History as Scourge

How truly the wisest of men used to assert that the souls of despots, if revealed, would show wounds and mutilations – weals left on the spirit, like lash-marks on a body, by cruelty, lust, and malevolence.

Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome. Penguin Group. Translation by Michael Grant, 1996 ed. Pg. 202

Tacitus wielded his history like a scourge, excoriating the corruption of emperors and populous alike, attempting to revise the fictions of earlier histories and chart the decay of Roman values and virtue in the early Empire. The end of the Republic in 31 BC was, for Tacitus, the end of freedom and equality in the Roman state. Though he idealized the republic as the embodiment of Roman values and virtue, Tacitus had no illusions, fully recognizing that it was irretrievably lost. The histories of Rome's emperors after Augustus were, according to Tacitus, tainted by flattery. Venerating the old republic, Tacitus sought to strip away the concealment......

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Title: History As Scourge
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