So I’ve finished the Annals, and am doing a quick burn through some secondary sources on Tactitus before moving on to Hardt & Negri. Unsurprisingly, I’m finding the original material much more interesting than the criticism, and as I’ve noted before, part of the reason is that most of said criticism refers to Tacitus as a historian rather than a rhetorician.
That’s not to say that I find history uninteresting. In fact, some of the reflections Tacitus offers on the topic of historiography seem to me to be as important today as they were two thousand years ago. My original concerns about taking lessons from the past to better understand the present were misguided: Tacitus firmly believes in history as a discipline that uses the threat of historical notoriety in the future as a means by which to guide moral action in the present.
The question then becomes: how concerned are we today about future notoriety? In terms of public policy, the two most explicitly future-oriented concerns of the United States are social security and the environment — and our record sucks on both.
In the Agricola, Tacitus places a famous critique of Rome in the mouth of the Scottish chieftain Calgacus, who says of the Romans:
“Plunderers of the world, after they, laying everything waste, run out of land, they probe even the sea: if their enemy has wealth, they have greed; if he be poor, they are ambitious; neither East nor West has sated them; alone of mankind they covet poverty with the same passion as wealth. Robbery, butchery, rape they misname empire: they make a wasteland and call it peace.” (80)
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