Episode Details

Tacitus served under the tyrant Domitian, kept his head down, and then wrote histories so scathing that they defined how the Western world understands Roman imperial corruption. His Annals and Histories are masterpieces of controlled fury, written by a man who knew what it cost to survive a bad emperor.

This episode examines how silence under tyranny produced the greatest political historian Rome ever had.

• How he survived Domitian's reign of terror while others did not
• The Annals and their devastating portrait of Tiberius and Nero
• The Germania and its complicated afterlife in European nationalism
• Why his prose style remains one of the most admired in Latin literature