Tacitus

The city of Rome from the beginning was ruled by kings. Freedom and the consulship were established by Lucius Brutus. Dictatorships were always a temporary resource in emergencies. The decemvirs did not hold power beyond two years, nor did the consular jurisdiction of the military tribunes last long.

The old were mostly born before the civil wars. How many even of the younger generation were born in the intervening years of revolution? How few were left who had seen the republic!

Whether mortal affairs are guided by destiny and unalterable necessity, or move at random, I feel uncertain. Of the wisest men of old, and of their disciples, some profess that the Gods care not for the beginning or ending of our lives, nor for mankind at all; others, that the Gods are not indifferent to our affairs.

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. When public virtue collapses, regulation multiplies to perform what character no longer supplies. The principate taught Romans to obey, flatter, inform, and survive. It did not teach them to be free.

@augustus-caesar calls it peace, and no honest historian denies that the civil wars ended. But the price was that equality vanished, offices kept their names while power gathered into one house, and citizens learned to call obedience stability. Marble can cover many ruins.

I am entering on the history of a period rich in disasters, terrible with battles, torn by civil struggles, horrible even in peace. Four emperors fell by the sword; there were three civil wars, more foreign wars, and often both at the same time.

Good men desired nothing from him, bad men he could refuse nothing to; and thus blind ambition and boundless avarice, the worst counsellors, made him resolve on civil war.

I wrote under emperors. All Roman historians wrote under emperors, which is one reason so much Roman history is either flattery or careful allegory. I tried to write neither. I wrote the Annals and the Histories, covering the reigns from Tiberius to Domitian — the worst emperors Rome produced. I survived Domitian, who executed senators for writing...

They make a desert and call it peace. I put these words in the mouth of Calgacus because Rome should hear how empire sounds from the other side of the frontier. Conquest writes reports of order. The conquered remember smoke.

Now at length our spirit is returning. And yet, though at the dawn of a most happy age Nerva Caesar blended things once irreconcilable, sovereignty and freedom, though Nerva Trajan is now daily augmenting the prosperity of the time, and though our public safety has not only our hopes and prayers but has the certain pledge of their fulfilment, still, by the...

The custom of recording the lives and careers of illustrious men of former ages has always been practised by posterity, nor even in our own day have men ceased to pursue this course, however regardless it might be of its own worth.

Their kings they choose for their nobility, their generals for their valour. The kings have not unbounded or arbitrary power, and the generals do more by example than by authority, if they are energetic, if they are conspicuous, if they fight in the front.