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2 His birthplace is unknown, nor can anything certain be told about his family, Some circumstances make it likely that the members of it were well to do in the world, if not highly distinguished, at least until he made the name of Tacitus memorable for all times. He rose rapidly in his public career; and that is hard for obscure and needy men to do. He married into a family of some rank; and in his writings he displays no token of the poverty that made his contemporaries, and, the one a flatterer of the great, the other a satirist of the wealthy and well-born. His abode, in early years at least, and possibly until he had passed middle life, was apparently either in Rome or its immediate neighbourhood. For not only would his practice at the bar, and the public offices held by him, make it necessary to have a house in the capital, but there are some indications of his being in it even at the time of Galba's death. The 'History' bears several traces of his presence in Rome during that disastrous year in which four emperors contended for the purple, and, all but one, found the reward of their ambition in a violent or a voluntary death.

The public life of Tacitus dates from the later years of Vespasian's reign. His second patron was, who, happily for himself, did not live long enough to forfeit his title of "Delight of Mankind." Not until we come to the fourteenth year of do we stand on firm ground as to his preferments. It is not easy to understand his relations to the third of the Flavian Cæsars. "I deny not," he says, "that my elevation was begun by Vespasian, continued by Titus, and still farther advanced by Domitian." So far, then, all the Flavian Cæsars and Tacitus were on