The ''Agricola'' (
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power ...
: ''De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae'', lit. On the life and character of Julius Agricola) is a book by the
Roman writer,
Tacitus
Publius Cornelius Tacitus, known simply as Tacitus ( , ; – ), was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars.
The surviving portions of his two major works—the ...
, written
c. AD 98. The work recounts the life of his father-in-law
Gnaeus Julius Agricola, an eminent Roman general and Governor of Britain from AD 77/78 – 83/84. It also covers the geography and ethnography of
ancient Britain
Several species of humans have intermittently occupied Great Britain for almost a million years. The earliest evidence of human occupation around 900,000 years ago is at Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast, with stone tools and footprints prob ...
.
[Tacitus. ''Agricola''. Translated by Harold Mattingly and revised with an introduction and notes by J.B. Rives. London: Penguin Group, 2009.]
The text survived in a single
codex ascertained by
Poggio Bracciolini to be in a German monastery (
Hersfeld Abbey
Hersfeld Abbey was an important Benedictine imperial abbey in the town of Bad Hersfeld in Hesse (formerly in Hesse-Nassau), Germany, at the confluence of the rivers Geisa, Haune and Fulda. The ruins are now a medieval festival venue.
Hist ...
).
It was eventually secured by the
humanist Niccolò de' Niccoli.
[ In modern times, two manuscripts of the ''Agricola'' are preserved in the Library of the Vatican.][Tacitus. ''Agricola''. Translated by Duane Reed Stuart. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909.] In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two more manuscripts are said by Duane Reed Stuart to have been brought to light, with one being held by the Chapter Library of the Cathedral at Toledo in Spain and the other being found in 1902 in the private library of Count Balleani of Jesi, in Italy.
Summary
After the assassination of