Year: 1990
Type: article
Abstract: This essay is based upon one of the slenderest volumes of Latin literature.In the most recent critical edition it covers about twenty-five pages, a total of some 750 lines.^Andyet this tiny work, styled an aureus libellus upon discovery in the Renaissance, has had an impact upon the life of a modem people unrivaled by any other product of classical antiquity.Publius Cornelius Tacitus, who was to become Rome's greatest historian, was bom, in all likelihood, early in the reign of the Emperor Nero.^His childhood was passed under that strange, debauched, and cruel ruler, whose enforced suicide in the year 68 was followed by the rapid succession of four emperors amid the horrors and cmelties of civil war.The successful claimant to the throne, Vespasian, established a dynasty which proved short-hved; he was succeeded by his two sons, Titus and Domitian.Tacitus entered upon a public career under the father and was advanced by each of the sons, until he ultimately reached the highest office open to a member of the senatorial order, the consulate.But the principate of Domitian proved to be a disastrous period for the upper classes of society, when the emperor persecuted the best men and women and, so to speak, virtue itself Tacitus was in his early forties when he published his first work, in the year 98, the biography of his father-in-law, Agricola, who had gained fame by his conquests of Britain.Although Tacitus' career had not been stymied by Domitian, the emotional and intellectual cost had been high.He described this period in despairing tones:What if, for a period of fifteen years, a great span of human life, many men perished by natural deaths, and all the most capable because of the •This paper essentially reproduces a lecture which I had the honor of delivering as J.
Author: Herbert W. Benario
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1512594159