Abstract
Tacitus has traditionally been judged to be not just a chronicler of events but a serious thinker and even a political philosopher. Machiavelli cited him with the deepest respect, referring, for example, to a “golden verdict” of Tacitus.1 Hobbes devoted one of his earliest writings to the first four chapters of Tacitus’s Annals.2 Montesquieu, referring to Tacitus’s Germany, said that the work is brief, but “it is the work of Tacitus, who abbreviates everything because he sees everything.”3 Gibbon characterized him as attaining the ideal of a philosophic historian.4
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Notes
Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), III 6.1, 218.
Thomas Hobbes, Three Discourses, ed. Noel B. Reynolds and Arlene W. Saxonhouse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 31–67.
Cited in Paul Cartledge, “Gibbon and Tacitus,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus, ed. A. J. Woodman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 271.
Jason Cavies, “Religion in historiography,” in The Cambridge Companion to The Roman Historians, ed. Andrew Feldherr (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), highlights a recent scholarly trend to view religion, including Tacitus’s membership in the priestly college of quindecimviri, as important for his historical interpretations.
Russell T. Scott, Religion and Philosophy in the Histories of Tacitus (Rome: American Academy in Rome, 1968).
Ronald Syme, Tacitus (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1958), 526–27. One could appropriately call these eternal ambiguities “permanent questions.”
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© 2013 Thomas L. Pangle and J. Harvey Lomax
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Nichols, J.H. (2013). On the Philosophic Character of Tacitus’s Imperial Political History. In: Pangle, T.L., Lomax, J.H. (eds) Political Philosophy Cross-Examined. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299635_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299635_6
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