Tacitus's Agricola (De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae) is a short biographical work written around 98 CE, shortly after the death of Emperor Domitian. It serves as a eulogy and tribute to the author's father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola (40–93 CE), a Roman general and governor of Britain. It critiques imperial tyranny, the moral costs of empire, and yet how good men can serve Rome honorably even under bad emperors. Many themes could be transposed with the current US empire without any loss of meaning. Change “Britain” to “Iran” (or any other target of US imperialism) and Roman to American and it reads flawlessly. 30. "When I reflect on the causes of the war, and the circumstances of our situation, I feel a strong persuasion that our united efforts on the present day will prove the beginning of universal liberty to Britain. For we are all undebased by slavery; and there is no land behind us, nor does even the sea afford a refuge, whilst the Roman fleet hovers around. Thus the use of arms, which is at all times honorable to the brave, now offers the only safety even to cowards. In all the battles which have yet been fought, with various success, against the Romans, our countrymen may be deemed to have reposed their final hopes and resources in us: for we, the noblest sons of Britain, and therefore stationed in its last recesses, far from the view of servile shores, have preserved even our eyes unpolluted by the contact of subjection. We, at the furthest limits both of land and liberty, have been defended to this day by the remoteness of our situation and of our fame. The extremity of Britain is now disclosed; and whatever is unknown becomes an object of magnitude. But there is no nation beyond us; nothing but waves and rocks, and the still more hostile Romans, whose arrogance we cannot escape by obsequiousness and submission. These plunderers of the world, after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace. -"Agricola" by Cornelius Tacitus (30)
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