TACITUS, CORNELIUS (c. 55-120), Roman historian, lived through the reigns of the emperors Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitel lius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan. All we know of his personal history is from allusions to himself in his own works, and from I I letters addressed to him by his very intimate friend, the younger Pliny. The exact year of his birth is a matter of inference, but it may be approximately fixed near the close of the reign of Claudius. Pliny indeed, though himself born in 61 or 62, speaks of Tacitus and himself as being "much of an age" (Pliny, Epp. vii.2o), but he must have been some years junior to his friend, who began, he tells us, his official life under Vespasian (Hist. i.I ), no doubt as quaestor, and presumably tribune or aedile under Titus (8o or 81), at which time he must have been 25 years of age at least. Of his family and birthplace we know nothing certain ; we can infer nothing from his name Cornelius, which was then very widely extended; but the fact of his early promotion seems to point to respectable antecedents, and it may be that his father was one Cornelius Tacitus, who had been a procurator in one of the divisions of Gaul, to whom allusion is made by the elder Pliny in his Natural History (vii.76). But it is all matter of pure conjecture, as it also is whether his "praenomen" was Publius or Gaius. The most inter esting facts about him to us are that he was an eminent pleader at the Roman bar, that he was an eye-witness of the "reign of terror" during the last three years of Domitian, and that he was the son-in-law of Julius Agricola. This honourable connection, which testifies to his high moral character, may very possibly have accelerated his promotion, which he says was begun by Ves pasian, augmented by Titus, and still further advanced by Domi tian, under whom we find him presiding as praetor at the cele bration of the secular games in 88, and a member of one of the old priestly colleges, to which good family was an almost indis pensable passport. Next year, it seems, he left Rome and was absent till 93 on some provincial business, and it is possible that in these four years he may have made the acquaintance of Ger many and its peoples. His father-in-law died in the year of his return to Rome. In the concluding passage of his Life of Agricola he tells us plainly that he witnessed the judicial murders of many of Rome's best citizens from 93 to 96, and that being himself a senator he felt almost a guilty complicity in them. With the em
peror Nerva's accession his life became bright and prosperous, and so it continued through the reign of Nerva's successor, Trajan, he himself, in the opening passage of his Agricola, describ ing this as a "singularly blessed time"; but the hideous reign of terror had stamped itself ineffaceably on his soul, and when he sat down to write his History he could see little but the darkest side of imperialism. He was an academic republican, like many of those who perished in that reign of terror. They were innocent in many cases of plotting against the emperor's life ; and, no doubt, many of the plots were imaginary. But some had been real, and Domitian was determined to take no risks. Hence academic sympathizers with republican ideals fell under suspicion and were involved in the indiscriminate slaughter of those three years.
He was apparently convinced that Tiberius had been a ruler of the same type as Domitian; and that prejudiced him against the great, but grim, successor of Augustus. Moreover, some of the memoirs, contemporary with Tiberius' reign, were not likely to depict him in a favourable light, and on those Tacitus had largely drawn. (For the value of this evidence see Furneaux, Tac., Ann.
vol. i. p. 20 ad fin. For Tacitus' judgment on Tiberius see ibid. Introduction ch. viii.) But, apart from personal prejudice, the Romans of the upper classes who lived in Rome or resorted thither tended to dislike imperial rule both socially and politically, and did, as a fact, see so much of the worst of it that they failed to appreciate the blessings it had conferred on the world outside. To his friend, the younger Pliny, we are indebted for the little we know about his later life. He was advanced to the consulship in 97, in succession to a highly distinguished man, Verginius Rufus, on whom he delivered in the senate a funeral eulogy. In 99 he was associated with Pliny in the prosecution of a great political offender, Marius Priscus, under whom the pro vincials of Africa had suffered grievous wrongs. The prosecution was successful, and both Tacitus and Pliny received a special vote of thanks from the senate for their conduct of the case.