Histories

Overview

Written around 105 to 110 CE, and originally covering the years 69 to 96, from the death of Nero to the death of Domitian, in twelve or fourteen books. Four books and a fragment of the fifth survive, which take the story only to the middle of 70. Everything on Vespasian’s reign, on Titus, and on the terror under Domitian that Tacitus lived through is lost.

The loss matters, because the surviving part is the prologue to a work about the author’s own lifetime. He says in the preface that he will write about Nerva and Trajan in his old age, a happier subject, and that he has kept that for later. He never got to it. Instead he went backwards and wrote the Annals, covering Tiberius to Nero, which is his greater book.

Tacitus was a senator, a consul in 97, and later governor of Asia. He had prospered under Domitian and felt the shame of it, and the Agricola contains a famous passage about the silence of those years and what it cost to survive them. That is the temperature of everything he wrote.

The prose is the other reason to read him. Latin of extreme compression: parallel clauses deliberately made unbalanced, verbs withheld, whole judgements delivered in four words. No translation carries it entirely, and Wellesley is the best available compromise.

The argument

Book 1: the fall of Galba. Nero’s suicide in June 68 leaves no Julio-Claudian heir. Galba, governor of Spain, in his seventies, is hailed by his troops and enters Rome.

Tacitus states his own position first: he was not injured or advanced by any of the men he writes about, and so writes without anger or partiality, sine ira et studio. It is a famous claim and only intermittently true.

Then the secret. Rome had always assumed the emperor was made in the city, by the Senate and the Guard. In 68 an army in Spain made one, and every frontier commander in the empire understood what that meant.

Galba’s fall is the most closely observed sequence in the surviving books. He is old, austere, honest and advised by bad men. He refuses to pay the donative the soldiers have been promised, saying he chooses his troops and does not buy them, which Tacitus gives as admirable and fatal. He adopts Piso as his successor and passes over Otho, who had expected it.

Otho buys the Praetorians. Galba is cut down in the Forum, Piso is dragged from the temple of Vesta and killed, and Tacitus gives the old man the verdict that everyone would have thought him fit to rule if he had never ruled.

Meanwhile the legions on the Rhine, who never accepted Galba, have proclaimed their own commander Vitellius.

Book 2: Otho and Vitellius. Two armies converge on northern Italy. The campaign is confused, the commanders are mediocre, and Tacitus is very good on the psychology of soldiers who are about to fight other Romans: the shouted recognitions, the strange pauses, the rumours.

Otho loses at Bedriacum, near Cremona. Then he does the one thing in the book that Tacitus admires without reservation: with troops still available and the war not lost, he kills himself to stop further bloodshed, calms his men, burns his papers so that nobody can be incriminated, sleeps soundly, and stabs himself at dawn. Tacitus, who despises everything else about him, records it straight.

Vitellius enters Italy, tours the battlefield, and remarks that a dead enemy smells good, and a fellow citizen better. In the east, Vespasian is proclaimed.

Book 3: Cremona. The Flavian army under Antonius Primus moves into Italy without waiting for Vespasian. The second battle of Bedriacum is fought through a night, and Tacitus writes it as the most confused and terrible thing in the work: men fighting by moonlight, a soldier killing his own father and then recognising him, a legion cheering the rising sun and the other side taking it for the arrival of reinforcements.

Cremona is then sacked for four days by the army that was fighting to restore the empire. Forty thousand soldiers and an unknown number of camp followers strip the city, kill the inhabitants, and burn it.

In Rome, Vitellius tries to abdicate and is prevented by his own supporters. Fighting breaks out in the city; the Capitol, the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the oldest and most sacred building in Rome, is burned down by Romans. Vespasian’s brother is killed. Vitellius is dragged through the streets with a sword point under his chin so that he must look up at the crowd, and killed at the Gemonian Stairs.

Book 4 and the fragment of Book 5. Vespasian is absent, and Rome is administered by Mucianus and by Domitian, then eighteen, whom Tacitus is already watching carefully.

The Senate resumes, and Tacitus gives a long and interested account of its behaviour: attempts to prosecute the informers of Nero’s reign, the counterargument that too many people are implicated, and the figure of Helvidius Priscus, the Stoic who insists on speaking freely and will later be executed.

On the Rhine, Julius Civilis, a Batavian auxiliary commander, raises a revolt that briefly proposes a Gallic empire, and legions swear allegiance to it. It is the sharpest illustration of what the year had done to the idea of Rome.

Book 5 opens the campaign of Titus against Jerusalem, and includes a long excursus on the Jews, their origins and customs, which is hostile, inaccurate and historically important as the most detailed pagan account of Judaism that survives. It breaks off in mid-narrative.

How to read it

Read Book 1 with full attention. The preface, the statement of the secret, and the fall of Galba are the core, and they set up everything else.

Then read Otho’s suicide in Book 2 and the night battle and sack of Cremona in Book 3. Those are the passages that made Tacitus’ reputation as a writer.

Keep a list of names, or use the notes. The cast is large, many of them are called Julius or Flavius something, and the geography moves from Spain to the Rhine to Judaea.

Notice the technique with rumour. Tacitus constantly reports what was said, what was believed, and what some thought, without endorsing any of it, and the effect is to build a world in which nobody can know what is happening and everyone must act anyway. It is a deliberate method and it is why he feels modern.

Read his impartiality claim sceptically. He says he writes without anger, and he writes the most contemptuous character sketches in Latin. The claim is a convention and also a genuine ambition, and watching him fail at it is part of the pleasure.

Read Suetonius on the same years for contrast. Suetonius gives you anecdotes, physical descriptions and gossip arranged by category; Tacitus gives you a causal account with judgements. The difference between them is the difference between a biographer and a historian.

And do not skip the Jewish excursus in Book 5 because it is wrong. It is evidence of what an educated, well-connected Roman senator believed about Judaism a generation after the destruction of the Temple, and it is one of the most consequential pieces of misinformation ever written.

Questions it raises

• Once the armies know they can make an emperor, is there any way back to a stable succession?
• Galba is honest and destroyed by it. Is Tacitus saying that virtue is incompatible with rule, or with that kind of rule?
• Otho is contemptible and dies well. What is the relation between how a man lives and how he ends?
• Can a historian who despises his subjects write without anger, and would we want him to?
• Roman soldiers burned the Capitol. What does Tacitus think that means?
• He praises the freedom of speech of his own day and writes almost entirely about a period when there was none. Why?