THE HISTORIAN'S VOICE

I start with a paradox. That funerary inscription with which we began advertises Tacitus' political distinctions. To judge by what he wrote, however, it might seem shocking that he had a political career at all. He acknowledges that facet of his life in prominent places, and we would know less about him if he did not (Hist. 1.1.3, Ann. 11.11.1). Yet his works dwell on the corrupting and contaminating effects of the Principate on Roman society and often seem to suggest that political life under the Principate is only an empty, poisonous charade. How, you want to ask, could that same historian who saw with such clarity, and condemned with such trenchancy, the hypocrisy and vanity of the Principate also want to take part in it? In other words, should he not rather have shaken the dust from his feet and gone into retirement, done anything rather than live the deplorable lie?

Our concern here is of course naive, in that it confuses the “Tacitus” narrating these works with the historical person P. Cornelius Tacitus.