Tacitus, Annals, 15.20­-23, 33­-45. Latin Text, Study Aids with Vocabulary, and Commentary, 2013a

It is thus telling that Tacitus’ literary career begins in earnest only after he
had reached the pinnacle of public life: the Agricola or De vita et moribus Iulii
Agricolae appeared in the year after he held the consulship (AD 98). His literary
debut also coincided with a major upheaval at the centre of power. AD 96 saw
the end of the Flavian dynasty through the assassination of Domitian and the
crowning of Nerva as emperor at the age of 65, after years of loyal service
under Nero and the Flavians. Pressure from the Praetorian Guard and the
army more generally soon compelled Nerva to adopt Trajan as his eventual
successor, and Tacitus’ first literary activities fall within this period of transition
and change, which he himself marks out as a watershed in politics and culture.
In fact, he explicitly links the demise of Domitian (and his oppressive regime)
to the renaissance of creative efforts in the literary sphere. 23 His writings in and
of themselves thus advertise the current system of government as a good one
(or at least an improvement over what had come before) and signal Tacitus’
(new) political allegiances. (Much of the bad press that has come down to us
on the last Flavian comes from writers in the reign of Trajan – Pliny, Tacitus,
Suetonius, above all – keen to paint the past in black and the present in white,
thereby promoting both the reigning emperors and themselves.)
The Agricola is difficult to classify in generic terms. Prima facie, it is
a ‘biography’ of his father-in-law Gnaeus Julius Agricola; but it also sports
striking affinities with various forms of historiographical writing, not least
the works of Sallust (the last ‘republican’ historiographer) or, in its year-byyear
account of Agricola’s governorship of Britain, annalistic history. It also
includes a brief ethnographic excursion on the British (10–12). But arguably
the most striking features are the three chapters of prologue (1–3) and epilogue
(44–46) that Tacitus devotes almost exclusively to an attack on the principate of
Domitian, which had just come to a violent end. 24 The historical material, the
overall outlook, and the timing of the publication all reek of a republican ethos.
Tacitus’ next work builds on the ethnographic pilot paragraphs in the Agricola.
His Germania or De origine et situ Germanorum is an ethnographic treatise on the
German tribes, which he uses as a mirror to reflect on contemporary Rome. 25
Soon thereafter Tacitus published the so-called Dialogus (Dialogus de oratoribus),
23 See Agricola 2, where Tacitus envisions all the pursuits (such as the writing of history)
that were traditionally located in aristocratic otium exiled from Rome during the reign of
Domitian.
24 See further Ash (2006) 20 and, for a close reading of the preface, Woodman (2012).
25 There was a sinister side to the treatise’s history of reception as it inspired many a
German nationalist after it was rediscovered in the Renaissance: see Krebs (2012).