The Histories

In AD 68 Nero's suicide marked the end of the first dynasty of imperial Rome. The following year was one of drama and danger, though not of chaos.

In the surviving books of his Histories the barrister-historian Tacitus, writing some thirty years after the events he describes, gives us a detailed account based on excellent authorities. IN the 'long but single year' of revolution four emperors emerge in succession: Galba, the martinet; Otho, conspirator, dandy and and symbol of self-sacrifice; Vitellius, the unambitious hedonist upon whom greatness was thrust to his own undoing; and hte ultimate victor, the no-nonsense Vespasian, who established the Flavian dynasty.

Tacitus sees history in terms of human sagacity and folly, of pathos and heroism, of chance and fate. In an incisive, rapid and smooth-running narrative which extends from Britain to Egypt and from Caucasus to Morocco, each episode and each sentence betray the verbal craftsman and the lover of epigram and paradox.