As an interpreter of history in detail, Livy was unoriginal or simply defective in his treatment of causes. However, he substituted for
explanation a vivid human sympathy shown in his portrayal of emotions both in the speeches he composed and in the narrative. This
is essentially an imaginative skill. There was no evidence about the feelings of the people of Veii, when the Romans drove them
from their city and razed it to the ground, or about what the Roman soldiers felt when sent under the yoke by the Samnites (both
these episodes took place in the fourth century B.C.); there was probably little more about the Romans' reaction to their defeat by
Hannibal at Trasimene in 217. Yet these are some of the most memorable passages in what survives of Livy. It was the 'tragic'
approach to history that influenced him much more than the 'pragmatic' approach of Polybius. Livy carried his history down to 9 B.
C.-a mammoth work never to be emulated, not least because in the meantime the Republic became a dead subject.
The Early Empire
The Principate of Augustus and his successors brought changes in political life and in literary style. Both the People and the Senate
gradually lost the power to make effective political decisions on matters of importance: policies were formed by the Emperor and his
intimates in camera; promotions ultimately depended on imperial favour. So secrecy led to ignorance of the arcana of the Empire
among contemporaries and later historians and, to compensate, fed rumour and suspicion, while the court atmosphere encouraged
intrigue and backbiting. Meanwhile the luxuriant oratory of men such as Cicero was abandoned in favour of a style pointed and
abrupt, like Sallust's, but more striking in its phraseology, especially apt for lampoon and denunciation.
Some historians who chronicled the transition from republic to monarchy maintained their independence from the new regime. One,
Cremutius Cordus, had his books burnt under Tiberius and later reproduced under Gaius in a censored edition. In general, however,
history, as Tacitus pointed out, was corrupted in two ways, by flattery of the present emperor and detraction of his predecessors. The
former was stimulated by the requirement to deliver formal panegyrics of the Emperor in the consul's oration of thanks, instituted in
Augustus' time (Pliny's Panegyric of A.D. 100 is the first surviving example). By contrast, Seneca's Ludus or Apocolocyntosis about
the death and deification of the Emperor Claudius is a remarkable specimen of licensed defamation. Equally detrimental to the
historian was the lack of traditional material. After Augustus' time most emperors did not seek major new conquests; at home there
was no room for the great political conflicts of the Republic. The rivalries of the aristocracy centred on trials for treason, as they
jockeyed for position in the Emperor's favour or the esteem of their equals. Important developments in the early Principate-changes
in administration at home and abroad, the spread of citizenship and Graeco-Roman culture, the growth of cities-were not the stuff
which had interested historians in the past and did not lend themselves to pathos or sensationalism. Yet Rome's greatest historian
worked in what he himself believed was a narrow and inglorious field.
Tacitus
C. Cornelius Tacitus was born in the middle of the first century A.D. and reached senatorial rank and high office under the Flavian
dynasty. He wrote mainly under the Emperor Trajan, in what was held to be an unexampled era of security and prosperity after the
murder of the last Flavian Emperor, the 'tyrannical' Domitian. One early work was a written version of a funeral panegyric about his
father-in-law Agricola. Both here and in his two major historical works-the Historiae, dealing with the Flavian period (A.D. 69-96),
and the Annales on the Julio-Claudian dynasty from A.D. 14 to A.D. 68-he proclaims his traditional concern with virtue and vice.
'The age was not so barren of virtues that it did not produce some fine examples of conduct.' These were not quite those of
republican annals. 'Mothers accompanied their children into exile, wives followed their husbands ... loyal slaves even gave insulting
answers to their torturers.' Nevertheless, Tacitus' work is full of miniatures of the Agricola type-obituary notices of those who
prospered under the regime or fell foul of it through treason trials. 'Let us make this concession to the reputation of famous men that,
just as in their funeral rites they are kept apart from mass burials, so they may each have their own notice in the records of deaths.'
Inscribed Lead Water-Pipe From The Fortress At Chester, one of the only two documents from Britain which name Agricola. The
longest-serving and most successful of Britain's governors (A.D. 78-84), Cn. Julius Agricola was also, the father-in-law of the
historian Tacitus, who commemorated him in a famous, if somewhat rose-tinted, biography. The imperial titulature dates the pipe to
79.