Little is known of the birth and parentage of Tacitus beyond the mere fact that he was a Roman of good family. Tradition places his birth at Interamna early in the reign of Nero; he passed through the regular stages of an official career under the three Flavian Emperors. His marriage, towards the end of the reign of Vespasian, to the daughter and only surviving child of the eminent soldier and administrator, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, aided him in obtaining rapid promotion; he was praetor in the year in which Domitian celebrated the Secular Games, and rose to the dignity of the consulship during the brief reign of Nerva. He was then a little over forty. When still quite a young man he had written the dialogue on oratory, which is one of the most interesting of Latin works on literary criticism; but throughout the reign of Domitian his pen was wholly laid aside. The celebrated passage of the _Agricola_ in which he accounts for this silence may or may not give an adequate account of the facts, but at all events gives the keynote of the whole of his subsequent work, and of that view of the imperial government of the first century which his genius has fixed ineradicably in the imagination of the world. Under Domitian a servile senate had ordered the works of the two most eminent martyrs of reactionary Stoicism, Arulenus Rusticus and Herennius Senecio, to be publicly burned in the forum; "thinking that in that fire they consumed the voice of the Roman people, their own freedom, and the conscience of mankind. Great indeed," he bitterly continues, "are the proofs we have given of what we can endure. The antique time saw to the utmost bounds of freedom, we of servitude; robbed by an inquisition of the common use of speech and hearing, we should have lost our very memory with our voice, were it as much in our power to forget as to be dumb. Now at last our breath has come back; yet in the nature of human frailty remedies are slower than their diseases, and genius and learning are more easily extinguished than recalled. Fifteen years have been taken out of our lives, while youth passed silently into age; and we are the wretched survivors, not only of those who have been taken away from us, but of ourselves." Even a colourless translation may give some idea of the distilled bitterness of this tremendous indictment. We must remember that they are the words of a man in the prime of life and at the height of public distinction, under a prince of whose government he speaks in terms of almost extravagant hope and praise, to realise the spirit in which he addressed himself to paint his lurid portraits of Tiberius or Nero or Domitian.