TACITUS, CORNELIUS, Roman historian. Tacitus, who ranks beyond dispute in the highest place among men of letters of all ages, lived through the reigns of the emperors Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. All we know of his personal history is from allusions to himself in. his own works, and from eleven letters addressed to him by his very intimate friend, the younger Pliny. The exact year of his birth is a matter of inference, but it may be approximately fixed near the close of the reign of Claudius. Pliny indeed, though himself born in 61 or 62, speaks of Tacitus and himself as being much of an age,1 but he must have been some years junior to his friend, who began, he tells us, his official life under Vespasian, no doubt as quaestor, and presumably tribune or aedile under Titus (80 or 81), at which time he must have been twenty-five years of age at least. Of his family and birthplace we know nothing certain; we can infer nothing from his name Cornelius, which was then very widely extended; but the fact of his early promotion seems to point to respectable antecedents, and it may be that his father was one Cornelius Tacitus, who had been a procurator in one of the divisions of Gaul, to whom allusion is made by the elder Pliny in his Natural History (vii. 76). But it is all matter of pure conjecture, as it also is whether his praenomen. was Publius or Gaius. The most interesting facts about him to us are that he was an eminent pleader at the Roman bar, that he was an eye-witness of the reign of terror during the last three years of Domitian, and that he was the son-in-law of Julius Agricola. This honorable connection, which testifies to his high moral character, may very possibly have accelerated his promotion, which he says was begun by Vespasian, augmented by Titus, and still further advanced by Domitian, under whom we find him presiding as praetor at the celebration of the secular games in 88, and a member of one of the old priestly colleges, to which good family was an almost indispensable passport. Next year, it seems, he left Rome, and was absent till 93 on some provincial business, and it is possible that in these four years he may have made the acquaintance of Germany and its peoples. His father-inlaw died in the year of his return to Rome. In the concluding passage of his Life of Agricola he tells us plainly that he witnessed the judicial murders of many of Romes best citizens from 93 to 96, and that being himself a senator he felt almost a guilty complicity in them. With the emperor Nervas accession his life became bright and prosperous, and so it continued through the reign of Nervas successor, Trajan, he himself, in the opening Pliny passage of his Agricola, describing this as a singularly blessed time, but the hideous reign of terror had stamped itself ineffaceably on his soul, and when he sat down to write his History he could see little but the darkest side of imperialism. To his friend the younger Pliny we are indebted for the little we know about his later life. He was advanced to the consulship in 97, in succession to a highly distinguished man, Verginius Rufus, on whom he delivered in the senate a funeral eulogy. In 99 he was associated with Pliny in the prosecution of a great political offender, Marius Priscus, under whom the provincials of Africa had suffered grievous wrongs. The prosecution was successful, and both Tacitus and Pliny received a special vote of thanks from the senate for their conduct of the case. it would seem that Tacitus lived to the close of Trajans reign, as he seems to hint at that emperors extension of the empire by his successful Eastern campaigns from 115 to 117. It is worth noticing that the emperor Tacitus in the 3rd century claimed descent from him, and directed that ten copies of his works should be made every year and deposited in the public libraries. He also had a tomb built to his memory, which was destroyed by order of Pope Pius V. in the latter part of the 16th century. Pliny, as we see clearly from several passages in his letters, had the highest opinion of his friends ability and worth. He consults him about a school which he thinks of establishing at Comum (Como), his birthplace, and asks him to look out for suitable teachers and professors. And he pays him the high compliment, I know that your Histories will be immortal, and this makes me the more anxious that may name should appear in them.