Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus[note 1] (/ˈtæsɪtəs/ TASS-it-əs, Latin: [ˈtakɪtʊs]; c. AD 56 – c. 120) was a Roman historian and politician. He lived in what has been called the Silver Age of Latin literature, and has a reputation for the brevity and compactness of his Latin prose, as well as for his penetrating insights into the psychology of power politics. Already more than 30,000 men made a gallant show, and still they came flocking to the colors—all the young men and those whose 'old age was fresh and green', famous warriors with their battle honors thick upon them. This canon (with approximate dates) consists of: The Annals and the Histories, published separately, were meant to form a single edition of thirty books. The Romans have no wives to kindle their courage; no parents to taunt them with flight, man have either no country or one far away. His experience of the tyranny, corruption, and decadence of that era (81–96) may explain the bitterness and irony of his political analysis. Tacitus makes use of the official sources of the Roman state: the acta senatus (the minutes of the sessions of the Senate) and the acta diurna populi Romani (a collection of the acts of the government and news of the court and capital). Tacitus is considered to be one of the greatest Roman historians. Examples from the set text include his selective Taci-turn-ity in reporting Nero’s alleged sex crimes and his judiciously aporetic stance on whether the emperor was responsible for setting Rome afire. Priscus was found guilty and sent into exile; Pliny wrote a few days later that Tacitus had spoken "with all the majesty which characterizes his usual style of oratory". ", List of persons mentioned in the works of Tacitus, Works by Tacitus at Perseus Digital Library, Comprehensive links to Latin text and translations in various languages, Complete works, Latin and English translation, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tacitus&oldid=982550120, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia indefinitely move-protected pages, Articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases from October 2018, Wikipedia articles with BIBSYS identifiers, Wikipedia articles with CANTIC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with CINII identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with Trove identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WorldCat identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, "inde consilium mihi ... tradere ... sine ira et studio, quorum causas procul habeo. In an early chapter of the Agricola, Tacitus asserts that he wishes to speak about the years of Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. There are substantial lacunae in the surviving texts, including a gap in the Annals that is four books long. Tacitus also uses collections of letters (epistolarium).