Cornelius Tacitus
historical figure · 2 works · 2 mentions · 2 anchored passages
in the texts
Ad Nationes
Roman historian cited as the source of the ass-head slander against Jews and, by extension, Christians.
But indeed the same Cornelius Tacitus — that most talkative of liars — forgetting his own assertion, reports in his later books that Pompey the Great, when the Jews were subdued and Jerusalem taken, entered the temple and, searching it thoroughly, found nothing of an image.
Apologeticum
Roman historian whose Histories originated the rumor that Jews and Christians worshiped an ass's head.
This suspicion of such a god Cornelius Tacitus has set going.
But that same Cornelius Tacitus — that most talkative of liars, to be sure — in the same history relates that Gnaeus Pompey, when he had taken Jerusalem and therefore entered the temple to spy out the secrets of the Jewish religion, found there no image at all.
For in the fifth book of his Histories, beginning the Jewish war from the origin of the nation, after arguing what he pleased both about that origin and about the name and religion of the nation, he relates that the Jews, when delivered out of Egypt — or, as he thought, driven out — in the vast and waterless wilds of Arabia, perishing with thirst, used as guides to a spring some wild asses which, …