He might not have been surprised to learn that all the efforts of Caesar Augustus to wipe his name and his writings from the memory of man were unsuccessful. For a while his books had to be secreted in cellars and barns and country houses, but many survived and before long came to be openly admired. With the ascension of the Christian Constantine to the imperial throne, his books were again banned but not destroyed. Within a few hundred years they were again popular, and during the English renaissance were among the most popular books of all, thanks to a translation of Metamorphoses by Arthur Golding that was quoted by everyone from Shakespeare on down.
A good translation by Rolfe Humphries captures the wit, brilliance, and pathos of the original. Another book that I recommend, if you can find it, is The Last World, by Christoph Ransmayr. This extraordinary book seems to be written about the present day, but at the same time the action takes place in Tomi, two thousand years ago, where the people of the town find themselves playing out the adventures and the fates of the characters in Ovid’s great book. I read Ransmayr’s book fifteen years ago and I have never forgotten a word of it.
TACITUS
56?–120?
Annals
Histories
We know a good deal about first-century Rome—the first century of the Roman Empire. Records have survived, historians have recorded the facts, and archeological study has added its not inconsiderable part. But what we think about that famous age is largely owing to Tacitus Cornelius Tacitus. He was a fine writer as well as a great historian—indeed, one of the most influential historians of all time.
Eleven emperors ruled Rome during the eighty-two years from the death of Augustus in 14 to the death of Domitian in 96, and four of them are among the most famous—or infamous—men who ever lived. Tiberius. Caligula. Nero. Domitian. The blood runs cold at the mere mention of their names, thanks to Tacitus.
Tiberius may have deserved a better report. During the first half of his reign, at least, he tried to be a good ruler and a worthy successor to Caesar Augustus. Like Augustus, Tiberius had to make up a great deal as he went along; the Romans weren’t used to being ruled by a king, having enjoyed a Republican constitution for centuries. There were few precedents to follow. At the same time there were great temptations; the Senate threw power at Tiberius even when he wasn’t sure he wanted it. During his last years he did, and he used it. Suffering from a disease that made him hideous to behold, he retired to his heavily guarded villa on the island of Capri, near Naples, and there ruled through subordinates, indulging himself in cruelty and vice. Or so Tacitus says. We do not really know.
Tiberius was succeeded by a madman, Caligula, whose cruelty made everyone regret the murder of Tiberius. But Caligula only lived for four years before he too was assassinated, to no one’s displeasure. His successor was Claudius, in many respects a successful ruler; his only real mistake was in taking the last of several wives, Agrippina. She was a devil, and she brought with her a devil of a son whom she persuaded Claudius to adopt as his heir before poisoning him.
The son, Nero, was only seventeen when his mother handed him the throne. He was already practiced in cruelty and in every form of vice. He particularly enjoyed torturing people to death and forcing the wives of Roman senators to prostitute themselves at the elaborate parties that he threw and that helped to exhaust the imperial treasury. His leading passion was the theater. He loved to act and to hear himself applauded. He acted often, his soldiers roaming the audience, beating onlookers who applauded for the wrong actor or didn’t applaud at all. Nero said he was surprised that he always won the prize as the best actor. His soldiers told him it was because he was so good. No one dared to puncture the deception.
Nero was acting one evening when a great fire began to sweep through Rome. The worst fire in the city’s history, it destroyed half of all its buildings, including many government structures as well as Nero’s own house. There were rumors that Nero had started the fire himself to destroy the city so he could rebuild it after his own plan and perhaps even name it Neropolis. He did build a new palace, the Domus Aurea or Golden House, on the ruins of the central city, thus further impoverishing the state. The rumors would not die concerning his own involvement in the conflagration and concerning the fact that he refused to stop his performance even though word of the fire had reached the theater (he was not, however, fiddling, despite the popular belief), and so he decided to shift the blame to a scapegoat. For this nefarious purpose he chose a burgeoning sect, the Christians, who were disliked by most people anyway. Nero arrested many thousands and killed them in cruel and humiliating ways. He disguised himself as a commoner and wandered among the crowds who were whipped into being present at the executions. His delight in the pain he inflicted led some among the spectators to begin to have sympathy for the Christians, a novel development at Rome.
Nero was assassinated in 68, when he was thirty-one. He had earlier murdered his mother, his brother, his wife, and his tutor and guide, the philosopher Seneca. Following each of their deaths, and the deaths of hundreds of other eminent and noble victims, he required of the Senate that it not only thank him for saving the state from traitors but also that it thank the gods. The Senate never failed to do so—but they were sincere when they thanked the gods for the death of Nero.
Since Nero left no heir and had killed every member of his family, his death was followed by civil war. It raged for more than a year, during which three men occupied the principate; finally a fourth, Vespasian, ended the carnage and reestablished imperial rule. He was succeeded by Titus and he by Domitian, another in the Tiberius mold; what began well ended, in the case of Domitian, with a reign of terror—during the middle 90s—that may have exceeded for cruelty and madness anything that had gone before.
Tiberius was in fact a somewhat better man than Tacitus gave him credit for being; Domitian may not have been as bad as Tacitus said he was; and Claudius and Vespasian, at least, were relatively good as emperors went. This was not, however, what really interested Tacitus. He was interested in tyranny—in the effect it has on those who suffer under it and what it does to the tyrant himself. The Annals, covering (with lapses—unfortunately, much of the work is lost) the period from the death of Augustus to the death of Nero, and the Histories, covering (again with lapses due to missing pages and whole books) the period from the civil war of 68-69 to the death of Domitian in 96, are among the most powerful indictments of absolute power ever written. There is nothing quite like them.
The world today has its share of tyrants, as it has always had. Probably the great majority of all rulers who have ever lived have been despots and only a very few of them have been benevolent. But there have been men like Tacitus, too—and there still are—who hate tyranny, bravely confront it, and eloquently describe it in its true colors. And who therefore make us truly understand what Tacitus called “the rare happiness of times”—namely, the times of those emperors immediately following the death of Domitian when Tacitus was able to publish his books—“when we may think what we please, and express what we think.”