In Our Time - Tacitus and the Decadence of Rome

Episode Date: July 10, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Roman historian Tacitus who chronicled some of Rome’s most notorious emperors, including Nero and Caligula, and whose portrayal of Roman decadence influences the way we see Rome today. “The story I now commence is rich in vicissitudes, grim with warfare, torn by civil strife, a tale of horror even during times of peace”. So reads page one of The Histories by the Roman historian Tacitus and it doesn’t disappoint. Convinced that Rome was going to the dogs, Tacitus depicts a Rome which is a hotbed of sex and violence, of excessive wealth and senatorial corruption. His work is a pungent study in tyranny and decline that has influenced depictions of Rome, from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall to Robert Graves’ I, Claudius. But is it a true picture of the age or does Tacitus’ work present the tyranny and decadence of Rome at the expense of its virtues? And to what extent, when we look at the Roman Empire today, do we still see it through Tacitus' eyes?With Catharine Edwards, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck, University of London; Ellen O’Gorman, Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol and Maria Wyke, Professor of Latin at University College London

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the story I now commence is rich in vicissitudes, grim with warfare, torn by civil strife, a tale of horror, even during times of peace.

That's on page one of the histories by the Roman historian Tacitus. Tacitus Rome, is a scene of crime, sex and violence, of excessive wealth and senatorial corruption. His work is a pungent study in tyranny and decline that has influenced depictions of Rome from Gibbons' decline and fall to Robert Graves' I. Claudius. But is it a true picture of the age? Does Tacitus' work present the tyranny and decadence of Rome at the expense of its virtues? And to what extent, when we look at the Roman Empire today, do we still see it through his eyes?

With me to discuss Tacitus are Ellen Gorman, Senior Lecture in Classics at the University of Bristol, Maria Weike, Professor of Latin at University College London, and Catherine Edwards, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck University of London. Catherine Edwards, Tastas two major works are called Annals and the History, which cover most of the first century AD.

Can you introduce us to the Anals, first of all? Right, well, Tastis Anals is actually his last work, but it covers the earliest period that he writes about, and that's the period from the death of Augustus in 14 AD, down to, we think, the death of Nehore. although the last parts of the annals are actually missing. So also missing are the period that covers the reins of Caligula and Claudius. So it's a fragmentary work, but it's nevertheless hugely important

and has had the most massive influence on how we see ancient Rome. Can you tell us more what, how many books remain? You've said that we don't know a bit about Caligula and sound. That's right. Well, we have books one to four, part of book five, book six, then books 7 to 10 are missing and then we have books 11 through to the fragmentary book 16. Book 16 breaks off at a very dramatic moment

and then we don't know what happens after that. So if you would give an overall view what you can get from what's the remaining of the annals, what would you say that the theme was on now? Well, there are different ways in which one could see the theme. I mean, it's the history of Rome, written in some ways in a traditional way, but preoccupied with the question really

perhaps of how one can go on being a good Roman senator under the regime of the emperors. Is it actually possible to function as a Roman senator under that autocratic regime? Was he a man who would have first-hand knowledge of this? Absolutely. He was a Roman senator himself. He'd reached the highest peaks, really, of a Roman political career. He'd been a consul, which is Rome's highest magistracy,

and he'd also had the very prestigious post of pro-consul of Asia, being the governor of Asia. So he knew history absolutely from the inside. And these other work of the histories, in what ways are different from the annals? The histories has written in fact earlier, but covering a later period. The period starts off covering AD69

for the period of the year of the four emperors and goes through probably to the death of demission. Again, that work is also fragmentary. We only have the first part of it. But it's really concerned with civil war. primarily. And is that different the way it's written,

the way it's aimed than the annals? It's not profoundly different. One might say that Tastas' style is kind of more mature, perhaps, in the annals than it is in the histories. But the histories, too, is concerned with the sort of inner conflict

of Rome, whether Rome can still be itself under the emperors. And in some ways, civil war, the kind of conflict and violence of civil war that involves so many deaths, is a sort of comes out as a kind of, in some ways, an essential characteristic of Rome,

that Rome is a nation that's always somehow been preoccupied with civil war. So by and large, these two incomplete collections, the histories of the analogue, are giving us a picture of Rome in the first century AD, of the Roman Empire in the first century, based on what is happening in Rome itself. Yes, it is largely based on Rome itself, but Tastas also brings in what's happening on the edges of the Roman Empire

and in some ways that acts in counterpoint to events back in the city. So we get campaigns in Germany, campaigns in the East against the Parthians, campaigns in Britain. Can we develop that, Eleanor Goldman? What is largely going on in the first century AD? In terms of the history of the period. Yes, in terms of what's going on outside of the battles, the extensions of empire, the defeats. Some idea of what is happening. One of the things that Tacitus starts with at the beginning of the annals is he says in Augustus's will,

one of the things that Augustus leaves to his successors is the advice that they don't extend the empire. And so one of the themes of the annals is, yes, we are maintaining our boundaries, but we're not actually pushing our boundaries out any further. And this is then placing a constraint upon the aristocratic class, because it places a constraint on the kind of military glory that they can achieve. by conquering new territories. Basically, they're a maintenance pattern. And Tacitus says that about four books into the annals.

He says, you must be aware that my history is different from earlier histories because there are no great wars. There are no cities to conquer. It'll be rather surprising to listeners. It is to me. I'm listening to you, obviously, that Augustus puts this in his will and emperors follow it, although emperors, we think, naturally, want to have more and more.

Is this because they're obedient or because of the... was big enough for them to look after? Sometimes it's about practicality, but for each emperor, it's a balancing task. The Rhine frontier is one good example. It's a natural frontier. So it's actually easy and therefore relatively inexpensive for the Romans to maintain. But any emperor who maintains the boundaries also runs the risk of alienating, first of all, the people in Rome because they like triumphs and money coming in, but also the legionaries out on the boundaries.

And that becomes then the problem at the beginning. of the histories because the legionaries start naming their own emperors. So this is one of the big things that's happening, I know it's asking you to put a quart in a symbol,

but is this one of the main things that's happening in the first century? In Rome, we're going to come to that, plenty of emperors and activities there, but out there, it's the Roman armies roving around and themselves gathering strength. Yes, well, they've always had strength.

What they're lacking now is something focused to do, and that increases a sense of dishonour for them, that there's this rumor going around. that we're not allowed to fight any wars anymore. And they also start to get attached to their military commanders who, of course, are there and present, rather than to some figure back in Rome.

Are we talking about an extremely rich empire in terms of material wealth? It's much booty and goods coming in from the empire to Rome? Well, it's no longer booty because most of the time it's not about looting. It's not about conquering new territories and looting. So it's more maintenance money. it's more about local taxes

and also of course the all-important grain coming particularly from Egypt. So it's a sort of regular maintained influx of money which of course is bringing with us with it a system of collecting these taxes and siphoning them back to Rome.

So outside Rome, how are we talking about a largely settled empire at this time? Largely, it does vary from place to place and of course at the end of the histories as we have it, the very brutal Jewish war is being fought and the siege of Jerusalem is about to happen. Tustas also wrote about Germany and about Britain.

What's happening particularly there? Well, I think the reason he wrote about Germany, which was one of his earliest monographs, was probably because he wrote this in AD98. The elderly new emperor Nerva had just adopted a young and experienced General Trajan as his successor, Trajan was still out on the round frontier, and this was creating a certain amount of tension in Rome. Why was our new emperor or a new emperor to be still out in Germany?

And that was probably one of the reasons why Tacitus wrote a monograph on Germany to explain the place to the Romans. Maria Weik, he read about Britain as well in a biography of his father-in-law, Agricula. In it he declared, and so the population, the population in Britain, was gradually led into the demoralising temptations of arcades, baths and sumptuous bankers. The unsuspecting Britannists spoke of such novelties as civilisation, when in fact there were only a feature of their enslavement. Can you elaborate on that, please? Yes, it's a curious thing about the agricola that it's meant to be a eulogy of Tacitus's father-in-law.

It is full of references to tribes who are seduced and kings who are captured and the establishment of forts and the final conquest from the Roman perspective of Britain. And yet it does take moments in which it chooses to critique empire and imperialism from the point of those who are conquered. So not only are we told that Agricula civilised the British and got them inured to warfare by offering them peace and leisure through things like the building of cities and temples. He got the chieftain sons to be educated.

The Britons became very interested in learning the Latin language and putting on the toga. And yet Tacitus then says precisely that this was not a process of civilization, but a process of entering into servitude because these features also led to the demoralizing lifestyle that comes with arcades and baths and banquets. And he also allows some of the conquered to criticise the imperial process

in the most extraordinary moving fashion. So famously there's a celebrated speech by the Caledonian chieftain Caligas as he summons 30,000 troops in the northernmost part of Scotland to fight a last stand against the Romans. And he describes themselves as the last of the free and the Romans as pillages of the world. And then he says to his troops that what the Romans have called Imperium,

what they call government, has been nothing but looting, ravaging and butchery, and that what they call peace has actually been desolation. And over the centuries, that moving, speech about the problems of imperialism have been taken up time and time again. And what rings through the years is the speech of Caligarchus, even though it's embedded in a story that praises the triumphs of Agricola.

It is curious, isn't it, because he very much admires the Britannes, especially the North Britain's, the Caledonians, that's picked Caledonians, let's just say, North. Northern Britain, we're sick for Northern Britain. and yet at the end he's quite pleased the Romans beat them of course but he finds great virtues in them and the virtues he finds to switch your civilization

might be called Spartan virtues and actually being introduced to civilisation and the Brits you think well it might be quite civilised to go to a banquet or the theatres he calls this enslavement and this runs through his later works the history of the annals as themes very strongly doesn't it

can you develop that? Yes I mean in a sense what's really striking about that particular comment in the agricola is that Tacitus is suggesting that decadence is a gift, a gift that Romans give to the people that they colonise. And one way of... A poison chalice, though?

Yes, indeed it is. And one way of understanding that is that in some senses it actually constitutes a critique of Rome itself. And to go back to what Catherine Ellen have been saying about how all the writings of Tacitus are in some sense about the subjection of the Roman world to emperors, you can see that in talking about the Romans subjecting the Britons, in talking about living in arcades and having banquets

as a demoralising process as a move from liberty to servitude, is a kind of progression which the Romans themselves have already experienced. And the only peoples, Tacitus is suggesting, who now have the traditional values that Romans used to have, live on the margins of the empire. So it's not necessarily even Spartan virtue, to some degree, some of these Caledonian tribes exhibit old Roman virtues, which is excellence in warfare, a dedication to the freedom of your people, loyalty to your families,

respect for your ancestors, duty to your descendants. These are all things that the Romans valued immensely highly. And Tacitus is saying, where is that now? It's not at the centre anymore. And he uses them as the yardstick, rather, rather than looking back to Augustus or before. before Augustus? Yes, he does to a degree because when you could say that

there's always a sense in his narratives as there are in many of the imperial histories that there was this earlier fantastic golden age of the Republic and a decline into imperial times. But actually interestingly, Tacitus suggests that the time of political equality,

the time of true republican government, the time of traditional Roman morals was actually in the very very, very, very dim, distant past. And we're not talking about a hundred years ago. We're not talking about Augustus. We're not even talking about before Augustus. We're talking about the second century BC. And he suggests that what has happened, the problem is that there may well have been this period. And one starts to think that perhaps he thinks it never quite was ever as good as that. He suggests that the problem is it's in the nature of man

to seek power. And the dangers for Rome is when that power is worldwide, is global. So there's a sequence of events. Mandesai's power, power brings wealth, wealth brings civil war, civil war brings autocracy, and there we are in this decadent age.

So he kind of suggests that it's almost always been like that. Well, let's turn to the decadence of Rome, Catherine Edwards. Can we look more specifically at his idea of Deccans? What did he see as the nature of corruption? What did Tacitus see? What was it that was corrupt and decadent in the realm of, let's say, the first century, 80, the Rome of the early emperors?

Well, I think it's very interesting. It's a very complex process in Tacitus. I mean, there is this issue, as Maria very rightly says, of autocracy as being something that, in a sense, Rome is always heading towards, and you get these kind of almost cycles, as he talks about at the Republic, that Rome starts off as a city.

ruled by kings, but then you get liberty in the consulship, but then somehow periods of one-man rule become increasingly frequent until we get to the sort of system set up by Augustus. So there's a sense in which individual rulers are to blame, the systems to blame, but also that the Roman senator to blame as well because they collude, they collude with emperors. They see that as the only way that they can do well for themselves is by collusion.

So what's quite curious about, the way Augustus, the way Tastus talks about the system of the principal is that it's not simply a question of blaming the emperors, but that it's, everybody is somehow compromised by it. Including Alan Aguhran, Tacitus himself. I mean, he paints a picture of the Roman Senate in relation to the Empress. He says in Egregular, we, the senators must include him, led the emperor's opponents to prison, we watched their sufferance in shame,

we stained ourselves with their innocent blood. Now what's you talking about now? Well, he's talking about the guilt of the senatorial order as a whole, and one of the things he starts to explore in the agricola and explores in very detailed ways throughout the annals and histories is what you do as an individual senator in Senate. And there's a number of things you can do. One is you can, as Catherine says, collude,

and the most striking examples of those and the most horrifying examples are you start to bring accusations of treason against your fellow senators, people that you know the Emperor is suspicious of you collude by dragging these people to destruction actively. You actually take you yourself as Senators take them to the prison

We watch their sufferings insane that means you watch them being tortured Yes I mean the example he's giving of We ourselves hold I think it's Helvidius Priscus off to prison We have another source saying One Senator did actually lay hands On Helvidius in Senate

And drag him physically to prison And the rest of the Senate of course stood there and were horrified or not, as the case may be. And so he said, we are guilty by association. So that's the other thing you can do. You can actively take on accusations, and you can benefit from that.

You can stand to one side and not take on accusations and be silent, or you can actively speak up and dissent, but you run the risk then of yourself being brought to trial for treason. So the fish is rotting from the head. The corruption for him begins in the Senate and the corruption of the Senate.

Ria, can I just, Mara, can I just go back one moment to the idealised passed, you put it to, say, three centuries before Tastas was writing. But was there not a sense, because we're probably thinking the Republic, not very long ago, about, just about the time of, just before the death of Julius Caesar in 44B.C. That was thought of as when Rome was great, when people were elected and for a short time, and a feeling of a sort of

male, upper-class democracy, but there it was. That didn't enter into his thought very strongly at all. Well, he perceives the period before Augustus as one that has already... Augustus' his periods were... Well, Augustus officially comes to power the day that Cleopatra flees the Battle of Actium in 31 BC and shortly after she and Mark Anthony commit suicide. And at that point, Augustus is seen as what's called the Prinkeps, the Principate starts, which means in theory the most excellent among many,

but is clearly heading gradually towards what we now call the reigns of the emperors, the House of the Caesars in Rome. So Tacitus doesn't necessarily suggest that the division is at the moment when we have what we now call our first Emperor Augustus. He suggests that it's all started long before that with all the civil wars and the legionaries who are devoted to their generals is an issue that has occurred already before the time of Augustus, with, for example, the battles between Julius Caesar and Pompey.

But what Tacitus does do also that's quite interesting is he kind of idolizes the Republican historians in the sense that he, at least he says, that in the time before Tiberius, who comes to power after Augustus, In the time before Tiberius, historians wrote about the people of Rome, not the one ruler of Rome. When they wrote about the people of Rome, they wrote with a lack of partisanship, a lack of anger about great events. But once you have a single ruler, then history is either completely servile or completely hostile.

And he suggests that what he's now trying to, in a way, return to the new track. of republican histories and do the difficult task of writing about emperors while sine era et studio, I think he says, without anger or partisanship. Catherine Edwards, the sexual activities, morose, are very important in Tacitus. Does he link, does he make a direct link

between moral and political corruption? He does, he does this in various different ways. I mean, with the Emperor Tiberius, who's the first emperor that we hear about in detail. We get the kind of lusts of Tiberius, which are not talked about in a great deal of detail, and there's a contrast there with Swaytonius' biography of Tiberius, which goes into all kinds of sordid detail.

But Tastus is in some ways more high-minded, but nevertheless, the lusts of Tiberius are a key part of his characterization. And we can see that as kind of a reflection of the kind of traditional picture of what a tyrant is like, tyrant is somebody whose lusts are unbridled, whose perverse lusts are unbridled. And so this is part of the way in which we can perceive the tyranny of Tiberius. If we look on to later emperors, Claudius... We're not doing it to scandal sheets.

It's just if you can give us some idea of the lusts of Tiberius. So that, well... We're all prepared to cover our ears, but we said have some indication because lusts have changed their nature as time to come out. Well, yes. I mean, he... A lot of it is done by kind of innuendo. and there's, Tiberius has spent a long period of time on roads before he becomes emperor and kind of quite what he was doing there remains the subject of rumour and gossip.

And rumour and gossip is hugely important in Tastas, and that's one of the ways in which knowledge circulates, but it's never entirely clear how stable that knowledge is under the principal. And sometimes he'll tell a dreadful story and say, oh, actually this isn't, you know, there's no real grounds for thinking this is true, but it's important because people were telling the story, and that's part of how they perceived what was going on. So still no information about losses.

Never mind. I'm afraid it's really quite improper for the radio at this time of day. I'll take your word for it. But what connection did he see? Well, I think it's a symptom of a political regime that is not as it should be when the ruler is indulging his lusts. And with Nero, we see that manifested in a rather different way, perhaps more flagrant way.

Nero has indulges his lust with a slave girl, actae. That's not so bad in the great scheme of things. But by far the kind of one of the worst aspects of Nero's reign is his relationship with his mother, Agrippina. Does he or doesn't he have incestuous relations with Agrippina? This is a kind of key question. and in some ways it's this which prompts Nero's murder of his mother, something we might come on to later.

But there are other stories about Nero and his lust. He's alleged to have had a sort of a public exhibition of a marriage ceremony with a man, Pythagoras, at which Nero played the bride and allegedly acted out all the things that would have happened in private for a normal wedding happened in public for Nero's. wedding to Pythagoras. Well, I see what you mean.

We shall draw a veil over that particular wedding. Women seem to be characterized, Mariah Weik, as scheming, sexually voracious, and generally responsible for bringing down weak and otherwise virtuous men. Is this what do you find in, doesn't it? Well, he has many very interesting tales to tell about women, and in particular about Messalina and Agrippina,

If we just take Messalina as an example, since I can see that you want, the wife of Claudius, since I can see you want some specific details here, this is all okay. Look, when I did the trail for this programme, I said, at the top of the programme there is actually, and there is a trade description act operating on in our time, you know. Well, in the case of Tiberius, you've said quite enough, people, you say what you want to say, but it's part of it, and I'm getting most of it from the notes of you three, so you can raise your eyebrows as much as you want. What's on paper can be on out.

Right, let's talk about Messalina, Claudius. Well, the interesting story that Tacitus tells about Messalina is that he indicates that she was an extremely lustful, utterly promiscuous young bride of this aged, rather decrepit, imbecilic Emperor Claudius. And that in her perversities, in her sexual perversities, she chose to pursue the idea of marrying her lover, which might not sound particularly perverse, but it is when you're already married to the emperor of Rome.

And so she decides to go through an entire wedding ceremony with her lover in Rome openly, including the wedding veil, the banquet, the marriage bed. Claudius's freedmen are absolutely horrified by this activity. They want to try and get rid of her. And so they have to think through how to do this without Claudius actually seeing her falling on his mercy. So we're told this fantastic tale that they send a couple of Claudius' mistresses out to him

because he's out in Ostia at the time to tell him what has happened. He comes racing back to Rome. Messalina's banquet immediately dissolves. She goes running through the city and can only find a garden refuse cart to get to him because Tacitus likes these little details. When she finally reaches Claudius, the freedmen start shouting over her when she's pleading for mercy, and they put lists of her lovers in front of Claudius's eyes,

so he can't be reminded how beautiful she is. They take him back into the city, show him the lover's house where half his property now reside, so he's suitably shocked and goes off for a good dinner, at which point he decides that perhaps he will see her the next day. So the freedmen then have to slaughter her that night to make sure there's no possibility of that. And when they finally tell Claudius what's happened,

he just asks for another bottle of wine, and then a while later marry somebody, else. And if we ask what is that story doing in Tacitus, what does it tell us about the roles of women, you could say that it's a perfect example

of senatorial government gone horribly wrong, because all that's happening here is a contest for power between the wife of the emperor and his freed men. And Claudius is just this idiotic old man deluded by everybody around him. But Alan O'Gorman,

sorry, you want to say something, I want to ask you a question. You said you want, well, I suppose I wanted to take up our reluctance to talk about the sex scenes. There are very few sex scenes in Tacitus. And if we read it Tacitus only for the sex scenes, we're missing the point. What Maria says is absolutely right. It's a sign of the corruption of senatorial power, but it's also, Tacitus tells very few these sex scenes because they show no possibility of redemption. He's more interested in senatorial scenes because there is the possibility of redemption there. But one of the reasons dwelling on women is that if you have a heresy,

predatory system, emperors, the Caesars of the emperors, then the woman's very important because she bears the air and therefore she will have control, far more control of the air as a mother than anybody else. So she becomes extremely important in that particular small scheme of things. Yes, mind you, aristocratic women, even in the late Republic, had a degree of political clout and there used to be, you know, that the aristocratic women of Rome had a

sort of club that got together and they networked and sorted out whose daughters were going to marry whose sons, which was a sort of keystone of political alliances in Republican Rome. So in one way what we see is that political influence of the Republican woman expanded beyond its normal influence to an excessive degree, and there it is a symptom of the same thing happening with the husband, that instead of having lots of senators, you have the emperor expanded beyond his normal status. Well, I think that's absolutely right, but I think it's very, very interesting the way that Tastus homes in on, particularly Livia, who's the wife of Augustus and the mother of Tiberius, and Agrippina, who's the wife of Claudius and mother of Nero, and is indeed Livia's great-granddaughter, and Tastas actually plays on the resemblance between the two of them. They are some of the most compelling figures in the annals.

Livia, the alleged poisoner, who plays a key role in getting her son onto the imperial throne, given that actually Tiberius is not the son of Augustus, and then Agrippino, who does exactly the same thing for her son Nero, who is not the son of Claudius, and manages to sort of sideline Claudius' own son in doing that. But also with Agrippina, we see an attempt to sort of muscle in on, or what Tastus presents is muscling in on the great decisions of state. Agrippina wants to be there welcoming the ambassadors. Agrippina wants to be sort of part of,

she wants to have a sort of, you know, a little hidey hole made, but she can listen in on senatorial debate and so on. And in some ways, the very fact that any woman can be in that position is in itself the most egregious symptom of how corrupt, how wrong the system of the principle it is, potassium, because traditionally women are not to have any, there should be a strict divide. And what happens within the House,

told us one thing in terms of marriage alliances and so on, but what happens in the Senate, that Senate should be where the decisions are made, not the Emperor's bedroom. Has it, would it be true to say that Tacitus hasn't many good words to say for many people, Eleanor Goldman. One of the people he does respect is an historian

Kramutius Cordes. Most people come up badly in his handles and histories. Most of the prominent people come up badly. It's interesting to... Badly to say badly, they fall from high standards one way or another. They fall from high standards one way or the other. He's sometimes a little bit more complex than that. I mean, sometimes he has characters who you think are going to be uniformly dreadful.

One example is Lucius Vitellius, the father of the emperor of Vitellius. The other is the Emperor Otho. In both instances, these are people who lead very dissolute lives in the city, are given a provincial command. Hey, presto, go out to the provinces and behave impeccably. So he is aware that people don't always behave as you expect. Certainly any historian he mentions, Cremutius Cordes gets a huge scene in the book four of the annals because he's just

written a history, he's called the assassins of Caesar, the last of the Romans and he's now arraigned for treason. And he gives a great speech defending history and defending his memory and then goes out and commits suicide. But also incidentally, there's an

obituary of Sevilleus andonianus and he says, you know, this man led an excellent life. And all he says, it's this man wrote Roman history, he led an excellent life, he doesn't appear anywhere else. So I think he continued used to feel picking up on what Maria said about history in the past that if you decide

you're going to be a Roman historian you're already somewhere on the path of virtue. Maria, take that word history. Is it history as you three would understand it or is it what might be called the higher gossip or would you sort of let it pass as history today? I source is clear.

Does he, that sort of thing, checking things are? In some senses it's much less it would fail by the standards of, say, serious historical scholarship in terms of its lack of explicitness about its documentation and in the style that it's written and in all sorts of other respects. But in some senses it's so much more than any modern history could be because it has so many higher expectations of what history ought to be doing.

And it's pragmatic in the sense that Tacitus says the work of history is to commemorate great deeds and to bring to the attention of prosperity evil deeds to denounce them. He also treats history as didactic. It will, we should learn from history. We should be able to predict the future from what we see in the past. And he is writing as a statesman

for readers who are going to have a life in public office. So it's moral instruction as well. Well, it's ethical as well because we should learn good and bad behaviour from within the writings. And because it has a strong sense of its utility, history has an incredibly important function to play in society. Because of that, you have to stir up the emotions of your audience. You have to engage them. And to engage them, you write in a style that is full of rhetorical ornamentation, devices that we would nowadays call novelistic, dramas,

direct speeches, all that sort of thing is meant to move your audience. so your audience will then learn and will take from the past what's needed for the future. Catherine, can I turn to the question of Tacitus influence? Do we know the influence he had around his own time before we move on from there? Well, we don't actually have a lot of history writing in Latin from after Tacitus, and we don't even know what happened to Tacitus in the end. People argue about the degree to which he may have been an important influence on the historian of the sort of later centuries of the Roman Empire,

Mianus Marsalinus. Later on, if we're looking far into the future, he's sort of rediscovered in the Renaissance and we find scholars like Sir Thomas Moore is very, very interested in Tastus and that one can detect a certain kind of tacitian

tone to the way he talks about British monarchs like Richard II and then perhaps one could go through to Given and Tastus. Well, let's go through to Gibbon. Eleanor Gorman, did he have given's history of the decline and fall the Roman Empire, an 18th century, a very important work in British history. Is the influence on Gibbon direct and very important?

It's direct and acknowledged. There's, of course, the famous paragraph in Gibbon where he recounts the scene of the Augustine Restoration in Senate and says it would take the pen of the tacitus to describe this, not only describe what the people are saying, but their inner motivations as well. what he's very interested in, first of all, is the way that Tacitus's rhetoric of appearance versus reality

pervades his historical visions. So Tacitus and Gibbon are always saying, this person did this apparently from the motive of X, but actually from the motive of Y, though people also said motive W choose what you will. I think Gibbon is also interested in Tacitus because Tacitus's narrative of what has happened, is also continually informed by the potentiality of the actions he describes

for the present readership in particular in the way that Maria has outlined, but also for that overall generalized sense of what is power and how does it affect individual rulers and people living under rulers. But Gibbon goes straight forward. And his title says the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And is the idea of the decline and fall of the empire, is that coming from? Did Tacitus set the idea of how you wrote about Rome,

you wrote about the decline and fall of Rome, rather than the rise and grandeur of Rome? Well, decline is a theme that occurs throughout Roman literature, even before the time of the emperor's Rome is in decline, as far as its writers are concerned. They're always in decline, because the Golden Age is always somewhere far in the distance. So even Horace writing under Augustus talks about Rome

having already declined from its republicans. So it's a kind of trope, but it's one that becomes especially important under the emperors and especially important once you've experienced the reign of terror of an emperor-like Domitian. So then there's a much progressively stronger sense and perhaps more of a reason to think that Rome is somehow in decline. In what way is Domitians are a reign of terror than in Tacitus? Do we know that, Catherine? Well, Domitian is described in most detail in Tacitus biography of his father-in-law, Agricola and there are references to individual senators who come to a bad end under

admission. One of the things that's quite interesting is that Tastas writes as though the reign of demission will far worse than anything that had preceded it and yet in terms of the sort of number of fatalities seems to be considerably fewer. I think so Tastas is often in the business of presenting an impression that he doesn't isn't quite substantiated by the factual details that he chooses to include. But certainly, Domitian, we also get other Roman writers who present us. with a very positive picture of Domitian, although those tend to be less believed than Tacitus. But it might be in a sense that Tacitus writes like that about Domitian

because that is the tyranny that he personally experienced. And he says quite movingly at one point in the Agricola that now that Domitian is dead, he says that after 15 years of a tyranny of that nature, we can never be what we once were, that there's no possibility even of returning to the partial freedoms the partial liberty that Romans had 15 years earlier, let alone going back to the Republic.

Except what he says at that moment is now we can speak. All right, our voices are rough, our voices are not practiced, but now we can at least speak. And what we would love to have, of course, is the rest of the histories, because the rest of the histories, if it was extant, would give us Tacitus as contemporary history, and that would be very interesting. One of the interesting aspects of Tastus, though,

is that although at one point he promises that he will talk about his own times in more detail and so these are the times when you can say what you think and you have freedom. He never actually kind of really writes about those good times and one might see that as partly because it's not ultimately congenial to his particular style of writing to celebrate the good.

Many people listening to this programme will have received as it were Tastas' view of history through Robert Graves through I Claudius Clodius they've got either on the screen or off the page. How many liberters did graves take with Tacitus? Well, in some senses he's extremely Tacitian in that the

hero of his work is a historian because if you remember in I Claudius and Claudius the God, Claudius is represented as someone who's writing a history of Rome for posterity. He's writing a history in which he wants to expose the corruption

of the imperial house in the hope that there can be a return to the days of republican traditions. I mean, that's in a sense, rather similar to the point of Tacitus, but he's also extremely untacetian in that he draws on many other ancient authors and brings in many of the anecdotes

that Catherine was mentioning earlier on. And perhaps one of our strongest memories of those novels and of the BBC series in the 70s were the sex scenes that now are given a great deal of prominence as a way of demonstrating the corruption of empire. But Catherine, what he's doing,

it seems to me Graves, when Tacitus suggests things and says, but these are rumours, but rumours are important, because you have to know the gossip of the day, that's part of the context of the day. Graves just piles in and said, look, Messalina did this, and here we go. I think that's absolutely right, yes, the sort of, you know, rumours about did Livia poison Augustus's grandsons or not, did she actually poison Augustus, all that then becomes actualised in the Robert Graves version. But of course, with television, you can't, it's much more difficult to present,

you know, different possible interpretations. you have to choose which to go for. Are we talking about the books? It does the same in the book. I can't blame television. It's blind Graves. I mean, it makes great books, but that's a different matter.

One of the interesting Tacitian influences on Graves is the scene when the young Claudius, who is training to be a historian, goes to the library of Augustus on the Palatine, and he meets the two great historians of the time, Livy, who we have, and Asinius Polio, who we don't have. And they write very different sorts of histories.

We know that. And the young Claudius has to choose which historian he will follow. He decides to follow a Sinius Polio. And Sinius Polio is the stylist whom Tacitus is ultimately following. So there's a sort of occluded Tacitianism there. Finally, Catherine, how much you trust Tacitus' view of Rome? Well, I think Tastus view of Rome is an incredibly powerful view

because he does present us with this very sophisticated and ironical view of human motivation, which I think many, many readers have found deeply compelling. Thank you very much. Thanks Catherine Edwards, Eleanor Gorman and Maria White. This is the last in this series of this series of in our time. We'll be back at the end of September and the programs from this series and many more are on the website

and thank you very much for listening.