Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II

Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I
and II

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II
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Title: Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II
Author: Caius Cornelius Tacitus
Translator: W. Hamilton Fyfe
Release Date: October 23, 2005 [EBook #16927]
Language: English
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TACITUS THE HISTORIES
TRANSLATED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY W.
HAMILTON FYFE FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE
IN TWO VOLUMES VOLUME I
OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1912

HENRY FROWDE PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF
OXFORD LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK TORONTO AND
MELBOURNE

TO D.H.F.
'The cause of undertaking a work of this kind was a good will in this
scribling age not to do nothing, and a disproportion in the powers of my
mind, nothing of mine owne invention being able to passe the censure
of mine owne judgement, much less, I presumed, the judgement of
others....
'If thy stomacke be so tender as thou canst not disgest Tacitus in his
owne stile, thou art beholding to one who gives thee the same food, but
with a pleasant and easie taste.'
SIR HENRY SAVILE (A.D. 1591).

CONTENTS
VOLUME I
INTRODUCTION 5 TEXT: BOOKS I, II 17
VOLUME II
TEXT: BOOKS III-V 9
INDEX OF NAMES 231
MAPS

INTRODUCTION
Tacitus held the consulship under Nerva in the year 97. At this point he
closed his public career. He had reached the goal of a politician's
ambition and had become known as one of the best speakers of his time,
but he seems to have realized that under the Principate politics was a
dull farce, and that oratory was of little value in a time of peace and
strong government. The rest of his life was to be spent in writing
history. In the year of his consulship or immediately after it, he
published the Agricola and Germania, short monographs in which he
practised the transition from the style of the speaker to that of the writer.
In the preface to the Agricola he foreshadows the larger work on which
he is engaged. 'I shall find it a pleasant task to put together, though in
rough and unfinished style, a memorial of our former slavery and a
record of our present happiness.' His intention was to write a history of
the Principate from Augustus to Trajan. He began with his own times,
and wrote in twelve or fourteen books a full account of the period from
Nero's death in 68 A.D. to the death of Domitian in 96 A.D. These were
published, probably in successive books, between 106 and 109 A.D.
Only the first four and a half books survive to us. They deal with the
years 69 and 70, and are known as The Histories. The Annals, which
soon followed, dealt with the Julian dynasty after the death of Augustus.
Of Augustus' constitution of the principate and of Rome's 'present

happiness' under Trajan, Tacitus did not live to write.
The Histories, as they survive to us, describe in a style that has made
them immortal one of the most terrible and crucial moments of Roman
history. The deadly struggle for the throne demonstrated finally the real
nature of the Principate--based not on constitutional fictions but on
armed force--and the supple inefficiency of the senatorial class. The
revolt on the Rhine foreshadowed the debacle of the fifth century.
Tacitus was peculiarly well qualified to write the history of this period.
He had been the eye-witness of some of the most terrible scenes: he
was acquainted with all the distinguished survivors: his political
experience gave him a statesman's point of view, and his rhetorical
training a style which mirrored both the terror of the times and his own
emotion. More than any other Roman historian he desired to tell the
truth and was not fatally biassed by prejudice. It is wrong to regard
Tacitus as an 'embittered rhetorician', an 'enemy of the Empire', a
'détracteur de l'humanité'.[1] He was none of these. As a member of a
noble, though not an ancient, family, and as one who had completed the
republican cursus honorum, his sympathies were naturally senatorial.
He regretted that the days were passed when oratory was a real power
and the