Rome's great historian of tyranny had a surname meaning silent
Tacitus won fame as a courtroom orator, an irony given that his name means silent. Surviving Domitian's reign of terror left him with a hatred of despotism that runs through the Annals and Histories. Half of the Annals survives only because a single manuscript lasted in a German abbey and another in Italy.
Remarkably little is known about his life: hints in his own books, letters from his friend Pliny the Younger, and an inscription from Mylasa in modern Turkey. He was born around 56 or 57 into an equestrian family, but his birthplace and even his first name are uncertain, with manuscripts giving Publius and a later writer Gaius. Marriage in 77 or 78 to the daughter of the general Agricola hints at roots in southern Gaul, though northern Italy and Spain have been proposed too.
His career climbed steadily. He entered politics as quaestor around 81, became praetor in 88, joined the priestly college that guarded the Sibylline Books, served in the provinces around 89 to 93, and rose to suffect consul in 97, the first in his family to do so. That year he delivered the funeral speech for the veteran commander Verginius Rufus. In 100 he and Pliny successfully prosecuted a governor of Africa for corruption, and in 112 to 113 he governed the province of Asia.
His first books came in 98: a life of Agricola, which also sketches Britain and puts a biting line about Romans making a wasteland and calling it peace into a Caledonian chief's mouth, and the Germania, a survey of tribes beyond the frontier. The Histories covered the civil wars of 69 and the Flavian dynasty; only the first four books and part of the fifth remain. The later Annals ran from the death of Augustus in 14, with the reigns of Tiberius and Nero best preserved.
He admired Britons and Germans who resisted Rome, which led some to imagine he was a Celt. He probably died after 116, possibly as late as 125 or 130. A third-century emperor who shared his name claimed descent and ordered his works preserved, though that story may be invented.
Source: Tacitus
