We do not know much about the posthumous ancient reception of Tacitus' work, beyond that his books did not disappear entirely. One of our few data concerns the emperor Tacitus:

As always, the testimony of the Historia Augusta calls for caution, but true or not, the story is interesting. It presents the worst fate that Tacitus' work can imagine for itself, and an end it was designed to avoid. The historian who strove to show that his work owed nothing to the regime's authority and influence, indeed that he had produced it in the face of institutional obstacles presented by the existence of principes, had in the end to be rescued from oblivion by an emperor, whose supposed intervention is far too much like the authorizing signature Josephus sought from Titus (Vit. 363) as proof that he had been right in his portrayal of the Jewish War.