Annals

Posterity grants everybody the glory he is due. In preparation for my trip to Rome, I decided that it was finally time to read Tacitus. I had been meaning to for a long while. Edward Gibbon, my favorite historian, always spoke of Tacitus in terms of deep reverence; and when your idols have idols,......more

The annual ups and downs of ordinary life in Imperial Rome sometimes seem just as important to the Roman historian Tacitus as are the world-shaking historical events that typically make the history books – wars and disasters and so forth. And yet Tacitus has his reasons for focusing, in his book The......more

A Game of Rome 27 September 2015 As I was reading this for the second time I simply could not believe how brutal this piece of literature was, and what is more impressive is that it is based on real life events. It is authors like Tacitus that make me want to throw modern historical fiction into the......more

The great benefit of a republic is the slowness with which it moves. In America or Rome, the long, careful consideration of matters by fractious, embittered rivals tend to assure that the only measures which pass are those which are beneficial, or those which are useless. In a dictatorship, much mor......more