Histories

Tacitusc. AD 100–110

Tacitus’s history of Rome from AD 69, written in the first decade of the second century. What survives ends in AD 70; its fifth book gives a Roman senator’s account of the Jews and of the opening of Titus’s siege of Jerusalem.

The Histories were the earlier of Tacitus’s two large works. They began with the civil wars of AD 69, a period that Tacitus had lived through as a boy. Only the first four books and the opening of the fifth survive, and the text breaks off in AD 70.

Book 5 opens with Titus encamped before Jerusalem. Before describing the siege, Tacitus gives an account of the origin, customs and history of the Jews (5.2–10), and then the city, the Temple and the portents said to have preceded its fall (5.11–13). The surviving text does not reach the capture of the city. The account of the Jews sets out several rival stories about their origin and is openly contemptuous of their religion; it is evidence for how an educated Roman saw them, not for their own traditions. It also records that Pompey, when he entered the Temple, found no image of a god inside (5.9).

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