Tacitus

About this book

The histories of Roman senator Cornelius Tacitus constitute the most influential examination of tyranny political behavior and public morality from the classical age. For centuries these portraits of courageous martyrs to freedom of paranoid tyrants and of sycophantic flatteres and informers shaped modern political attitudes. Ronald Mellor provides a compelling analysis of the ideas of the greatest historian of evil in the western intellectual tradition. In Tacitus Ronald Mellor passionately argues for reclaiming this ironic genius whose cynical world view is particularly well-suited to an analysis of the tyranny and brutality in our own century. Tacitus is presented as a moralist psychologist political analyst and literary artist. Tacitus greatest impact has never been on historians. Rather his political vision and dramatic images left their mark on painters poets and thinkers.