‘It has rightly been felt that in the words of Tacitus the authentic voice of ancient Rome is heard for the last time.’ So E. Fraenkel wrote in 1932, and nothing we have learned since about the literature and thought of later antiquity detracts at all from the truth of his words. The age of Trajan marks not the beginning, but the end of an epoch. Then, as scarcely thereafter, specifically Roman ideas of dignitas, grauitas, and uirtus, and that specifically Roman sense of continuity and tradition, still counted for much and conditioned both actions and attitudes. Tacitus speaks both for his own time and for the past.

The central conflict between Tacitus’ claim to write dispassionately and the manner in which he does in fact write can never be reconciled or removed. It is no less real because it partly arises from our acceptance of standards of historical accuracy quite unfamiliar to Tacitus.