Campbell Duncan. The Rise of Imperial Rome AD 14-193

Osprey Publishing, 2013. ― 95 p. ― (Essential histories 076).Introduction
During the reign of Hadrian, the great Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus wrote what would be his final work, entitled the Annals: it is a chronicle of Roman history from the death of Augustus to the death of Nero. In it he lamented that, while the historians of the Roman Republic had written about 'great wars, the storming of cities, and the capture of vanquished kings', his own themes were 'restricted and inglorious: peace, undisturbed or scarcely challenged, depressing events in the city, and an emperor uninterested in extending the empire' (Annals 4.32, referring to the emperor Tiberius).Tacitus had grown up under the Flavian emperors. He served out a moderately successful senatorial career, perhaps beginning with a tribunate in one of the legions that spearheaded the invasion of Caledonia under his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola. Having risen to the consulship under the emperor Nerva, he went on to hold the prestigious proconsulship of Asia towards the end of Trajan's reign. He had thus lived through a time of great wars, but - unfortunately for us - never took the opportunity to write of Trajan's storming of cities (both in Dacia and in Parthia) and the capture of the vanquished Dacian king Decebalus.