Book description
The Agricola is both a portrait of Julius Agricola - the most famous
governor of Roman Britain and Tacitus' well-loved and respected
father-in-law - and the first detailed account of Britain that has come
down to us. It offers fascinating descriptions of the geography, climate
and peoples of the country, and a succinct account of the early stages
of the Roman occupation, nearly fatally undermined by Boudicca's revolt
in AD 61 but consolidated by campaigns that took Agricola as far as
Anglesey and northern Scotland. The warlike German tribes are the focus
of Tacitus' attention in the Germania, which, like the Agricola, often
compares the behaviour of 'barbarian' peoples favourably with the
decadence and corruption of Imperial Rome.
Tacitus studied rhetoric in Rome and rose to eminence as a pleader at
the Roman Bar. In 77 AD he married the daughter of Agricola, conqueror
of Britain, of whom he later wrote a biography.
J. B. Rives received his PhD in Classics from Stanford University
(1990) and taught at Columbia University and at York University in
Toronto before moving to the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, where he is Kenan Eminent Professor of Classics. He is the
author of Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage (1995) and
Religion in the Roman Empire (2006), as well as numerous
articles on aspects of religion in the Roman world. He has also
published a translation, with introduction and commentary, of Tacitus'
Germania (1999) and, for Penguin Classics, has revised Robert
Graves' translation of Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (2007).
Harold Mattingley was born in 1884 and died in 1964. He is best
known for his study of Roman coinage at the British Museum where he
worked from 1920 to 1948. He wrote over four hundred articles and
books and his Roman Imperial Civilization, first published when he was
seventy-two, embodied the reflections of a lifetime devoted to the
study of the Roman world.
