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The Histories
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The Corrupting Influence of Power
Content Warning: This section includes descriptions of warfare and attacks against civilians; mentions of sexual violence, suicide, and enslavement; and an antisemitic description of Jewish history and culture.
A central aspect of The Histories is Tacitus’s warnings about how power damages moral character. Power, Tacitus argues, has the worst influence on those who are already immoral, but some, like Antonius Primus, “needed success” to show their true character (153). Moreover, as Tacitus has Galba warn Piso, power attracts sycophants who will “weaken” the character of those who were previously good (12).
The corruption of figures once they achieve power is common within The Histories, but its most notable examples are in the Vitellians following their victory over the Othonians and then the Flavian army in Italy following their victory over the Vitellians. In both examples, Tacitus also shows how corruption among the leaders of a group has a trickle-down impact that leads to their army being corrupted in turn. With the Vitellians, Vitellius himself is consistently presented as ill-suited to rule. During the opening stages of the rebellion, he acted lazy and without the speed that Tacitus claims is essential to success in a civil war. His imperial challenge only succeeded because of the eagerness of his army and the talent of his generals. With the Othonians defeated, Vitellius is said to have become “more despicable and lazy every day” as he led a ponderous march toward Rome (113). His own poor action “ruined” his armies (113), who were allowed too many luxuries. The weakening of the Vitellian army was completed once they arrived in Rome, where Tacitus states the “lures of the capital” ruined their moral and physical preparedness. Tacitus thus draws a direct link between Vitellius’s inability to control himself when given power and his subordinates being corrupted.
For the Flavians, their general Antonius Primus acted well during the war. He urged decisive action, rejecting orders to slow down. Tacitus praises him for this, as it took the maximum advantage of the Vitellians’ corruption. Still, the power gained from the victory revealed “his greed, pride and other hidden vices” (153), causing a brutal conquest of the rest of Italy in which he allowed his soldiers to sack Cremona and ravage the countryside. Domitian’s character is also associated with victory, as he used the power of his position as the emperor’s son to commit immoral deeds. Tacitus comments that “although he was not yet prepared to focus on his official responsibility, he was already playing the part of an emperor’s son by his rapes and adulteries” (180-81), again showing the tendency of those in power to shirk the duties entrusted by them in favor of immoral action.
Through these examples, the image that Tacitus creates of figures at the top of the Roman system is clear: Rome was ruled by people unsuited to rule whose power worsened this. He diagnoses the heart of the issue by stating, “From time immemorial humans have had an innate passion for power, but with the growth of the empire it has ripened and run wild” (83). For Tacitus, the empire and the increased wealth it brought to Rome led to an equivalent decrease in morality, one that is most apparent in the leaders of the state. This corrupting influence can be used to partially explain the chaos that overtook the Romans in 69 CE, as people’s greed and immorality made them want to gain increasing amounts of power.
However, Vespasian is shown to be an exception to this trend. While Tacitus notes that he was somewhat greedy and that mixed stories about his reputation were spread, he notes that “he was the only emperor up to that point who changed for the better” (33). This is used to demonstrate his eminent suitability for power and to show why his reign would bring a decade of relative stability, while none of the other emperors of the year could bring this stability. Tacitus also suggests that adoption of the best available man to become heir of the empire could help alleviate the corruption at the top of the Roman system. Through the conversation between Galba and Piso, Tacitus voices this view, and he stresses that if chosen correctly, the person will be more immune to corruption.
The Instability and Societal Upheaval Brought by Successive Crises
The Histories focuses on an exceptionally tumultuous period of Roman history as the state struggled to deal with the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Tacitus highlights the endemic pressure placed on the Roman system by the removal of the family, which had been the only rulers of the Principate so far. Establishing political legitimacy and stability again after this is shown to be a difficult process, with compounding consequences as instability grew.
Tacitus’s analysis of the instability from 69-70 CE begins with the overthrow of Nero by Galba, revealing the “well-kept secret” that emperors could come from outside of Rome (5). This precedent and the lack of “a dynasty put on a firm basis through long rule” created the opportunity for anyone with enough support to make an imperial challenge (106). This was made worse by the increased moral corruption that Tacitus also highlights. Consequently, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian all fought for the imperial office when they saw the chance. This instability at the top of the system is argued to have led to further consequences, making it a period of societal upheaval as well. Tacitus shows people rebelling from their defined social positions. Enslaved people and freedmen rejecting what Tacitus saw as their appropriate status was a development that he found especially worrying. When cataloguing the disasters of the period, Tacitus states, “Slaves were bribed to turn against their masters, freedmen against their patrons” (4), and he later disapprovingly comments on the role of the freedman Icelus in Galba’s regime.
Potentially more worrying than this for Tacitus was how the upheaval impacted the army. Throughout The Histories, it describes soldiers rioting, mutinying, or killing their commanders with shocking frequency at little provocation. Tacitus eventually describes it as soldiers competing in “insolence and insubordination” instead of “courage and discipline” (130). The extent of the social breakdown is clear with the extreme violence during the Sack of Cremona, where soldiers tried to enslave civilians and then killed them when forbidden from enslaving them. It then culminated in Rome itself, where infighting led to “the most lamentable and appalling disaster to befall the state of The Roman people” as the temples of Capitoline Hill were burned (169), followed by “a simultaneous orgy of violence and pleasure” as the Flavians conquered the city (176). Tacitus compares the instability to a fire that could not be controlled. Eventually, this lack of control reached Germany, where the Batavian tribes acted on the weakness they saw in Rome and rebelled. With the rise of the Flavians, Tacitus shows that order began to be restored. However, through Domitian, he hints that this social order would not be permanent.
This theme reveals Tacitus’s historical style. Writing from the point of view of an aristocrat, he focuses on traditional social structures, valuing them highly and disapproving of events that can be seen as threatening to these structures. From this basis, he identifies the instability in the Roman system, caused by the Principate and its successive crisis, as a fundamental factor that contributed to the most important turns in history of the age. He traces how these factors influenced events throughout his narrative. This ultimately leads to his work acting as a continual argument to see history from his point of view: Through framing the key events as a contiguous series of consequences, Tacitus implicitly works to persuade the reader of the merit of his analysis.
Roman Identity in the Principate
In The Histories, Tacitus questions what the Roman identity means while under the Principate. He presents Romans as struggling to maintain the virtue they supposedly had within the golden age of the republic, but he also stresses that there is still goodness in the Romans and reason to favor them over other peoples. Ultimately, Tacitus appears to believe that the ideal Roman citizen should be brave, possess moral integrity, be incorruptible by wealth, be politically active, be concerned for the good of the state, and be fair to subject tribes.
Through hints throughout the text and the broader ideological context in which Tacitus existed, his ideal Roman citizen can be reconstructed. Tacitus states that if Vespasian and Mucianus could be combined and their vices removed, they would possess “an excellent blend of imperial qualities” (64). Accordingly, his description of them is a starting point for the virtues he prioritized. Tacitus praises Vespasian’s martial prowess and prioritization of victory over luxury, while Mucianus’s speaking and administrative skills are also highlighted. Conversely, Vespasian’s greed, Mucianus’s generosity, and their shared jealousy are criticized. Furthermore, Tacitus focuses on the self-sacrifice of the Romans as comparable to “the history of early Rome” (4). Examples of this include Sempronius Densus, the “one heroic man” from the day of Otho’s coup because of his sacrifice for Piso (28), and the Gallic woman who refused to give in to torture. On top of this, Tacitus shows a preference for citizens who are politically active and aware of the importance of their own liberty. In Galba’s speech to Piso, he warns that Piso must be aware of public opinion, as Romans will not tolerate slavery. Finally, Tacitus frames the ideal Roman foreign policy as helpful to allies through creating a defense of Roman imperialism in a speech that Cerialis gives to Gallic tribes. Here, Tacitus has Cerialis claim that Romans were invited to Gaul to defend it from Germans, that they brought peace to the warring tribes of the area, and that the empire created wealth.
Tacitus notes examples of these virtues within the Romans of his day but expresses considerable disappointment with his contemporaries. Rather than politically active and concerned for the state, he argues that Romans had developed a “passionate devotion to servility” (60), meaning that they cared little about who ruled the state. Instead of politics, they were concerned with wealth. This is presented as a key reason why the Vitellian armies started a civil war, an example of greediness overriding the patriotism that Tacitus believed they should have felt. Moreover, he dismisses the rumor that Romans on each side of the civil war between Otho and Vitellius considered making common cause, as “in such a degenerate era,” there was no chance soldiers would “exercise such self-control” (83). The common threads that should have bound them as Romans had little impact, an element of the instability and social upheaval that Tacitus covers. Roman identity was further placed under stress by the complications of the empire. The Batavian revolt was “an amalgam of civil and foreign war” and raged over cities such as the Colonia Agrippinesium (193), where the locals and Romans are said to have intermarried with each other and become indistinguishable. The weakening of what it meant to be Roman culminated with this war, as Roman legions defected to a non-Roman army in an “unparalleled outrage” (220).
However, as with the instability, by the end of the surviving segment of The Histories, Roman identity begins to be restored after the stresses of civil wars. Tacitus implies this through his ethnographic digression into Jewish history and culture. When he claims, “[E]verything we hold sacred is regarded as sacrilegious; on the other hand, they allow things which we consider immoral” (246), Tacitus creates a clear point of comparison to Romans. The claims that he makes about Jewish people, such as them being hated by gods, devoted to lust, insular, and willing to be idle, are used to show the opposite of what Romans are. The “restorative” purpose of this digression is shown by the location he places it in the text. While the Jewish rebellion has been occurring in the background of the text throughout, Tacitus places this after the civil wars are over and once the Batavian revolt is in the process of being defeated. With the Romans again victorious and internally at peace, their identity has been sufficiently restored to be compared to, and found superior to, other peoples.
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