Tacitus

Roman historian who wrote the Annals, the Histories, Germania, and Agricola — the greatest prose stylist among Roman historians — whose compressed, ironic Latin captures the corruption and violence of the early imperial period with a psychological penetration unmatched in ancient historiography.

Created the definitive literary account of tyranny under the Roman Empire — the Annals' portrait of Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero defines the type of the paranoid emperor, and Tacitus's technique of letting his subjects condemn themselves through their own words and actions establishes the ironic style that all subsequent political satire has drawn on.