Tacitus Quotes
The best day after a bad emperor is the first.
Cornelius Tacitus, c. 55-c. 117, Roman Historian, "The Arab Spring at One", Foreign Affairs, March/April 2012
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This brilliant statement to lift morale was skillfully designed not to make the polulation too optimistic because there was much bad news ahead. And the Battle of Egypt did not tip the balance of military power. But it was a win for the allies, and the first significant one.
The South at the time had a virtual caste system with a few families in each area controlling and leading. Many Unionists from the argued that the lower and middle class whites had to be given more power and education about their rights. Of course the controlling families had a strong vested interest to see that Reconstruction failed and the “Yankees” were hated. Anti-Negro racism was just a part of the motivation. Maintaining the elite families power of the pre-war political culture was also critical. The Northern Reconstuctionists were therefore twice dangerous.
Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus (AD 56 – c. 120) was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars. He lived in what has been called the Silver Age of Latin literature, and has a reputation for the brevity and compactness of his Latin prose, as well as for his penetrating insights into the psychology of power politics.
