Produced by Justin Kerk, Louise Pryor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net [Transcriber's note: Footnotes have been renumbered; all references to them use the new numbers. Spellings in the original are sometimes inconsistent. They have not been changed.] TACITUS THE HISTORIES TRANSLATED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY W. HAMILTON FYFE FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE IN TWO VOLUMES VOLUME I OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1912 HENRY FROWDE PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK TORONTO AND MELBOURNE TO D.H.F. 'The cause of undertaking a work of this kind was a good will in this scribling age not to do nothing, and a disproportion in the powers of my mind, nothing of mine owne invention being able to passe the censure of mine owne judgement, much less, I presumed, the judgement of others.... 'If thy stomacke be so tender as thou canst not disgest Tacitus in his owne stile, thou art beholding to one who gives thee the same food, but with a pleasant and easie taste.' SIR HENRY SAVILE (A.D. 1591). CONTENTS VOLUME I INTRODUCTION 5 TEXT: BOOKS I, II 17 VOLUME II TEXT: BOOKS III-V 9 INDEX OF NAMES 231 MAPS INTRODUCTION Tacitus held the consulship under Nerva in the year 97. At this point he closed his public career. He had reached the goal of a politician's ambition and had become known as one of the best speakers of his time, but he seems to have realized that under the Principate politics was a dull farce, and that oratory was of little value in a time of peace and strong government. The rest of his life was to be spent in writing history. In the year of his consulship or immediately after it, he published the _Agricola_ and _Germania_, short monographs in which he practised the transition from the style of the speaker to that of the writer. In the preface to the _Agricola_ he foreshadows the larger work on which he is engaged. 'I shall find it a pleasant task to put together, though in rough and unfinished style, a memorial of our former slavery and a record of our present happiness.' His intention was to write a history of the Principate from Augustus to Trajan. He began with his own times, and wrote in twelve or fourteen books a full account of the period from Nero's death in 68 A.D. to the death of Domitian in 96 A.D. These were published, probably in successive books, between 106 and 109 A.D. Only the first four and a half books survive to us. They deal with the years 69 and 70, and are known as _The Histories_. _The Annals_, which soon followed, dealt with the Julian dynasty after the death of Augustus. Of Augustus' constitution of the principate and of Rome's 'present happiness' under Trajan, Tacitus did not live to write.