Cornelius Tacitus, a Roman knight and procurator in Belgic Gaul, mentioned by the elder Pliny. Yet it is strange that the younger Pliny never alludes to the procurator, who from his position can hardly have been a person quite obscure. In fact, Tacitus was not an unprecedented name, and Cornelius was a very common one in Italy.
On the expiration of his prætorship he would seem to have left Rome, and not to have returned to it until after Agricola's death, A.D. 95—an absence of at least four years. If he followed the ordinary course, he would be appointed on the expiration of his office to some provincial government. But whither he went, or how he employed himself during his absence from the capital, is not on record.
Credible testimony there is, conveyed by himself, that he was at Rome during the later and the worse period of Domitian's reign. "Our hands" (those of the senators), he writes in his 'Life of Agricola,' dragged Helvidius to prison; we witnessed the fate of Mauricus and Rusticus; we were steeped in Senecio's innocent blood." Now and then the description of signal and stirring events is so vivid in Tacitus's pages that it is difficult not to believe them to have been traced by the hand of an eyewitness. The passage of the 'Agricola' just cited bears the marks of his presence in the senate when Domitian's victims were dragged away to die.
And yet, in spite of the doubt and darkness that hang over his personal history, Tacitus was a "celebrity" in Italy at least, and in the literary circles of Rome. That he was so is plain from the often repeated story of the recognition of his name by a stranger to his
