Tacitus

Written around the turn of the second century AD, this history opens in the chaos that followed Nero’s death, when Rome cycled through four emperors in a single year. Tacitus tracks the swift rise and fall of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, the legions that made and unmade them, and the eventual victory of Vespasian, founder of the Flavian dynasty. The surviving text carries the account through the civil wars of 69 AD and into the Batavian revolt on the Rhine frontier; only the first four books and a fragment of the fifth remain. What survives holds some of the sharpest political writing Rome produced. W. Hamilton Fyfe’s translation gives English readers Tacitus’s compressed, unsparing view of ambition, loyalty, and the machinery of empire under strain.