Michael Grant on Tacitus

“Moral purpose...is never absent from Tacitus' mind. The sequence of events on which he chooses to focus his attention provoked the sternest moral reflections. To him, as to many others, decline and disaster seemed due to vice. Virtue and vice are continually emphasized and contrasted. As Tacitus himself says, "I regard it as the foremost task of the historian to ensure that virtues are not left unrecorded, and that evil words and deeds are made subject to the fears inspired by posterity's denunciation."”

“[I]t seems that he is not really able to believe that an autocrat can be good. For he constantly stresses the evils of rule by one man. Perhaps this conviction is the central point of his philosophy. No amount of experience, he infers, can stand up against the corrupting effects of autocratic authority. "In spite of all his experience of public affairs, Tiberius was transformed and deranged by absolute power." So it was under Tiberius that freedom suffered its most fatal losses. As these are remorselessly described we do not feel two thousand years distant.”

“Human fate often looks black to Tacitus. So does human nature. Yet he is far from sceptical about the potentialities of the human spirit. Even in times of civil war and tyrannical government, he is able to point to human actions of extraordinary virtue, bravery, and pertinacity. Indeed he is a humanist, and one whose contribution to our western tradition of humanism has been immense and singularly inspiring.”

“The outstanding quality of Tacitus is his brilliance as a literary artist. Racine called him "the greatest painter of antiquity". Others have compared his work not so much to a series of pictures as to a continuous frieze. But of his supreme artistic genius there can be no doubt. A large part of the artistry resides in his style – the aspect of his talent which a translator has least hope of reproducing. Now ancient readers usually recognized stylistic talent, and by no means found that it interfered with their enjoyment when history contained a strong infusion of rhetoric. But the style of Tacitus, as it had developed to its culminating point in these Annals, was indeed extraordinary. It displays a sharp, astringent contrast to the rotund periods of Cicero and to the flowing, "milky" diction of Livy.”