Tacitus - Mellor - Hardcover

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The histories of the Roman senator Cornelius Tacitus constitute the most influential discussion of tyranny, political behaviour and public morality of antiquity. For centuries these portraits of courageous martyrs to freedom, of paranoid tyrants and of sycophantic flatterers and informers shaped modern political attitudes. In this book Ronald Mellor provides an analysis of the ideas of the greatest historian of evil in the western intellectual tradition. Tacitus is presented as a moralist, psychologist, political analyst, and literary artist. Tacitus' greatest impact has never been on historians. His political vision and dramatic images left their mark on painters, poets and thinkers, especially when contemporary monarchs resembled Tacitus' Roman emperors. His histories were inflammatory texts which provoked imprisonment or persection. Thomas More, Ben Jonson, Racine, Bacon, Montaigne, Vico, Montesquieu, and Thomas Jefferson all used him to understand political autocracy. Even Napoleon angrily denounced him as a slanderer of the Roman emperors "whom their people loved". In this book, Ronald Mellor conveys the full intellectual and literary and political force of Tacitus.