At this point he closed his public career. He had reached the goal of a politician's ambition and had become known as one of the best speakers of his time, but he seems to have realized that under the Principate politics was a dull farce, and that oratory was of little value in a time of peace and strong government. The rest of his life was to be spent in writing history. In the year of his consulship or immediately after it, he published the _Agricola_ and _Germania_, short monographs in which he practised the transition from the style of the speaker to that of the writer. In the preface to the _Agricola_ he foreshadows the larger work on which he is engaged