TACITUS, the historian, is known to us chiefly from autobiographical touches in his own writings and from allusions in Pliny's letters. His full name is mat ter of doubt—CORNELIUS TACITUS being his nomen and cognomen; but whether his prmnomen was PUBLICS or GAIUS can only be conjectured. Born perhaps in Rome (less probably in Terni), under the Emperor Claudius between A. D. 52 and 54, it is inferred that his family was respectable from his education. his pro fession, and his marriage. He studied rhetoric in Rome under M. Aper, Julius Secundus, and, likely enough, Quintilian; rose to eminence as a pleader at the Ro man bar; and in 77 or 78 married the daughter of Agricola, the conqueror and governor of Britain. He filled a qutor ship under Vespasian, who made him praetor and member of a priestly col lege. In 89 A. D. he left Rome, probably for Germany, where, doubtless as gov ernor, he must have acquired his knowl edge of the features, natural and social, of the country; and he did not return till 93, when he found his father-in-law had recently died. He was an eye-witness of Domitian's reign of terror. We have his own testimony as to the blessed change wrought by the accession of Nerva and Trajan.
Under the former emperor he became consul suffectus, succeeding the great and good Virginius Rufus, on whom he de livered in the Senate a splendid oraison funebre. In A. D. 99, conjointly with the younger Pliny, he prosecuted the political malefactor, Marius Priscus, which won him the thanks of the Senate. After this we lose sight of him, but may assume it as certain that he saw the close of Tra jan's reign, if not the opening of Ha drian's. The high reputation he enjoyed in life is attested by the eulogistic men tion of hini repeatedly made in Pliny's letters, and in the 3d century the Em peror Tacitus, proud to claim kinship with him, built in his honor a tomb which was still standing in the later decades of the 16th century, when it was de stroyed by Pope Pius V. The same em peror also issued an edict by which the works of his namesake were to be copied out 10 times yearly for presentation to as many public libraries.
In spite of this multiplication of cop ies we possess but a moiety of what he wrote. His earliest work, the "Dia logues de Oratoribus," treats, in conver sational form, of the decline of eloquence following on the change for the worse in the education of the Roman youth un der the empire. It has reached us entire.
Next comes the "Agricola," the literary character of which it is difficult to define. Quite a library has accumulated on the question whether it is a "laudatio fune gris," or an "apologia" written to shield the memory of Agricola, or a historical panegyric framed for political ends. But it will always be read for its elevation of style, its dramatic force, its invective and its pathos. For English readers its interest is unique. The third work, the "Germania," or "De situ, moribus, et populis Germania, " is a monograph of the greatest value on the ethnography of Germany. Fourth in Arder are the "Historix," or the history of the empire from the accession of Galba in A. D. 69 to the assassination of Domitian in 97. of the 12 books originally composing it only the first 4 and a fragment of the 5th are extant.
Tacitus is at his strongest in this nar rative. His material was drawn from contemporary experience; and though the imperial archives were closed to him, he had at command the personal informa tion open to a man of his position, to say nothing of correspondence (as of Pliny). He yearned for the return of an aristo cratic oligarchy—the Rome of the Scipios and the Fabii. He is, on this account, a partisan, but is able to justify the most trenchant contrasts between the great ness of Republican and the deterioration of Imperial Rome, which latter he con trasts disadvantageously with the free dom and simplicity of even barbarian Germany. To his peculiar satirical gift which often makes him a "Juvenal in prose" he gives free rein from time to time. He had no appreciation of the higher qualities of the Jews, and his atti tude to the growth of Christianity is that of a prejudiced, if cultured Roman.
The qualities conspicuous in the "His tori" are maintained in his last work, the so-called "Annales," a history of the Julian line from Tiberius to Nero (A. D. 14 to 68). Of their 16 books only 8 have come down to us entire, 4 are fragment ary, and the others lost. In these, as in all his writings, his avowed aim was a noble one, to perpetuate virtue, and to stigmatize baseness in word or deed. Among the more obvious defects which lower his value as a historian are his weakness in geography and his careless ness as to strategic details.