There are two major sources for the political developments of the early empire, the equestrian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (born c. ad 70) and the senator Publius Cornelius Tacitus (ad 56 to after 117). Both worked in the early second century ad when the more tolerant rule of Trajan allowed them to write more freely than had been possible under the ‘tyranny’ of Domitian (see below). Suetonius’ most celebrated surviving work is his set of biographies of the emperors, On the Lives of the Caesars (from Julius Caesar to Domitian). In each biography he follows a similar pattern: the early life of his subject, his public career, physical appearance, and private life. For the early lives Suetonius had access to the imperial archives (he was an imperial secretary until dismissed by Hadrian) and he also drew on gossip and reminiscences though often without much discrimination. The result is a highly readable collection of vignettes whose accuracy is open to question.
A far greater historian is Tacitus. Tacitus’ career, as a senator, began under Vespasian but it was his experience of the tyrannical reign of Domitian that defined his attitudes to the past. Tacitus wrote his accounts of the first century ad from the perspective of one who was nostalgic for the ancient liberties of the republic and who saw many of the emperors as destroyers of these liberties. Yet he is also aware of the underlying problems in writing any kind of history at all. ‘Some’, he writes in the Annals, ‘hold as true whatever they hear, others twist truth into fiction, and both types of perversion become more extreme with the passing of time.’ It may be that one of the points that Tacitus is making is that the ‘perversions’ are the direct result of a government that has lost its contact with the masses and become secretive.
‘Truth’ becomes lost within the machinations of those in power. (A reliable biography of Tacitus is by Ronald Mellor, Tacitus, New York and London, 1993. Wider perspectives are provided by A. J. Woodman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus, Cambridge and New York, 2009.)
Tacitus’ earliest work is a panegyrical life of his father-in-law Agricola, governor in Britain, whom he felt Domitian had betrayed. This was followed by the Germania, a study of the German tribes. Many of the details of their daily life compiled by Tacitus have been confirmed by archaeological research although the whole is set within an ideological framework in which the ‘virtuous’ German is set against the ‘decadent’ Roman. (For the legacy of this text in Renaissance Europe and afterwards see Christopher Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book, New York, 2011.) In his Histories of the period ad 69-96, of which only the first part survives, and his Annals, which cover ad 14-68 (although here again much is missing), Tacitus shows the same ability to distance himself from the Romans and to understand that not all their subjects had cause to welcome Roman rule.
There is a strong moral undertone to Tacitus’ writings and he is fascinated by the problems caused by tyrannical rule, in particular for those ‘good’ men who manage to survive under it. Thucydides is the nearest equivalent among the Greek historians. This makes for an absorbing and penetrating narrative shaped by Tacitus’ determination to expose his villains and glorify his heroes. As Ronald Mellor puts it in his study of Tacitus, ‘If other ancient writers examined the human psyche as affected by war (Homer), by love (Ovid), by suffering (Sophocles), and by religion (Euripides’ Bacchae), Tacitus above all others probes the individual personality transformed by political absolutism. . .’ Even Augustus failed to escape his acute, if waspish, analysis:
He seduced the army with bonuses and his cheap food policy was successful bait for civilians. Indeed, he attracted everybody’s good will by the enjoyable gift of peace. Then he gradually pushed ahead and absorbed the functions of the senate, the officials, and even the law. Opposition did not exist. War or judicial murder had disposed of all men of spirit. Upper-class survivors found that slavish obedience was the way to succeed, both politically and financially. . . (Translation: Michael Grant)
World History
