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Excerpt from The Annals of Tacitus: Books I to Vi The works of Tacitus should appeal very strongly to the modern Englishman. The beginnings of English history are to be found in his pages. He was the first great historian who placed on record the gallant but hopeless struggles of the Britons under Boadicea and Caractacus against the irresistible might of Rome and it was his own father-in law, Agricola, whose Life he wrote, who finally achieved the conquest of our island. But there is another reason why Tacitus as an author has a special claim upon the attention of the Englishman of to-day. The spirit of the age with which he dealt was, in many respects, peculiarly modern and it cannot fail to interest, and perhaps to profit, us to compare and con trast the modern Imperialism, under which we live, with the greatest Imperialism of the past. We may learn much from the great artist who painted such vivid, sometimes such lurid, pictures of the period in which he lived, a period which left an indelible impress upon future ages, the period in which the Roman Empire reached the zenith of its power, while already betraying symptoms of the causes which contributed to its fall. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.