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[Eisworth]

I've been reading, but it's hard for me to find spare time to organize my thoughts and post --- that's part of the fun of being a daddy.

Anyway, these two short works were written by the Roman historian Tacitus approximate 1900 years ago. The importance of the first book lies in the fact that it is devoted to the structure and culture of the "barbarian" tribes lurking beyond the Rhine river in the 1st century AD. There's no other place to get this information, and the Germans themselves didn't begin writing things until a few more centuries had past.

The second work treats the biography of Tacitus's father-in-law, who was intimately involved in the history of early Roman Britain -- he was instrumental in the conquest of the province, and then he later became governor. Apparently he ran afoul of the somewhat erratic emperor Domitian, so he was eventually recalled from this post.

I knew this work primarily as the source of one of Tacitus' famous quotes about the Romans:

"To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace. "

These two compositions were much shorter than the Histories that I reviewed earlier, and although I found them interesting, they didn't engross me.
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Todd Eisworth
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Ohio University