Life
Details about his personal life are scarce. What little is known comes from scattered hints throughout his work, the letters of his friend and admirer Pliny the Younger, and an inscription found at Mylasa in Caria.
Tacitus was born in 56 or 57 to an equestrian family; like many Latin authors of both the Golden and Silver Ages, he was from the provinces, probably in northern Italy or Gallia Narbonensis. The exact place and date of his birth are not known, and his praenomen (first name) is also unknown; in the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris his name is Gaius, but in the major surviving manuscript of his work his name is given as Publius. One scholar's suggestion of Sextus has gained no traction.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Oh! what a poor thing is human life in its best enjoyments!—subjected to imaginary evils when it has no real ones to disturb it! and that can be made as effectually unhappy by its apprehensions of remote contingencies as if it was struggling with the pains of a present distress!”
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“As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new,—and near the end
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