Writing Imperial History: Tacitus from Agricola to Annales

The late first- and early second-century Roman senator and historian Cornelius Tacitus, whom Edward Gibbon described as “the first of the historians who applied the science of philosophy to the study of facts,” shaped the development of the modern understanding of history as a crucial vehicle for social analysis. The breadth of his thinking is fully revealed only through analysis of how the political, geographical, and rhetorical theories expounded in his early works influenced his later na...