the writing of history. “This I regard as history's highest function,” he writes (Annals 3.65), “to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.” His moralizing intent is made even clearer in another passage (Annals 4.33): “There must be good in carefully noting and recording this period, for it is but few who have the foresight to distinguish right from wrong or what is sound from what is hurtful, while most men learn virtue from the fortunes of others. Still, though this is instructive, it gives very little pleasure.”

But no desire to give pleasure will persuade Tacitus to lower the dignity of his work. At several points he expresses regret that his incidents are so mean and his personalities so petty compared with the grander events and figures of the Republic, and he refuses to compromise what dignity his theme possesses by spicing his account with what is merely titivating. “I think it unbecoming the task I have undertaken,” he writes (Histories 2.50), “to collect fabulous marvels and to entertain with fiction the tastes of my readers.” A form such entertainment might take is glanced at in Annals 13.31: “One might fill volumes with the praise of the foundations and timber work on which Nero piled the immense amphitheatre in the Field of Mars. But we have learned that it suits the dignity of the Roman people to reserve history for great achievements, and to leave such details to the city's daily register.”

It is the moralizing intent which explains and is served by Tacitus' interest in people. Broad principles, large movements, even great achievements move him not for their own sake but because they tell us about the people who were responsible for them. “Tacite a introduit l'homme dans l'histoire,” writes a French critic, “c'est l'homme, c'est l'humanité qu'il raconte en racontant Rome et les Romains.” And not humanity in general but individual humans. Always Tacitus strives to penetrate into the thoughts and motives of the actors in his drama. It is Tacitus' skill in delineating characters, particularly intense and theatrical Roman characters, that is apt to strike the reader as his outstanding achievement. Macaulay has put the case well: “In the delineation of character Tacitus is unrivalled among historians and has very few superiors among dramatists and novelists. By the delineation of character we do not mean the practice of drawing up epigrammatic catalogues of good and bad qualities, and appending them to the names of eminent men. No writer, indeed, has done this more skilfully than Tacitus; but this is not his peculiar glory. All the persons who occupy a large space in his works have an individuality of character which seems to pervade all their words and actions. We know them as if we had lived with them.”

“Very few superiors among dramatists and novelists.” One recalls Aristotle's distinction between the poet (which would include the dramatist and novelist) and the historian, and his insistence that the poet is the more philosophical because his picture carries the conviction of general validity and is universally true (Poetics 1451b). Aristotle's historian, on the other hand, however accurate his transcription of particular events, remains only the reporter of particular events, which may in fact be freakish occurrences of highly improbable possibilities. The philosopher prefers probable impossibilities. Here a comparison with Tacitus' greatest Greek and greatest Latin predecessor is illuminating. Thucydides is interested in the actual and probable behavior not of individual men but of men in general, living in society. He does tell us a good deal about such men as Pericles, Alcibiades, Nicias, it is true, but the details he gives are such as the reader must possess in order to understand the course of the Peloponnesian War, which is Thucydides' main concern. For details of Pericles' relations with Aspasia or Alcibiades' lisp we must go to Plutarch, who is so far indifferent to political considerations that he represents the Peloponnesian War as having been started by Pericles in order to cover a scandal arising out of a private quarrel. Livy tells us much about the great Romans of the Republic, but his object, like that of Augustus in lining his Forum with their statues, was to create a gallery of heroes for the patriotic devotion of his contemporaries. All or almost all are idealized. In the period of the Second Punic War, for example, Fabius Cunctator, Marcellus, and Scipio Africanus are practically beatified, and the reverses of that war are blamed upon two scapegoats, Flaminius and Varro. We could guess, and modern historians have demonstrated, that the one group are not the saints they are pictured and the other not the villains. Tacitus' characters, unlike Thucydides', are there for their own sake, but they are there to be understood, not merely to be praised or condemned. And if Tacitus' bias goes far in the direction of pessimism we need but to look about us, alas, to be convinced that he is nearer the truth than is his contemporary Plutarch, who lived not in Rome but in a provincial Greek town, and who chose the men whose lives he wished to examine.

Something like this must have been in Gibbon's mind when he said of Tacitus that he was the “first of historians who applied the science of philosophy to the study of facts.” For in philosophy in the ordinary sense Tacitus does not appear to advantage. It is in fact impossible to extract a philosophy from his writings. His Weltanschauung has been criticized as immature and full of irreconcilable contradictions. Following the tradition of Polybius he explains events by natural causes, and when natural causes fail he invokes accident or Fortune. But Tacitus refers events to transcendent causes also; he speaks of the gods, their grace and their wrath. He speaks of Inexorable Fate and Absolute Necessity, and then of chance, which makes a jest of prosperity and doubles the tragedy of suffering. It may be only a rhetorical striving for point that results in such odd combinations of the immanent and transcendent in explaining events: Varus succumbs to destiny and the strength of Arminius (Annals 1.55); a famine is averted by the grace of God and a mild Winter (Annals 12.43). The fact of the matter is that Tacitus is no more a closet philosopher than a research historian. He is a practical man, really less confused in relating life to theory than such Stoics as Seneca and even the Younger Cato; he is interested in events and not in speculation. It may be significant that he practically avoids the word philosophia and uses the homelier Latin term sapientia instead. Those expressions in his works which may be combined to prove his philosophic naïveté are part of a cultured vocabulary, and show only that Tacitus was neither a misologist nor interested in creating a neat and necessarily impracticable system.

Two other characteristics of Tacitus' work which are likely to distress the modern historian may be mentioned. One is the attribution to his characters of speeches which they cannot have delivered (an inscription discovered at Lyons in 1528 gives part of an actual speech of Claudius which Tacitus reports only in brief outline but quite differently in Annals 11.24), and the other is the manifest inaccuracy of his battle accounts. As for the speeches, they had become a fixture in history since Thucydides, and as in Thucydides they are frequently the most convenient way of setting forth a situation or a point of view. A discourse dramatically suited to events is more effective than exposition, and if effectiveness and intelligibility are desiderata, why reproduce a speech which is less effective and intelligible than one the writer can supply? Ancient historians are always more artists than scientists and could regard only as a fetish the sanctity we attach to inverted commas. Such a fictive speech as the British chieftain is made to deliver in the Agricola, for example, almost certainly sets forth the grounds for native opposition much better than any native could set them forth.

As for the battle description which follows this speech, it seems to have been lifted almost bodily from Sallust's description of a battle which had been fought in Africa two centuries before. Mommsen called Tacitus the most unmilitary of historians (which is unfair to Livy), and even Gibbon says his military history is more remarkable for elegance than perspicuity. When Tacitus describes a battle we are made to feel at least that strenuous and significant action took place; as for details, he follows the practice of the later historians generally, who seem to have resorted to commonplace books for such embellishments. All the naval battles in the later historians, for example, bear so pronounced a family resemblance that one is almost forced to the conclusion that Dio Cassius and the others resorted to the same file, under the folder marked “Sea Battles.” Indeed, contemporary criticism would condemn a writer who refused to borrow from his predecessor as eccentric, and was prepared to tolerate a much larger volume of borrowing than can be charged to Tacitus.

If descriptions of battles are mere rhetoric, if speeches are fanciful, if motives are ascribed to characters when it cannot be known what their motives were, one may well ask how trustworthy the resultant history is. A modern historian guilty of such faults would surely lose all credit. But in the Roman concept the historian was never thought of as a researcher but primarily as a literary man, and his function not as the propagation of sound learning so much as the inculcation of salutary doctrine. The most highly regarded historian in Tacitus' day was Livy, who had lived a century earlier, and Livy's attitude to fact was much more cavalier than Tacitus'. Livy's professed aim was edification; he wished to make his degenerate contemporaries aware of the grand achievements and majestic personalities of their past, to the end that they might glory in the name of Rome and justify the responsibility of their noble heritage. Tacitus' program is not very different. He recognizes, to be sure, that the glory of the remote past is gone forever, but he is profoundly concerned that the degradation of the immediate past shall not be repeated. With allowance made for rhetorical embellishment customary in his day, and within the limits of distortion which his own views of morality and politics make inevitable, Tacitus never consciously sacrifices historical truth. He consulted good sources, memoirs, biographies, and official records, and he frequently implies that he had more than one source before him. He requested information of those in position to know, as we learn from a reply of Pliny to such a request. He exercises critical judgment in questioning the value of a biased account (Annals 13.20). Both knowledge and impartiality are recognized as prerequisites for the historian's task in the first chapter of the Histories. “The truthfulness of history,” he writes, “has been impaired in many ways; at first through men's ignorance of public affairs, which were now wholly strange to them, then through their passion for flattery, or, on the other hand, their hatred of their masters.” Similarly at the beginning of the Annals he insists that he is writing “without either bitterness or partiality.”

For an authoritative opinion on the historical validity of Tacitus' writings we can do no better than turn to the sober Cambridge Ancient History (10.872, 1934): “Though he occasionally appears to group events more with a view to literary effect than to strict sequence in time, it would be difficult to produce an instance when he has deliberately misstated or falsified facts, and easy to cite passages when he carefully rejects and passes over versions and rumours which suit his book better, but which he eschews. His portrait of the slow degeneration of Tiberius or Claudius is severe, but with his preconceptions, and on the evidence before him he could not write otherwise: he depicted Tiberius as he does because the evidence before him all pointed that way. Modern research tends ultimately not so much to prove Tacitus false or malignant, but rather to illustrate and stress aspects of the history of the Empire in which Tacitus was not interested. Thus it comes about that the facts he reports are usually accurate enough and rarely refuted by modern discoveries, but his interpretation must often be challenged. … The trend of present-day scholarship is towards the recognition of his integrity and essential greatness.” It is hard to imagine how bare and distorted our picture of Tacitus' period would be without Tacitus; all that has been written upon it since is either a dim reflection of his insight or a lifeless extract from his writings.

But Tacitus could see only through his own lenses, which were strongly colored, and it is a testimonial to his effectiveness that he has infected the world's view of the period with which he deals with the same tint. Tacitus was an aristocrat with a nostalgic admiration for the Republic and contempt for a populace and a nobility alike corrupted by slavery. Domitian's terror had touched his own circle and his own family. His is not history written by a white-smocked laboratory technician. His emotions are not relegated to such times as he may remove the smock and step out of his workroom. That is why he paints Tiberius too black and Germanicus too white, that is why he can carry his readers in the torrent of his own convictions.

Those critics who complain that Tacitus' philosophy cannot be reduced to a neat system are unhappy also because he does not provide a revolutionary program for restoring the Republic he so admired. He may be regarded as pusillanimous or prudential, according to the reader's disposition. A speech put into the mouth of Eprius Marcellus may fairly be cited for Tacitus' own point of view (Histories 4.8): “I do not forget the times in which I have been born, or the form of government which our fathers and grandfathers established. I may regard with admiration an earlier period, but I acquiesce in the present, and while I pray for good Emperors, I can endure whomsoever we may have.” Tyranny is galling, but the objections to it are not social or humanitarian. Indeed, Tacitus' attitude to the lower classes of society is very wide of the democratic (or Stoic) ideal. Slaves cannot be credited with normal human sensibilities, the blood of gladiators is characterized as worthless, and foreigners are regularly the object of distrust and loathing. When he reports that four thousand freedmen infected with Egyptian and Jewish “superstitions” were expelled to Sardinia he adds that the loss would be slight if they succumbed to the unhealthy climate of that island (Annals 2.85). From the point of view of general security and comfort, it is the excess of these commodities rather than their lack which distresses Tacitus. He puts a good case for oppressed provincials, but it is inefficient and greedy administration he objects to rather than the principle of empire. He rejoices in the Empire, in fact, and justifies it on the ground of the white man's burden. He realizes that empire is no longer possible without an emperor, and only desires that the emperor be virtuous. Caesarism's vice is not physical or economic oppression but spiritual degradation. The elimination of the power of the aristocracy is for Tacitus the source of corruption in society, of cringing nobles and upstart freedmen, of degradation at home and humiliation abroad. It would have been interesting to see how Tacitus would have treated the Caesarism of the “good” emperors whose history he promised but never wrote. Perhaps lack of time was not the only reason they were never written.

If Tacitus is artist as well as historian it remains to glance at some of his artistic devices. The masterly characterizations of which we have spoken are achieved with remarkable economy of detail. He never indulges, as Suetonius does, in scandalous gossip for its own sake. His sketches are rendered in bold strokes, his effects are obtained by the use of light and shadow which bring out the essentials. If this technique results in theatricality it is but the characteristic of the age. The grand Romans all stalk about on a stage, like the lurid figures in Seneca's tragedies; their grandeur and their intensity are always on parade, they are always conscious of their public and their public's expectations. Is it natural for an old woman confronted by the assassins her son has sent to point to her womb and say “Strike here”? Theatrical to the highest degree and to the highest degree effective are such sequences (and they are many in number) as those which tell of Messalina's mock marriage in the eleventh book of the Annals, or of the events leading to Nero's murder of his mother in the fourteenth. Their effect is stunning, as theatre if not as life; no ancient dramatist approaches the decor and the direction.

Such scenes are not the only things in Tacitus which suggest the dramatist's art. Using identical materials different authors achieve the most diverse effects by selecting and grouping their details. In Tacitus the details chosen are frequently such as will produce horror; then occasionally amusing episodes or instances of ordinary humanity are inserted, very like the relaxing interludes with which Shakespeare relieves and points up tragic tension. After the storm and stress of the Piso conspiracy at the end of Annals 15, for example, we have the hoax of Dido's buried treasure at the beginning of Book 16. Ostensibly the annalistic form is followed, but the apparently chronological order conceals a subtle art of arrangement. Traditional and obvious connections are disregarded, and fresh and illuminating associations are substituted. Again the criterion is not political clarification but dramatic effectiveness.

Effective scenes are one requirement of the dramatic art, another is effective lines. In Seneca characters exchange single-line tags for pages, each compact and pointed, each eminently quotable. No paragraph in Tacitus is without its pregnant epigram embodying some acute observation or comment. Here the English reader is put at a serious disadvantage, for only rarely does the sharp point carry over in translation. Of one of the best known, solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant, only half the effectiveness is lost, for the translation requires only double the number of Latin words, “They make a wilderness and call it peace.” It is to be expected that the loss in effectiveness is usually greater. In the case of the concise epigrams at least explanation is possible, but for Tacitus' style as a whole description to one who has not read the Latin is as difficult as describing peppermint to a man who has never tasted it. The style is unique and unmistakable. The ordinary word, the ordinary construction, the ordinary arrangement are studiously avoided. The balance, the parallelism, the flow characteristic of Cicero or Livy are eschewed. The only rule is that Tacitus will say a thing differently than you expected and more concisely. The effect is frequently that of sombre and full-toned organ music played staccato. By modern standards of style Tacitus is labored, even precious; but Latin style, and particularly the Latin style of the Silver Age, must be judged by a different standard, for it never attempted to approximate the spoken language. Yet in his straining to avoid the commonplace in diction Tacitus goes far even for Silver Latin. He not only avoids “brothels” by saying (Histories 2.93) inhonesta dictu, “places unseemly to mention,” but he calls spades “implements for digging earth and cutting turf” (Annals 1.65). For death fifty different circumlocutions have been counted in Tacitus.

Tacitus had to wait until the Italian Renascence for proper appreciation. From the fifth century to the fifteenth he is mentioned not more than two or three times. Early in the latter century Niccolo Niccoli was in possession of the manuscript which is our sole authority for the Histories and the second half of the Annals, and Poggio was working hard to obtain the minor works; in 1455 Enoch of Ascoli brought them from Germany in a manuscript which is apparently the father of all our existing manuscripts of these works. In 1509 the manuscript which is our sole source for the first part of the Annals was discovered at Corbey. Immediately all writers on political subjects began to quarry from Tacitus. Machiavelli, as might be expected, quotes him, in the Discourses and the Florentine History, and Montaigne (3.8) remarks how applicable Tacitus is to his own France. French interest in Tacitus was very marked. He was translated several times and very frequently echoed. D'Aubigné, for example, says of Henry IV, “digne du royaume s'il n'eût point régné,” a version, at the usual rate of expansion, of imperii capax nisi imperasset. Tacitus figures large in French political disputations. Saumaise considers him a champion of absolutism, and is warmly refuted by John Milton. Montesquieu had a high regard for Tacitus and consciously strove to model himself after the man of whom he wrote: “Tacitus abridged everything because he saw everything.” Voltaire finds him a republican, and Desmoulins in the Vieux Cordelier discourses on despotism from a text in Tacitus. Napoleon complains of Tacitus' vilification of the emperors, and offers to correct “inaccuracies” in his work.

Dramatists and novelists have found Tacitus a no less fruitful source. Corneille has an Otho, Racine a Britannicus, Ben Jonson a Sejanus, Alfieri an Octavia, and Chénier a Tiberius; there are a dozen plays on Nero. Sinkiewicz' Quo Vadis and such contemporary novelists as Feuchtwanger in his Josephus stories and Robert Graves in his Claudius series have long sections which are but adaptations of Tacitus. Contemporary history also, aside from contemporary literature, shows increasingly long sections which are but adaptations of Tacitus, and Tacitus has a profounder claim on the attention of the modern reader than the mere satisfaction of antiquarian curiosity. Tacitus always helped men understand themselves and their history, but not for a hundred years have his lessons been as pertinent as they are today. Along with his great Greek model Thucydides, Tacitus provides an agreeable channel whereby the best historical insight and experience of the ancient world are made available for our own enlightenment.