Tacitus and the Histories

I'm Chris Whitten, and this is the first in a series of lectures on taxes histories.

Book one.

I'm going to start here by introducing testes and this work and just set up what's

going on in one of the histories before we get into some of the details.

So Tacitus was a Roman senator. He was born in the fifties, a D.

And in the year, 1970 was Consul, Uh, and he's writing the histories in around.

We don't know exactly when, but the first decade of the second century A D.

By this time, he's in his forties or fifties,

and he'd already written three shorter works.

The curricula about his father in law, analogous

and the game mania.

And he'd go on to write one of the most famous works of all ancient history.

The annals, which is this fairly chunky book here.

But before he got there, he wrote the histories, which, as you can see,

is rather shorter, or at least what we have of.

It is rather shorter because we don't have the

complete text of the annals or of the histories.

The histories was originally in 12 books,

and it covered the years 69 to 96 a D, which is to say,

six emperors and two very unequal trios.

The first three Galba Otho invite Tellus in the so called Year of the Four Emperors,

about which more to come

and then three more.

Vespasian, Titus and Emission, who are known as the flu avian dynasty that is,

from the end of 69 through to 96.

At the start of the histories,

Tacitus promises in pretty graphic way a catalogue of disaster, he says,

This is going to work be a work full of catastrophe.

He features, for instance, the eruption of Vesuvius,

the burning of the capital in Rome,

a world where the worst men got the highest positions of

power and all the best men ended up in exile.

So he promises some pretty gripping reading.

And one of the things he's doing, they're presumably is selling his work to come.

He wants us to keep reading,

so this is a kind of cover blurb or an advert for what's coming.

But it's also a very bleak account with good reason.

This work begins in the first books with

the first civil war since the Augustine settlement.

Ever since Augustus had been emperor

since he had sole rule at least after the Battle of Acxiom in 30 one BC Rome had

been free of the thing that has plagued it for so many decades before that civil war.

But here, 100 or so years later, Civil War has returned.

This was one of the worst things that could happen in Rome.

And although this seems fairly remote in history's,

one where this whole work as a whole is going is to the Emperor Commission.

He wouldn't become emperor until 81

and things would only get really bad under him in the last three or four years. 94 56.

But Tacitus himself had been mid career at that time,

and he and his entire generation had witnessed an emperor go very sour,

with very dangerous consequences for the Senate's many deaths, exiles and so on.

So everything that's going on in the histories right from the start

is leading up to this reign of terror that's going to end it

now.

I should say there's a major problem,

which is we've lost most of the histories because it stops in Book five.

We never actually get beyond the year 80 70. But it's a pretty fair guess,

both from other things, Tacitus wrote,

and from that table of contents in the preface

that that is where it was going.

The other thing you could say about Texas history is like you

can say about the annals is it is a deeply cynical work.

Here is a writer who takes a very dark view of human nature

and a dark view of the principles as a system of government,

and I'll talk about both those things

in a little while.

One of the one of the jobs he's doing

on every page of these histories is cutting through the

smooth language of official discourse and revealing the hypocrisy

that underlies the system and underlies human individual behaviour.

Finally, we might ask how far this is a work of died axis.

Ancient history was always trying to teach you

something in the same in modern history is

but more explicitly in the ancient world. It was always moralising

that you take a moral position.

You judge the you evaluate the actions and the ethics of the participants

in your history and tasked us is certainly no exception to that.

But the question what lessons were actually supposed to gain

from reading the histories is a rather harder one,

and I'll come back to that later on.

So before we get started,

just a quick summary of where we got to and the main

events of these of this first book of the histories Books 123,

are concerned with the year 69 Tacitus.

We can tell from both the annals and the histories wrote in Hex Odds Sets of six

and triads, Sex of Three books

and these first three books of the

histories very carefully and precisely structured.

This is the year that he gives the fullest coverage to a very slow pace.

In fact, a quarter book one is on a single day, the events of 15th of January,

when Galba when when the authors coup against Galba actually gets started.

But what we need to know is we're in Galveston Interpret.

Galba has been emperor now for six months. Nero committed suicide in June 68

Galba, who at the time was governor of one of the provinces of Spain,

has been made emperor by the Senate by the autumn of 68 Galba was in Rome,

and in January our book begins.

It begins with a single crucial action.

On the first of January, the army's in Germania.

In as it were, Germany refused to swear their annual oath of allegiance to Galba.

And that sets off a coup attempt.

A rebellion by Vitaly Asse, who is the governor of one of the provinces of Germania.

Now,

while that's going on because it takes them

several months to march down from Germany to Italy

at the same time in Rome, off though,

one of Balboa's best allies mounts a coup against Gal.

But in the meantime,

so we have the first couple of months of the year off those coup against Galba

later in the year.

By the spring we'll have also as emperor

but Vitaly Asse arriving in Italy to challenge him

at the first battle of Cremona in April. This is now booked.

Two of history's Vitaly Asse defeats author only commits suicide

shortly afterwards

in October. 69 is the so called second Battle of Cremona.

By this point, someone else in a province has declared himself emperor.

Now Vespasian, who is one of the governors in the east of the Empire, Syria and Judea.

And in the autumn of 16 69 Vespasian forces

defeat the Tellus at the second Battle of Cremona.

By December,

Tellus is dead,

and the Vespasian is the Flavin's take control of Rome.

So those are the first three books are the histories.

They're very carefully structured.

It's no accident that Galba dies halfway through

Book one author dies halfway through Book two,

and Martellus dies at the end of Book three. So you have half a book for Galba.

One book for author 1.5 for Vitaly is there is a classic rising try Colon,

and one of the things that shows you is that Tacitus, like any ancient writer,

is very concerned to turn turn history into an artistic structure,

to create literature

and to create meaning through structure out of this account of events.

And that's the first signal

that he's out to do more than just give us some kind of

neutral narration.

So Book one, as I say, is the most intense of all those books.

It covers just 2.5 months,

most of it in fact,

the first half which is the bit I'm going to be talking

about in these lectures is completely restricted to the first two weeks

of January. This is very slow motion stuff, but even here, it's not just a narrative.

Early on, just after the preface, Testa says,

I'm going to do a brief survey of the provinces and of Rome because I'm not interested

simply in telling us about the car sues a 12 square rare room that is to say,

what actually happened the way things turned out.

But the radio and the cows Sayigh

the rationale

and the reasons. So this is a fairly typical historical claim.

Of course, we don't just want to know what happened,

but we want to know why it happened.

It's a slightly funny twist in Tacitus version of it, he says.

What actually turns out is playroom, queer fortuity, for the most part,

accidental.

No one actually governs the way things turn out, but he's still interested

in the causes of them,

and I think what he means by that is interested in

the causes that motivate people to do what they do,

even though they don't control the way is going to go.

And the first to perhaps most important individuals

of those people are Galba and author,

and they will be the subject of my next two lectures.