From the Stacks of Yesteryear

From the Stacks of Yesteryear: The Missing Portions of Tacitus’s Histories and Annals

By Nadya Williams

My husband occasionally talks about being born in the wrong century. A thoughtful, dignified, proper man with a love for talking serious theology over breakfast, he would have fit better in some circles in eighteenth-century New England. It’s okay. He compensates by studying intellectual and religious history.

I suppose this feeling of living in the right place but in the wrong time is not too uncommon for intellectuals. The Roman historian Tacitus, for instance, was born in the mid-first century AD and spent his life longing for what he imagined were the glory days of the Roman Republic, a time removed from his own by over a century. It was, he thought, a time when men were honorable, the virtues ruled, and the character of Roman citizens was much nobler—uncorrupted by one-man rule.

I am exaggerating a bit, of course, but not overly much. The heroes of Tacitus’s works are time and again men who resist the emperors. They pay for their desire to keep the virtues with opportunities for career advancement (best-case scenario) or possibly with their lives (a not-uncommon scenario). Tacitus can admire such men, but he himself took a more cautious path, writing most of his works towards the end of his life. Asked to highlight my favorite books “From the Stacks,” I started thinking about them. The problem is, the originals Tacitus wrote are truly and completely out of print. Let me explain.

Tacitus’s two greatest  works (in terms of scope) are Histories, which begins with AD 69, the Year of the Four Emperors, and Annals, which opens with the death of Augustus. He had envisioned the two works as a year-by-year chronicle of Roman history from the death of Augustus to the death of Domitian in AD 96. He completed both, but we’re missing large portions of both. Histories has been particularly acutely eviscerated by the ravages of time and that uncertain way by which ancient literary works have been transmitted from antiquity into the Middle Ages—the centuries-long labor of monks lovingly copying them (and perhaps adding grouchy notes or cat and dragon pictures in marginalia).

We forget sometimes, in our own modern privileged world of so many books accessible in print or online, that books could actually get lost forever, whether whole or in part. The survival of Annals, books 11-16, and the survival of the small portion of Histories that we do have (books 1-4, and the beginning of book 5), is particularly remarkable, as the earliest known medieval manuscript of each comes from the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino.

Such precarious survival tales do make me feel grateful for what we do have. And yet, I so wish we had, in particular, the rest of Tacitus’s Histories. In the small surviving snippet of book 5, he begins documenting the Jewish War, otherwise best known to us from the writing of Josephus, the Jewish leader who defected to the Romans, and enjoyed a flourishing literary career in the Flavian imperial court. What might Tacitus have told us? And what did he think of the rule of Vespasian, the disciplined miser, and his son Titus, the decorated general who died young? Can any emperors be even a little bit good, after all, or is everything about one-man-rule rotten to the core in its very nature? We can guess Tacitus’s thoughts here, but we do not know for sure.

To study the ancient world today is to live in this discomfort all of one’s days. It means to have a wish list of all the books that didn’t make it that I’d like to read. But for me as a writer today, it is also an apt reminder: memento mori. You too could labor for years on a book. Yes, you should make it good. And yes, it is good for writers to hope that their books will find readers who love them and will then pass them on to more readers. There is nothing wrong with dreaming. But in the end, you’re only human. You are not in control.

Nadya Williams is the Books Editor at Mere Orthodoxy. She holds a PhD in Classics from Princeton University and is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church; Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity; and Christians Reading Classics (forthcoming Zondervan Academic, 2025).