c. AD 56–c. 120 · Roman senator, consul & historian
Publius Cornelius Tacitus — his praenomen is disputed, with manuscripts giving Publius and Sidonius Apollinaris giving Gaius — climbed the Roman senate under the very emperors he would later dissect, holding a suffect consulship in AD 97 and the proconsulship of Asia in 112–113. His Annals, his last and largest work, narrates the empire from AD 14 to 68 in a compressed, mordant Latin built for exactly this kind of epigram. He is not Cicero: Cicero was a Republican orator and statesman who died in 43 BC, before the Empire that Tacitus chronicled had even begun.