Tacitus is a Roman politician and historian famous for his book
Histories, where he also included his moral judgements over historical events he experienced in person. In 69 AD, when
Nero fled
Rome amid a revolution against him, the civil and military authorities disconnected from him elected
Galba, the then governor of
Hispania Tarraconensis who supported and led the revolt, as the new emperor, which was challenged by
Clodius Macer and
Fonteius Capito, two loyal generals of Nero, who cut off the food supply to Rome. However, when Galba executed the two generals, the executions were not positively received among Roman citizens, on which Tacitus comments in
Histories, "indeed, when a ruler once becomes unpopular, all his acts, be they good or bad, tell against him." In the 2007 book
Who Robbed Our Aestheticism, the author Pan Zhichang, a Chinese aesthetician from the School of Journalism and Communication at
Nanjing University, analyses the etiology of
historical political chaos during 220–280 AD, which inspired the stories in the Chinese classic
Romance of the Three Kingdoms. He describes the government of
Imperial China as a
totalitarian regime with unlimited power and therefore unlimited desires for wealth. As the emperor taxed more on the people, the country would be more corrupted by its officials, which in turn led to more taxation and even more corruption, eventually causing a
societal collapse due to the unlimited desires of the
ruling class. This also means the regime had fallen into the Tacitus trap. Chinese writer Chen Xubin quotes
Zigong in
The Analects, "
Zhou's wickedness was not so great as that name implies. Therefore, the superior man hates to dwell in a low-lying situation, where all the evil of the world will flow in upon him," and reasons that "Zigong's trap" may be a more proper name for the theory and that famous Chinese politicians, such as
Empress Cixi and
H. H. Kung, all fell into the trap. == Popular uses in Chinese politics ==