In all
likelihood Tacitus, in the Histories, is saying that the secret was the
issue of power. This is what the principate had been founded upon from the
beginning, though it was unacknowledged, and the official propaganda had depicted the situation
differently.
After Nero's suicide Rome was basically thrown into confusion
and four men were to have the role of Emperor over the next year (69 CE). The first of these,
Galba, was a military commander in the provinces. There was no legitimate reason that Galba
should have become Emperor, and he was himself murdered a short time later. The Empire had
already become a free-for-all in which leadership was based on brute force and the military
rather than civil rule as had existed in the Republic.
But Tacitus's point
was that this had always been the case since the Republic had come to an end through Augustus's
absorption of the power of all branches of government into his personal rule, the principate.
This was the secret that no one wanted to acknowledge: that even from the start of the
Julio-Claudian dynasty, it was all based on power lust. Though Augustus himself had kept things
under control, from his successor (and stepson) Tiberius forward, the Julio-Claudian family had
been a disaster for Rome, in Tacitus's view. In the Annals Tacitus focuses
especially upon the fact that Nero was an absolute degenerate, and from this point on nothing
would have been surprising about the power-grabbing the Empire was based upon. The Flavian
dynasty stabilized things somewhat, but Vespasian really had no legitimate claim to the throne
either, other than his military leadership in the East, and his successors were his own sons
Titus and Domitian. Thus in less than a century after Augustus's perhaps necessary power grab,
Rome had by this time (69 CE) become a state ruled by military leaders whose only claim lay in
the power of their troops supporting them.
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