Chronology
Every drafted work, year by year, alongside the events of Tacitus's life. Runs of consecutive letters are folded into groups so you can skim past them or expand to read.
98 BC
Age ~42. Two years after Domitian's assassination ended fifteen years of terror, and with Trajan newly emperor, Tacitus — a senator who had survived and risen under the tyranny he loathed — publishes his first works: the Agricola, a biography of his father-in-law, the general who subdued Britain, and the Germania, an ethnography of the tribes beyond the Rhine.
hist The Agricola 98 AD hist The Germania 98 AD102 BC
Age ~46. The Dialogus de Oratoribus, set in his youth, asks why oratory has declined under the emperors — because, it implies, free speech died with the Republic.
rhet A Dialogue on Oratory 102 AD109 BC
Age ~53. Tacitus turns historian in earnest with the Histories — Rome from Galba through the year of four emperors (69) and the Flavian dynasty, the period he had lived through.
hist The Histories 109 AD117 BC
Age ~61. As Trajan dies and Hadrian accedes, Tacitus completes his masterpiece, the Annals — Tiberius to Nero — the cold, mordant anatomy of how the early principate corrupted Rome and its rulers.
hist The Annals 117 AD