It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks.

Tacitus frames this remark as a comment on political liberty after the death of the emperor Domitian (r. 81–96 CE), whose reign was remembered for repression and fear among Rome’s senatorial elite. Writing under the comparatively more moderate rule of Nerva and Trajan, Tacitus reflects on a moment when public speech and private judgment seemed less dangerous than they had been in the preceding tyranny. The line functions as a preface-like observation in his historical writing, contrasting an earlier climate of surveillance and enforced conformity with a present in which frank discussion and honest historiography appear newly possible.

The sentence celebrates a political and intellectual condition: freedom of conscience (to “think what one likes”) joined to freedom of expression (to “say what one thinks”). Tacitus’s emphasis on its “rare fortune” is double-edged. It praises a respite from autocracy, yet also underscores how exceptional such liberty is in imperial politics—suggesting that censorship and self-censorship are the norm rather than the exception. In Tacitus’s hands, the thought is also a program for history: truthful writing depends on a regime that does not punish candor, and the historian’s task is to use that brief opening to record the past honestly.