To C. Cornelius Tacitus, Senator:
I confess that I do not know whether I am more honoured or more amazed: that you, the distinguished author of the Dialogue on Oratory, and of the ever to be admired Life of your father-in-law, the Imperator C. Julius Agricola, should turn to me and request my help in preparing the materials for the History of our own terrible times, on which you tell me you have audaciously embarked.
What can I say? I cannot deny you, all the less because I am persuaded that your History will be immortal, and this makes me all the more anxious that my name should be, however vestigially, associated with it. And yet I shrink from the task you set me, in part because I am conscious of my own inadequacy, in part because the thought of venturing into the gloomy cave of memory fills me with fear, foreboding, and self-hatred. I, like all our generation, have waded deep in innocent blood. The cries of those dragged to prison and execution still ring in my disturbed and fearful nights. And I do not know if I can summon the fortitude to set down for you what I recall – still less what I was guilty of – in the time of terror.
You know this yourself, being, as I remember, a man of lively and sympathetic imagination – the source which feeds your genius. Yet you ask this of me, and such is my respect for you that, as I say, I cannot deny you, though every fibre of my nervous being cries out to me to do so. Even the particular reason why you seek my help makes me shudder. You do not state this reason, but I know it is in your mind. I was indeed the schoolfellow, and for some years the dearest friend, perhaps the only friend, of the tyrant Domitian. I knew, if any did, the innermost thoughts of that dark and secret man. We were brought up together, my own (reputed) father having been killed at the side of his father Vespasian in some scuffle with barbarians in the British campaign. Vespasian himself often spoke warmly of my father, and even let me understand that he owed his life to him. Perhaps he did; why say so otherwise? Then I was with Domitian throughout that terrible year when Rome stumbled and seemed about to be engulfed in civil disaster.
Oh, yes, I know it well. I know too much. I learned, when too young for such knowledge, that the gods take no thought for our happiness, but only for our punishment.
You tell me it is now safe for me to return to Rome, the tyrant being no more. I knew it already. It is not fear that keeps me here, in this distant town on the edge of barbarian lands, far from where the lemon trees bloom. It is rather a species of lassitude. Why should I move? I have made a sort of life for myself. The wine is thin and often sour, but there is no shortage of it. I confess I often go drunk to bed; drunkenness wards off evil dreams. And I have a woman, part-Greek, part-Scythian, who loves me, or says she loves me, and at any rate acts often as if she did. We have children, too, four curly-headed brats. What would the like of them do in Rome? What could Rome do for them? Here they will grow to be farmers or traders, useful creatures.
Tacitus, you who have survived and continued to inhabit the Great World, and engage in public affairs, will no doubt despise me and my way of life. But you have survived by grace of qualities which I lack, perhaps by grace of virtue also (though in our time virtue has too often invited punishment) and, it may be, by a touch of Fortune also. It occurs to me that you are a favourite of the gods, if such a thing is possible. But I have too much with which to reproach myself. I have acquiesced in murder and, for a time, profited by my weakness. I was ambitious, and, to further my ambition, stood by while evil was done.
You ask me to revisit scenes of bloodshed, to re-enter a world of treachery and malice, to confront the stuff of nightmare. You do not know what you ask of me; it is to explore memory to destroy such peace as I now possess.
Nevertheless I shall do as you ask. There will be at least one former friend whom I have served well.