Cornelius Tacitus

Tacitus wrote the history of the early Roman emperors as a man who had prospered under a bad one and never quite forgave himself for it. Born about 56, he rose to the consulship under Nerva and the governorship of Asia under Trajan, and the Agricola, his account of his father-in-law's command in Britain, is partly an apology for the silence of those who kept their heads down under Domitian. The Annals cover Tiberius to Nero and the Histories the year of four emperors; both survive incomplete. Germania is a short ethnography of the peoples beyond the Rhine, admired for centuries and then put to uses in the twentieth century that its author could not have foreseen. The Dialogue Concerning Oratory asks why public speech had decayed, and answers, carefully, that it had nothing left to do. He wrote in a compressed, unbalanced Latin that translators have found almost impossible to carry across.