LIFE OF TACITUS

§ 1. Our knowledge of the chief facts and dates in the life of Tacitus rests mainly on allusions in his own writings and those of his friend the younger Pliny, who addresses several letters to him and often speaks of him in others.

His praenomen is not mentioned in this correspondence, and is differently given by later authorities as Gaius or Publius. His family connexions are unknown; but he would appear to have been the first of his name to attain senatorial rank, though of sufficient position to have begun his ‘cursus honorum’ at the earliest, or almost the earliest, legal age; as he can hardly have been born earlier than 52–54 a. d., and must have been quaestor not later than 79 a. d., by which time he had also received in marriage the daughter of Agricola, who was already a consular, and one of the first men in the State.

His boyhood falls thus under the time of Nero; his assumption of the ‘toga virilis’ would coincide, or nearly so, with the terrible year of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius; his early manhood was spent under Vespasian and Titus; the prime of his life under Domitian; the memory of whose tyranny is seen in all his historical writings, which were composed at various dates in the great time of Trajan.