Hellenistic/Roman
Tacitus
c. 56–120
“They make a desert and call it peace.”
Tacitus was a Roman senator and historian writing under the early empire. The (with the ) records the Julio-Claudian and Flavian years in compressed, ironic prose, attentive to motive, dissimulation, and the cost of power under tyranny. He holds that history's highest function is to preserve worthy deeds and to hold wicked rulers up to the judgment of posterity. Posterity is his court. Machiavelli and Gibbon read him for different lessons; both treat him as a master of political history.
In the Conversation
1 of the Great Ideas