Tacitus and Agricola

Abstract

BUT for Tacitus' biography, Agricola and his governorship of Britain would be almost unknown to us. A piece of lead pipe at Chester,' and passing references in Dio Cassius2 would be the sole evidence for the fame and activity of perhaps the greatest governor the province ever had. Tacitus has indeed succeeded in his self-appointed project of preserving the memory of his father-in-law for the admiration and profit of future ages. This curiously slender thread of transmission has been emphasized often enough before,3 but it now seems that Agricola has survived the perils of the Dark Ages only to meet with worse. Having become one of the most widely known and, with a monograph to himself, best attested of Imperial personalities, modern criticism has subjected him to a new danger, a danger not of oblivion but of discredit. He is involved in the scepticism with which Tacitus' value as a historian has been viewed: the characterizations in the pages of Tacitus, when checked with independent evidence, are not infrequently shown to be misleading or coloured by bias. In particular, the reigns of Tiberius and Claudius now appear in a far better light through a more sceptical treatment of Tacitean evidence. And it is but a step for critics to consider the Agricola as similarly erroneous. Justification is not lacking. The monograph has been assailed as a whole and in detail, and has been no less vehemently defended.4 It has been suggested that it is as much a political pamphlet as a biography. Tacitus' animosity towards Domitian is well known, and the later chapters of the work must be taken with a pinch of salt on those grounds. The high principles of Agricola, whose worth Domitian failed to appreciate, and whose conquests he let slip, are written up ira et studio to damage Domitian's reputation yet further. Tacitus is said to be defending himself and other moderates like Agricola, who had acquiesced in the tyranny of Domitian's latter years. He argues that headstrong opposition and ambitiosa mors at such times are valueless as compared with the industria, vigor, obsequium, and modestia of men like Agricola, and that such men ought therefore not to be condemned in the wild reaction of the