Chapter II · TACITUS

The spice of problems—Facts and inferences concerning Tacitus—His official career—Tacitus as a speaker—Memory of “The Terror”—The three minor works—Speculation on secondary motives—Aspects of the Dialogue on Oratory—Vexed questions—Agricola—Its form and purpose—Later style in the making—Germania—Points of interest—Matter and manner—Histories—Plan—Character-drawing—Other dramatic qualities—Annals—Great episodes—Sources—Outlook on human life, history and politics—Anti-imperial bias—Attitude to Tiberius—Language and style—Vicissitudes of his fame.

Concerning P. Cornelius Tacitus,⁠[1659] the greatest historian of the Silver Age, there is no dearth of problems to awake interest, though they do not affect his unchallenged mastery of one of the most wonderful prose styles in literature. His very praenomen is uncertain.⁠[1660] We do not know when or where he was born; we do not know when or where he died; and, while scholars are now nearly unanimous⁠[1661] in ascribing the Dialogus de Oratoribus to him, they are not agreed on its date of composition or on the explanation of its contrast in style with the other works of Tacitus. Differences of opinion have arisen about the author’s real aim in his monographs on Agricola and on Germany; rival suggestions have been made about the number of books which the now mutilated Histories once contained; and more serious controversies have raged over the sources from which Tacitus drew, his method of using them, his credibility in general and his presentation of Tiberius in particular.

Approximately his birth-year may be given as A.D. 55. This is an inference from two facts: first, that, looking back on the year 75, the dramatic date of his Dialogus, Tacitus referred to himself as then “quite a young man” (iuuenis admodum, Dial. i.); and next, that, while the younger Pliny considered himself and Tacitus “nearly of an age” (propemodum aequales) he has mentioned efforts of his own as an adulescentulus to imitate Tacitus, who had already made a name.⁠[1662] We can prove Pliny to have been born in 61 or 62, and from his words we may guess that Tacitus was some half-dozen years his senior. Possibly the historian’s father was the eques Cornelius Tacitus mentioned by the elder Pliny⁠[1663] as a procurator in Belgic Gaul: the surmise at least would accord with Tacitus’s standing in public and private life. His official honours under the three Flavians are summarized by himself as “begun by Vespasian, increased by Titus, and further advanced by Domitian,”⁠[1664] the interpretation being that under the first of these emperors he held one of the offices in the vigintivirate and had served in the army as tribunus militum laticlauius; that Titus nominated him to the quaestorship in 80, when twenty-five; and that under Domitian he was either edile or tribune, and afterwards, we know, praetor in 88.⁠[1665] In A.D. 77, when still a iuuenis, he had been betrothed to the daughter of the Roman general Agricola, who was consul at the time, and married her next year shortly before his father-in-law’s appointment to Britain.⁠[1666]⁠

The keenness with which Tacitus studied rhetoric under eminent masters appears from his own statement.⁠[1667] Following with closest attention the court-pleadings of M. Aper and Julius Secundus, he took lessons from them at their homes on the principles of argument and style. It is not impossible, although unproved, that he was one of Quintilian’s pupils: the Ciceronianism of his earliest work rather favours the idea. Certainly the Dialogus marks deep interest in the prospects of Roman oratory. A good rhetorical education, turned to practical account, earned him fame as a speaker; and among his noted appearances in public were, after being made consul suffectus in 97,⁠[1668] his delivery of a funeral eulogy over Verginius Rufus, and in A.D. 100, when counsel with Pliny for the African provincials, his impeachment of Marius Priscus, their ex-proconsul. Pliny’s explicit compliment to his eloquence on both occasions was, we may take it, deserved; and it is significant that, in regard to the second occasion, he singles out as a quality of Tacitus’s oratory its impressive dignity.⁠[1669]⁠

Duties in an unknown province having kept Tacitus and his wife abroad for the four years from 90 to 93, they returned to Rome too late to attend the death-bed of his illustrious father-in-law.⁠[1670] At once he found himself in the gloom of a reign of terror when senators were cowed by Domitian into conniving at the emperor’s judicial murders.⁠[1671] The atmosphere of calculating espionage and of inexorable repression, now imposing silence, now inviting adulation, coloured all the after-life and after-writing of Tacitus. However gratefully he recognized that the dark clouds had lifted with the accession of Nerva in 96, and that at the dawn of “a most blessed age”⁠[1672] he was at length free to express his views, we yet feel that the iron had entered into the soul of this man of over forty before he ever embarked on his career as historian, and that his outlook upon events must inevitably reflect the sombre hues of fifteen years of dumb helplessness which could not be forgotten.⁠[1673] Though after Domitian’s death he accepted a consulship and though an inscription found in Caria shows he was proconsul of Asia about 112-116, still we may assume that henceforward his extensive plans for historical composition occupied most of his time. These plans proved in the event too extensive for the span of life allotted to him. After the Histories came the Annals, completed, as we shall see, between 115 and 117. But for his old age he had, he tells us, set aside the reigns of Nerva and Trajan; and he had also contemplated a work on the times of Augustus.⁠[1674] These latter projects he never carried out, so that it looks as if he did not long survive the publication of the Annals about the end of Trajan’s reign.

The three minor works of Tacitus, the Dialogus, Agricola, and Germania, written before his prolonged historical labours, are linked together in several ways. The text of all three descends from the same lost archetype (Hersfeldensis), usually identified with a codex observed and recorded at Rome in 1455⁠[1675] as containing the Germania, Agricola and Dialogus with the extant portions of Suetonius’s De Grammaticis and De Rhetoribus. All three works are of importance for the preliminary stages in the evolution of Tacitus’s style. Further, all three have been made the subjects of much theorizing about secondary purposes which, it has been alleged, they were written to subserve. Certain critics are not content with the motive professed in each case by the author, but have insisted on looking beneath the surface. Thus the Dialogus, ostensibly an inquiry into the decadence of oratory, has been declared, in keeping with the more than doubtful hypothesis that it was composed after Domitian’s reign, to be the author’s farewell to public speaking and an implicit apology for deserting the rhetorical art in favour of history.⁠[1676] The Agricola has been asserted to be not only a memorial of piety to an honoured relative,⁠[1677] but a semi-political monograph meant to explain to Trajan and others the conduct of both Agricola and Tacitus in the troublous times of Domitian; while the Germania, the contention runs, is no mere sketch of the homes and habits of northern tribes but a pamphlet with a definite tendency, either to hold up to luxurious Rome an accusing mirror which should reflect the healthier simplicity of the Germans, or, with far-sighted historic sense, to inculcate on the Romans the need for guarding against danger from the barbarian, or virtually to justify the prolonged absence of the new emperor Trajan on so vital a frontier as the Rhineland. The ingenuity, however, displayed in pressing such secondary motives has tended in some measure to push the real motive into the background and to distract attention from the literary value of the works.

The Dialogus de Oratoribus, in the form of a discussion among eminent men of the day, supplies an answer to a question put to Tacitus by Fabius Justus about the reasons for the decline in oratory. The participants are four—Curiatius Maternus, poet and dramatist, at whose house the scene is laid; Marcus Aper, an advocate of Gallic origin; Julius Secundus, a polished historian, and, like Aper, a native of Gaul; and Vipstanus Messalla, a Roman of high birth. It is part of the author’s dramatic skill to represent them in debate as speaking in character. Aper, utilitarian and practical, contrasts his own remunerative profession of pleader with the uselessness of poetry: Maternus, as poet and idealist, disdains wealth and influence, preferring the “privacy of woodland and grove” (nemora et luci secretum)⁠[1678] and the “blest camaraderie” (felix contubernium) of the Muses. Secundus is a quiet and refined speaker, while the true Roman Messalla is the admiring champion of the past, with a dislike for the faults of contemporary oratory and education. The earlier part of the Dialogus consists of Aper’s eulogy on a lawyer’s calling and Maternus’s reply on behalf of poetry. On Messalla’s entrance, a preliminary exchange of views leads to Aper’s speech in praise of modern oratory at the expense of the “ancients”; whereupon he is, at Maternus’s request, followed by Messalla as a critic of defects in present-day eloquence. Maternus interrupts to recall Messalla to the real subject—the causes of deterioration in oratory—which is handled in the last part (xxviii-xli). A lacuna marked in the MS. has deprived us of the opening of Secundus’s historical review of factors in politics and in legal procedure which fostered the oratory of the republican era. In contrast therewith “the emperor’s discipline had tranquillized eloquence as it did everything else.”⁠[1679] A second lacuna must be assumed, where we have lost the first part of Maternus’s closing speech, which proceeds in the extant portion to argue that unsettled political conditions and party spirit in ancient times had favoured the rise of great speakers. “Eloquence is the nurseling of licence” (eloquentia alumna licentiae), so that too well organized a government is fatal to first-rate speaking.

The Dialogus is a piquant combination of the fascinating and the provoking; for, while it handles an attractive theme with a charm that justifies its old description as an aureus libellus, it yet raises problems that remain unsolved and are, some of them, perhaps insoluble.⁠[1680] The Tacitean authorship is now soundly upheld on the basis of manuscript authority, the general agreement of views with those in Tacitus’s unquestioned writings, and, despite obvious differences, the presence of significant similarities in style. With this prevalent acceptance, the claims made for Quintilian, the younger Pliny, Suetonius and others (including a hypothetical anonymous author) fall to the ground. The dramatic date of the conversation is widely accepted as A.D. 74-75, on the reasonable interpretation of the phrase sextam stationem as the sixth year of Vespasian’s reign.⁠[1681] The actual time of composition by Tacitus is a much more vexed question; but Gudeman’s contention that it must have preceded the reign of Domitian appears still the most satisfactory. In opposition to this a theory⁠[1682] is maintained that the Dialogus came after the other minor works in Trajan’s reign and that the divergence in literary manner presents little difficulty for the reason that in antiquity style was often not the man himself but a garb which a clever author could don or doff at will. Yet, when all is weighed, the Dialogus would have been a literary anachronism at the end of the first century. It is difficult to discern any occasion for Tacitus, so late as A.D. 98 or 99, when he ranked as one of the foremost speakers of the day, to write a dialogue on decay in oratory and to connect the subject with circumstances over twenty years earlier. Is it credible that a man of nearly forty-five, who was of recognized literary power and, according to hypothesis, already the author of both Agricola and Germania, would profess himself unable by his own effort to treat the causes of decadence directly and so feel obliged to employ the device of dialogue-form? And would a promise to repeat exactly a discussion almost a quarter of a century old strike readers as a plausible one? Another consideration is that the contrast between the sunny spirit of the Dialogus and the oppressive atmosphere of the Agricola makes it hard to assign them to the same period of their author’s life. Tacitus’s own reference to his silence under Domitian throws us back on an earlier date, and, if we fix that date before Domitian’s reign, as A.D. 81, it is not unnatural that Tacitus looking back from the age of twenty-six should have thought himself iuuenis admodum at the supposed period of the dialogue, A.D. 74-75.

For his Dialogus Tacitus drew considerable inspiration from works of Cicero like the Hortensius and the De Oratore. Quintilian’s known Ciceronianism is likely to have influenced Tacitus, whether he studied under the great professor or not; and those who place the composition of the Dialogus after Domitian’s time are entitled, without violating chronology, to believe that it was written with a bearing on the lost treatise by Quintilian De Causis Corruptae Eloquentiae. Tacitus mentions as available in libraries the acta and epistulae collected by Mucianus. He may have used Varro’s Catus de liberis educandis, and, like Quintilian in the Institutio and the pseudo-Plutarch in Περὶ παίδων ἀγωγῆς he probably went back to their common source, a Stoic work by Chrysippos, if we may judge by the array of resemblances set out by Gudeman.⁠[1683]⁠

In the Agricola Tacitus feels that he has a great man for the subject of his monograph: sincerity of admiration, therefore, lifts him above the rhetoric with which he was conversant. His epigrams here, as in his later works, are effective because they show grip of the eternal realities of human nature. So there is no small amount of the universal—of that which is true for all time—in the little book. It has besides the great interest of reflecting truthfully important aspects of the Roman imperial administration.

The introduction (i.-iii.) gives reasons for issuing a biography in an age when satire enjoyed more vogue. Personal memoirs—a class of writing with ancient traditions—must from their nature contend against prejudice, and in the recent reign of terror had been impossible; “for every good art had been exiled so that nothing honourable could cross one’s path anywhere.” But in the changed times of Nerva and Trajan⁠[1684] an enforced silence may at length be broken, though, after past methods of repression, the harm still visible renders it hard to revive literature:

Nevertheless it will not be an uncongenial task to compose, even in a rugged and unpolished style, the record of previous servitude (under Domitian) and a testimony to present blessings. Meantime I issue this book designed to honour my father-in-law, Agricola, and in virtue of its expression of loyal affection it will be, if not commended, at least excused.⁠[1685]⁠

After this preface the author, turning to his theme, relates in six chapters (iv.-ix.) the life of Agricola up to his appointment as legate of Britain, describing his parentage, education, civil offices, and periods of service in Britain before his consulship. Into this earlier narrative Tacitus skilfully weaves characteristic qualities of a hero whose greatness is to culminate in his British victories. The all-important central portion of the work is therefore preceded by two excursuses, a brief description of Britain with its inhabitants (x.-xii.), and a sketch of the past conquests of Rome in the island (xiii.-xvii.). Twenty-one chapters (xviii.-xxxviii.) are then devoted to the main subject of Agricola’s British campaigns during the seven years of his command, from the defeat of the Ordovices and surrender of Mona to the victory over the Caledonians near Mons Graupius and the circumnavigation of the northern coast. Throughout he is depicted as not only a successful commander skilled in strategy but an able administrator, a discerner of men, and himself fair-minded, loyal and modest. The final portion (xxxix.-xlvi.), on Agricola’s recall and last years of retirement in Rome, begins with the ominous note of Domitian’s jealousy (fronte laetus, pectore anxius), and indicates that the ex-general by his unostentatious conduct was fulfilling the part of a good citizen in evil times. The shadow of an emperor’s enmity falls darkly over the later pages; and suspicions of poison are not absent from the fatal illness of A.D. 93. The work closes in a rhetorical apostrophe to the dead man and an epilogue on immortality:⁠[1686]⁠

“Thou wert blest indeed, Agricola, not only in the brilliance of thy life, but also in the timeliness of thy death! They who were present to hear thy last words recount thine unflinching and cheerful welcome of thy fate, as though thou wert doing a man’s best to make a gift of ‘not guilty’ to the emperor. But for me and for thy daughter, beyond the bitterness of having a parent torn away, there is an added sorrow. It was not ours to sit by thy sick-bed, to support thine ebbing strength, and take our fill of looks and embraces. Assuredly we should have received instructions and utterances to imprint in the depths of memory. Here lies our grief, our wound. By the circumstance of so long an absence abroad, he was lost to us four years before. Doubtless, best of parents, with a most loving wife sitting by thee, everything was done abundantly to show respect. Still it was with too few tears that thou wert lamented; in that last day of life there was something for which thine eyes yearned in vain.”

“If there is a land for the spirits of the just, if philosophers are right in holding that great souls are not extinguished with the body, then mayst thou rest in peace! Summon us, thy household, from a paralysing sense of loss and from womanish moanings to the contemplation of thy good qualities. To weep or beat the breast for such were sin. It is by admiration rather than by transient praise, it is by rivalling thine example if nature allows, that we must pay thee respect. That is genuine honour. That is the dutiful regard of one’s nearest kindred. This too I should enjoin on his daughter and his wife so to revere the memory of a father and husband, as to meditate inwardly on his every act and word, and cherish the mould and fashion of his soul rather than of his body. It is not that I think a veto should be set on images fashioned of marble or bronze; but, as with the face of man, so the likeness of the face is but frail and perishable, while the mould of the mind is everlasting—you can preserve and reproduce it, not through a foreign substance and by art, but in your very character. Whatever we loved, whatever we admired in Agricola, abides and will abide in the memories of men, in the eternity of the ages, through the reputation of his deeds. Many an ancient will oblivion overwhelm, as if inglorious and ignoble: Agricola, whose story is thus recorded for posterity, will survive.”

On the literary form and aim of the Agricola a surprising amount has been written.⁠[1687] Biography, an established form of literature among the Romans, was akin to the laudationes funebres pronounced over the dead. Such encomia went back for their artistic pedigree to Greek models like the Agesilaos of Xenophon and the Evagoras of Isocrates, while formal rules for their construction were laid down in rhetorical handbooks. It does not, however, follow that Tacitus—though Gudeman⁠[1688] would have it so—scrupulously conformed to these regulations; for his was not a genius to imprison itself within mechanical bounds. His growing interest in history was little likely to be content with laudation, but prompted him to introduce narrative freely, even to the extent of an enlivening digression such as the adventurous voyage of the Usipian cohort, or an excursus such as that on the geography and tribes of Britain, where the doubtful relevance from the standpoint of biography may be excused on the ground of irresistible didactic impulse. This very blend of narrative with eulogy has tempted some to regard the central portion of the Agricola as one of Tacitus’s preliminary studies destined for incorporation in his contemplated account of Domitian’s reign. But an examination of the sections dealing with Roman governors in Britain will show that in order to suit them for insertion in the Histories radical alterations in the scale of treatment would have been inevitable, especially in recording the services not only of Agricola but of Cerialis and Frontinus. Besides, certain domestic details appropriate in a biographical study would have been out of place in a chapter of imperial history. Both recasting and omissions therefore would have been necessitated. As it stands, the author’s illustration of his father-in-law’s eminence by the story of concrete achievement constitutes a more effective, if more subtle, form of praise than a direct panegyric like Pliny’s upon Trajan. The purely personal element was presumably strong in the lost Republican autobiographies of Scaurus, Rutilius Rufus, Catulus and Sulla, and under the Empire in the Lives of Pomponius Secundus by Pliny the Elder and of Julius Asiaticus by Julius Secundus, as well as in the kindred eulogies upon Paetus Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus. It was the example of Sallust’s Jugurtha and Catilina that served to recommend to Tacitus a more impersonal mode of treatment through an increased admixture of history; and the result is a composite work where both structure and style are, throughout the narrative, affected by Sallustian precedent. Livy’s influence also operates in the delivery of speeches by the Caledonian chief and by his Roman antagonist, while Cicero’s appears particularly in the apostrophe near the close.

As to the purpose of the Agricola, some scholars insist that it is no simple tribute of pietas, as Tacitus’s words suggest, but a political manifesto in favour of moderation under tyranny, and thus a reply to critics of Agricola’s and his own past subservience.⁠[1689] Now, it is true that Tacitus dislikes extremists and commends moderate men, but he does so in all his writings; and no evidence exists to show that he, any more than contemporaries like Pliny, stood after Domitian’s death in special danger of virulent attack for years of non-resistance. The sorrowful admission which he makes⁠[1690] of the shame incurred by forced acquiescence in Domitian’s outrages is very far from the tone, which Gantrelle professes to hear in the Agricola, of “an angry advocate defending a client.” Surely, after all, his attitude had not been different from that of Nerva and Trajan⁠[1691] themselves or the majority of the senatorial class, so that hostility to Tacitus on the ground alleged would logically have been an unreasonable position for all but a few irreconcileables, and even in their case would have logically implied a censure upon two emperors as well.

The Agricola is a book to which one can always return with pleasure. In a venture through its pages one gets, within marvellously brief compass, a memorable revelation of a period in history and a noble personality. The rapid strokes of its prose, though not yet, as a rule, in Tacitus’s most condensed manner, are still sufficient to mark out the author as a great stylist and at the same time a student of humanity. No intelligent reader of the opening three chapters is likely to forget their lurid picture of the despotic villainy from which Rome was just recovering. In this setting begins a tale which holds a world of meaning in its pregnant statements. Take a few as one meets them. With a withering glance at Caligula, Tacitus says of Agricola’s father that “his very virtues won the resentment of Gaius Caesar.” A personal touch lends interest to the reminiscence concerning Agricola himself: “I recollect he used to say that in early youth he might have imbibed the tenets of philosophy too eagerly for a Roman and a senator (quam concessum Romano ac senatori), had not his wise mother curbed his burning and ardent enthusiasm.” Later, the first stirrings of military ambition felt by the young officer in Britain are ominously pronounced to be “unwelcome at an era when sinister misconstruction encountered eminence and a great name was as risky as a bad one” (nec minus periculum ex magna fama quam ex mala). Deep significance underlies the words “for his quaestorship the lot assigned him Asia as province and Salvius Titianus as chief: neither corrupted him” (neutro corruptus est.) Success as a subordinate could not be more pointedly summarized than in the balanced terms: “so by valour in obeying orders, and modesty in his reports, he avoided jealousy without avoiding distinction” (extra inuidiam nec extra gloriam erat). A pretty irony characterizes the reflection on the popular belief that one day Agricola would come back to Britain as governor: “rumour is not always astray: sometimes it actually picks the man” (haud semper errat fama, aliquando et elegit), and no less ironical is the comment on the British adoption of Roman dress, baths and banquets: “with the unsuspecting it all passed for civilization, though it was but a piece of their slavery” (humanitas uocabatur, cum pars seruitutis esset).

We may put his sententiae down to rhetoric, but it is a human rhetoric, based proverb-like on the experience of ages. “Successes everybody claims, failures are laid at one man’s door” (prospera omnes sibi uindicant, aduersa uni imputantur) is an adage that applies to more than soldiering. “Everything unknown passes for the marvellous” (omne ignotum pro magnifico) is a safe declaration for others than the Caledonian chief to make. “It is the way with human nature to hate the man you have wronged” (proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris) makes a cynical reminder of man’s unfairness to man. With the Agricola, in short, Tacitus has reached his Sallustian period, but already a greater than Sallust is here: in both Agricola and Germania the unique style of the later works can be seen, as it were, in the making.

The Germania, naturally of vital importance for early Teutonic history, belongs to the same year as the Agricola. The northern tribes of Europe had been powerful enemies of Rome for 210 years, Tacitus reckons, from the Cimbrian invasion of 113 B.C. to Trajan’s second consulate⁠[1692] in A.D. 98; “so long has the conquest of Germany been going on” (tam diu Germania uincitur). The title, originally perhaps De Situ Germaniae, has received in the MSS. such expansions as De origine et situ Germanorum or De origine, situ, moribus ac populis Germanorum. There is no parallel in antiquity to this separate study of a people, viewed first generally (i.-xxvii.) in respect of geography, climate, warfare, government, religion, divination, meetings, punishments, chieftains, dwellings, dress, morality, food, drink, tillage, funeral as well as other customs; and then specially (xxviii.-xlvi.), in respect of the various tribes. In this second part Tacitus, starting with western and northern tribes, passes to the Suebi in central Germany and thereafter from the tribes along the Danube and on the east to island folk and folk near the Baltic, ending with Wends (Veneti) and Finns (Fenni) bordering on Sarmatia. One does not need to be an anthropologist to appreciate the attraction of a little treatise so neat in its description and sometimes so biting in its swift comments. All sorts of curiously instructive and diverting details are given about those tall men with fierce blue eyes and red hair (truces et caerulei oculi, rutilae comae). Was it, Tacitus asks, the kindness or anger of the gods that denied them silver and gold, so that, though frontier tribes adopted money, barter remained the trade-custom of the interior? We learn how German women were held in respect and how their near presence was felt to be a stimulus by warriors in battle. We read of the tribesmen’s fixed times for meetings at the new or the full moon, and we recognize the origin of our English “fortnight” and obsolete “sennight” in their non-Roman mode of computing time (nec dierum numerum, ut nos, sed noctium computant). Their observance of the marriage tie, their payment of blood-money to end a feud, their open hospitality, their primitive love of a gift, and reckless dicing up to the final stake of personal freedom, all go to fill the picture. Their liquor fermented from barley or other grain was evidently responsible for much insobriety. “To spend a whole day and night in drinking disgraces no one. Their quarrels, frequent as usual among the intoxicated, are seldom settled with abusive words, but commonly with wounds and bloodshed.”⁠[1693] One of their curious habits was to take counsel at a feast, when the true feelings are disclosed amidst the freedom of the carousal, but to make a decision next day by a sort of appeal from Germans drunk to Germans sober: “they deliberate when they are unable to dissemble, they resolve when they cannot make a mistake” (deliberant dum fingere nesciunt, constituunt dum errare non possunt, xxii.).

Too much ink has been wasted on speculations whether the treatise is fundamentally an ethnographic essay, or a moral lesson for voluptuous Rome, or a political brochure to commend plans of aggression against the Germans.⁠[1694] If we could be sure that the province which Tacitus once governed was in the north, we might then divine the origin of his interest in the tribes across the frontier. Though there is nothing in the treatise that proves personal contact, there is much that might very well have been conveyed by oral inquiry apart from reading. Supposing that his father was the procurator of Belgica named Cornelius Tacitus, the author clearly had opportunities for questioning a useful witness on many points. His own purpose of writing a history of Domitian’s reign during which there had been German campaigns, and Trajan’s absence for the first year of his reign on the German frontier, were enough to attract Tacitus to the subject. But it is most unlikely that these forty-six chapters were designed as part of his future Histories: it is a different thing, however, to view an independent monograph as a preliminary survey of ground some of which he would one day have to cover historically. The only previous authority whom he names is Caesar; but that he drew from more than one source is indicated by his vague plurals, quidam affirmant, quidam uocant. Fragments of Sallust prove that he dealt with German customs; Tacitus may or may not have used him; and the same possibility holds with regard to Livy (the periocha of whose hundred and fourth book gives part of its contents as situm Germaniae moresque), and with regard to Paterculus, Pomponius Mela, and the twenty books on German wars by the elder Pliny.

The best reason assignable for the genesis of the book is that Tacitus found the subject interesting. Had he intended to secure a political effect, such as the advocacy of a forward policy on the frontier, it is unimaginable that he should have left his object a secret to be penetrated by a very few critics with whom all others disagree. His one conceivable thought in representing the Germans as dangerous enemies from the days of the Cimbrian menace must have been approval for the policy of caution such as Trajan favoured.

And if he took up the subject because it interested him, he wrote about it in a way meant to interest the reader. Of course he points out differences between Germans and Romans, and of course he passes caustic remarks, because they are likely to capture the attention. People enjoy them, because they are excellent literature. Even Roman grauitas might permit a smile now and again over a clever gibe at obvious national failings. But this is not to say that Tacitus constructed his essay to be either a monitory or a minatory mirror for Rome. The Germans are not idealized in it. Though Tacitus admires their bravery, loyalty, purity, hospitality and simplicity of life, he does not overlook their faults like idleness, drunkenness, gaming, and unpunctuality in attending popular assemblies. He is entitled, then, with an investigator’s impartiality, to redress the balance by implied or express censure on blemishes in Roman civilization—its absurd deification of women belonging to the imperial family; its demoralizing spectacles; its over-costly banquets and funerals; its ineffectual enactments against exorbitant interest. The widespread laxity of social life at Rome is no doubt before his eyes when he writes “no one in Germany smiles at vice: to corrupt and to be corrupted is not styled up-to-date” (nec corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum uocatur). He has in mind Rome’s carelessness of her offspring when, after recording that infanticide is an infamy in Germany, he adds, “good morals have more force there than good laws elsewhere” (plusque ibi boni mores ualent quam alibi bonae leges, xix.). The social influence of the childless rich is what, like any satirist, he inwardly stigmatizes in the remark that among the Germans there are no advantages in childlessness (nec ulla orbitatis pretia); and it is of the notorious predominance of freedmen at certain epochs that he is thinking when he points out that they are of no importance in German states except in those ruled by kings: “elsewhere the inferiority of the freedman is the proof of freedom” (impares libertini libertatis argumentum sunt). Pronouncements so pithily sarcastic illustrate the same general characteristics of style in the Germania as those noticeable in its immediate predecessor.

In the Historiae Tacitus treated a period of some twenty-eight years (A.D. 69-96) which he had himself lived through.⁠[1695] The work, when complete, embraced six principates, those of Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian; in others words, its main theme was the Flavian imperial house with the preceding struggle during which three nominees of different sections of the army rose in turn and quickly fell. Beginning with 1st January, 69, it may have been originally meant to continue a history written by Fabius Rusticus. The title is guaranteed by Pliny’s prophecy “I augur (and in augury I am expert) that your Histories are to last,” and by Tertullian’s reference to the Jewish wars related in the fifth book.⁠[1696] What we have left breaks off before the middle of Book V in the second Medicean MS., the sole authority for the text of the Histories, as it is also for that of Annals XI-XVI (a run of books which begin and end in a gap). Since that MS. numbers Histories, Book I as the seventeenth of the combined work from the death of Augustus, there is, prima facie, a presumption that the Annals ended with Book XVI, which, when unmutilated, must have treated about three years and a half (middle of A.D. 65 to end of 68). That, however, was about the length of time covered in Books III, and XIV, and XV. From Jerome we learn that Tacitus’s complete narrative of the Caesars, beginning with Tiberius and ending with Domitian, consisted of 30 volumes.⁠[1697] If, then, the Annals were in 16 books, the Histories had 14. Some assign 18 to the former and 12 to the latter.⁠[1698] This would imply a symmetrical hexadic division, so that six books of the Annals would in that case have treated Tiberius, six Caligula and Claudius, and six Nero.

The composition of the Histories preceded that of the Annals, where Tacitus alludes to having already dealt with Domitian’s times.⁠[1699] Pliny had portions of the Histories sent to him for revision, and occasionally supplied Tacitus with material like the account of the eruption of Vesuvius. References in his letters—we have eleven addressed to Tacitus—enable us to fix the period of publication for the Histories as the years from A.D. 104 to 109.⁠[1700]⁠

One cannot read the first twenty chapters without recognizing that they come from a historian of grasp, who realizes the momentous issues involved in the troublous times which formed his theme. His plan is clearly stated, the dark character of the period foreshadowed, the state of the Empire and feeling in Rome sketched, before he brings on his stage most of the leading personages in the sanguinary contests which followed the death of Nero. Vitellius for the moment receives only passing mention; but one cannot fail, even within the earlier chapters, to be interested in the figures of Galba, Piso, Otho, and Mucianus, who is the champion of the two coming Flavians, already, says Tacitus, marked out for imperial power. Much of the interest, when one pauses to analyse it, is awaked by Tacitus’s never-failing psychological skill. We have almost at once brought home to us old Galba’s obstinate parsimony. “He was undone by his old-fashioned strictness and an excessive severity to which nowadays we are not equal” (I. xviii.). His murder is followed by a fuller estimate, in which his seventy-three years prompt the reflection that, having lived under five emperors, “he had been luckier in the reign of others than in his own.” The estimate then describes his character as one “rather free from vices than distinguished by virtues,” and ends in the well-known terms, “by general consent he would have been declared equal to empire, had he never been emperor” (I. xlix.). Piso’s behaviour at his adoption by Galba is excellently depicted: “not the least change did he show in look or manner: it was as if he had the power rather than the wish to rule” (I. xvii.). Of Otho we are told that “he had spent a slack boyhood and unruly youth; Nero liked him for rivalling his own profligacy” (I. xiii.). In Mucianus we see one better fitted for emperor-maker than for emperor: “he was a blend of dissipation and energy, courtesy and arrogance, good and bad qualities. His self-indulgence was excessive in leisure hours: whenever he was on service, he displayed great qualities.... He was a man who would find it easier to confer imperial power than to hold it” (I. x.).

The summary of the times is impressive in its melancholy force:

The period I am entering upon was rich in disasters, appalling in its battles, and rent asunder by mutinies—even in peace a cruel time. Four emperors were cut off by the sword. There were three civil wars, still more against the alien, and often wars with both characters combined.

After a review of troubles in the Roman world at large, he concentrates on Rome:

The city was wasted by conflagrations, its oldest sanctuaries consumed, and the Capitol itself fired by the hands of citizens. Holy rites were profaned; there was immorality in high places; the sea was full of exiles and its rocks dyed with butcheries. The savagery in the city was more outrageous. Nobility, possessions, magistracies declined or filled, invited accusation: merit meant surest destruction.... Slaves were bribed to betray masters, freedmen to betray patrons: those without enemies were ruined by friends. Yet the age was not so barren in good qualities as not to exhibit fine examples as well. Mothers accompanied sons in flight: wives followed husbands into exile: there were brave kinsfolk and faithful sons-in-law: the fidelity of slaves bade defiance even to torture: there were distinguished men driven to the last necessity, when compulsory death was faced with gallantry, and the last scenes of all rivalled the renowned deaths of antiquity. At no time did more terrible disasters to the Roman people or plainer evidence prove that what the gods care for is not our peace of mind but our chastisement (non esse curae deis securitatem nostram, esse ultionem, I. iii.).

Such was the far from roseate aspect which, on a general survey, the period wore in the eyes of its historian. One tragedy follows another in this historical drama with the inevitability of fate. The prominent characters being as Tacitus depicted them, no other dénouements seem possible. Galba’s meanness was sure to undo him with the praetorians; Otho’s faintheartedness to drive him on suicide; Vitellius’s gluttony to prevent a successful stand against the Flavianists. The secret of the imperial system had now, as Tacitus says, been revealed: emperors could be made elsewhere than in Rome, and the Empire, despite the veil drawn by the plausible fictions of Augustus and his successors, was demonstrated to be essentially a military, not a civil, institution. The pretence of hereditary right to the succession vanished before the decrees of contending armies. If only, then, as documentary evidence for a new epoch of vital significance the Histories must be of lasting value. Book I leaves Otho momentarily in power. Much skill is shown in the employment of speeches to serve historical purposes; for example, Galba’s address to Piso at his adoption is an essay on the duties of an emperor (xv.-xvi.), and the speech put into Otho’s mouth after praetorians and marines have sworn allegiance to him is intended, through an indictment of Galba’s rule, to explain the reasons for its collapse (xxxvii.-xxxviii.). Among many impressive moments in what makes a most readable book is that which immediately precedes the murder of Galba and Piso. Like dramatists ancient and modern, Tacitus divined the power of silence: in the third book it is through the deserted halls of the palace that the doomed Vitellius wanders alone (terret solitudo et tacentes loci, III. lxxxiv.), and in the fourth book there is a memorable picture of a disgraced legion on its gloomy march like a dumb funeral procession (silens agmen et uelut longae exsequiae, IV. lxii.). So here, in the opening book, as Galba with his adopted successor reach the forum, the stage is set for tragedy:

Not an accent came from people or crowd; but looks were those of dismay, and ears turned to meet any sound. There was no uproar, no repose: it was a hush like that of a mighty terror and mighty wrath (I. xl.).

Danger to the new ruler declares itself at once from the legionaries in Germany, who proclaim Vitellius emperor. Otho is therefore compelled to face hostile armies pouring into Italy from the north. This struggle is the main subject of Book II, which, owing to the historian’s constant dramatic sense, begins by directing attention to Vespasian and his son Titus, who are on the alert to challenge the victor in the latest duel. The description of the battle of Betriacum, which left the Vitellianists in possession of the field, is clearly not the work of an expert military historian; but Otho’s speech to his men choosing self-inflicted death as the only honourable course is a fine performance which throws into the light unsuspected traits of nobility in one who had misspent his life. Next comes the turn of the victorious gourmand. Vitellius, in betraying his indecent joy when nearly six weeks after the battle he rode over the field among heaps of putrefying dead, appears with unconscious dramatic irony to be provoking nemesis. Meanwhile that nemesis is drawing near in the shape of the generals who invade Italy on behalf of Vespasian, the nominee of the eastern troops. This fresh struggle for the throne is the subject of the third book—a powerful one, containing such thrilling episodes as the terrible sack of Cremona, the burning of the Capitol at Rome, and the last miserable hours of Vitellius. The fourth book brings the acknowledgement of Vespasian as emperor, and is largely concerned with the bold scheme of the Batavian Civilis to establish a northern empire free from the yoke of Rome. The narrative of his operations continued in part of the next book is, like most of the military history in Tacitus, hard to follow—“more remarkable,” says Gibbon, “for its elegance than perspicuity.”⁠[1701] But the most interesting portions of the fifth book are those in which Tacitus turns to the war with the Jews at the outset of Vespasian’s reign. Unluckily, the account of the siege of Jerusalem is lost, but there is a curious fascination in the ludicrously distorted version of the Israelitish exodus from Egypt and of the mode whereby Moses put an end to the sufferings of his people in the wilderness. In many matters touching Jewish religion Tacitus betrays an amount of Roman prejudice and ignorance more tolerable in a satirist like Juvenal than in an investigator of history. One cannot but think it a pity that, if Josephus was not yet accessible, Tacitus failed to consult the Septuagint.⁠[1702]⁠

Concluding his Histories with the year A.D. 96, Tacitus turned back to deal with a period of over half a century from the death of Augustus in A.D. 14. The title of this narrative of the Julian dynasty through the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, is given in the sole MS. authority for Books I-VI (the first Medicean or Laurentian) as Ab excessu diui Augusti. Since Tacitus, however, several times⁠[1703] refers to his work as Annales, we are justified in using the traditional title. It is at least appropriate to his plan of following the yearly succession of events, although Tacitus, being too great an artist to enslave himself to such bare monotony as is found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, deviates from chronological order, should his subject appear to demand it.⁠[1704] Thus he relates in sequence two summer campaigns as a relief from miseries in Rome, and elsewhere combines the inter-connected transactions of several years so that they may be more easily remembered.⁠[1705]⁠

A clue to the date of composition is got from a reference to the Persian Gulf as a contemporary limit of the Empire. This held good only between Trajan’s conquest of A.D. 115 and Hadrian’s order for withdrawal on his accession in 117.⁠[1706] That the division into books was the author’s own is plain from allusions like “in prioribus libris.”⁠[1707] The conclusion of a book was often arranged to synchronize effectively with some striking event: thus II ends with the death of Arminius, (liberator haud dubie Germaniae), XI with the fall of the empress Messalina, XII with the poisoning and deification of Claudius, XIV with the cruel fate of Octavia, XV with the crushing of the Pisonian conspiracy. We may guess that the now imperfect Book V culminated in the overthrow of Sejanus. Out of what once amounted to at least sixteen books, there have survived the first four, a fraction of the fifth with more of the sixth, and, although defective at beginning and end, the series from the eleventh to the sixteenth. Interpreted in terms of history, the losses are parts of Tiberius’s reign, the whole reign of the imperial madman Caligula, the reign of Claudius up to A.D. 47, and over two years at the close of Nero’s reign.

Regrettable though these losses are, we possess in the remainder one of the greatest monuments of historical genius—the ripest work of a penetrating critic of affairs who expressed his thoughts in accents that are absolutely unique. Whatever its gloom or its bias, lack of interest cannot be alleged against the broken story of fifty years. In Tiberius’s reign we have placed before us the enigmatic character of the emperor, his varying attitude to Senate and senators, his ultimate withdrawal from Rome, the sinister growth of sycophancy and delation, mutinies theatrically engineered and as theatrically suppressed, the exploits of Germanicus in the North and his untimely death in the East, the fortunes and misfortunes of the elder Agrippina and of the children whom she bore to Germanicus, the ambitious projects of the dangerous minister Sejanus, and the smothering of the third Caesar in his seventy-eighth year. Even so, the record cannot always be thrilling, and we find the historian regretting the necessity for inserting details which may look trivial in spite of their significance and for using matter that may appear monotonous. This is why he breaks off his depressing tale of judicial murders to relate the legendary account of the marvellous phoenix in view of the rumour that it had reappeared in Egypt, and why he suggests that even Eastern troubles with Parthia—not the most attractive theme in his narrative—might afford a welcome change from affairs in Rome. But in fact the variety of topics touched upon within the compass of this single reign is amazing, and much is due to social or economic bearing—extravagance in living, scarcity of corn, financial crises, fires in the city, inundations from the river, increase of slave establishments, Oriental worships, the seductions of astrology, relief from taxation for Asiatic cities ruined by earthquake, the questionable right of sanctuary for criminals and so forth.

A break of about a decade after Tiberius’s death takes us six years into the reign of Claudius, when Messalina was empress and Suillius conducted his dastardly prosecutions. Interested in completing a magnificent aqueduct from Subiaco to the capital, in adding new letters to the alphabet, and in supporting the claims of leading provincials for admission into the Senate, the emperor, himself a puppet in the hands of his freedmen officials, is the last to realize the public scandal caused by Messalina’s misbehaviour. When, thanks to energetic steps taken by the libertus Narcissus, she is despatched, the marriage of Claudius to his niece the younger Agrippina, Germanicus’s daughter, who had previously married Domitius, ushers in a period of intrigue which brings about the poisoning of Claudius and, with the elevation of Agrippina’s son Nero to the throne, the exclusion of Claudius’s own son Britannicus. Nero’s reign begins at Book XIII and is full of incident. His earlier years of high promise are followed by the growth in him of depravity, megalomania and cruelty. At times unpleasant, the chronicle is scarcely ever uninteresting and is often exciting. Among episodes which enchain the attention are Nero’s plots against his imperious mother, his callous repudiation of Octavia to marry his mistress Poppaea, heavy fighting in Armenia, a fresh revolt in Britain, the execution of a whole household of slaves for a murder committed by one, a treasure-hunt in North Africa on a false scent, the emperor’s roystering in the streets by night, his public display of his musical talents, his conduct after the great conflagration in Rome, the ramifications of the ill-starred Pisonian conspiracy, the dramatic deaths of men so different as Seneca and Petronius, and the fate of the daringly independent Stoic senator Paetus Thrasea. By a coincidence, time has cut short the Annals in the midst of the account of Thrasea’s enforced death just after he had severed his arteries and let the blood flow with words which virtually repeat those of the dying Seneca and which Tacitus in a freer reign must have rejoiced to write—“we pour out a libation to Jupiter the Deliverer” (libamus Ioui liberatori).⁠[1708]⁠

To do full justice to the debated subject of the historical sources of Tacitus would require a separate chapter, if not a book. Here it must be lightly touched upon. Let us first note what obligations he specifies, remembering that such acknowledgements were never de rigueur in antiquity. In the Histories he names three authors, Vipstanus Messalla (twice), C. Plinius and Sisenna.⁠[1709] In the Annals he mentions more sources: C. Plinius three times, once as a writer on wars with the Germans, Fabius Rusticus also three times, Cluvius twice, Corbulo⁠[1710] once, Tiberius’s orations, a letter from Tiberius to the Senate (quoted in part, perhaps from a previous historian rather than from the acta senatus), the commentarii Agrippinae filiae, acta diurna, and commentarii (or acta) senatus.⁠[1711] But he is often content with vaguer references, implying a plurality, and sometimes a conflict, of authorities: e.g. inuenio apud quosdam auctores or celeberrimos auctores habeo or tradunt plerique.⁠[1712] Clearly there was a large amount of potential material—literary works, public or private records, oral tradition, and, for the period of the Histories, the author’s own observation. It could not all, however, be either equally available or equally valuable for the historian. Among different sorts of records, the commentarii principales were probably not accessible to him, the acta senatus could not always be trusted, and the acta diurna contained too much petty detail. In one passage⁠[1713] he mentions the circulation of fictitious speeches and decrees purporting to be genuine acta senatus; he was, then, on his guard against forgeries, and we may imagine that in some cases his account of proceedings in the Senate was a combination of the “Hansard” of the day with oral tradition.⁠[1714] In another passage, relating to Nero’s amphitheatre, he disdainfully relegates to the “Daily Register,” or acta diurna, all details of foundations and timber-work as beneath the dignity of history.⁠[1715] Fortunately, although here he seems to imply that the concern of history is with “illustrious events,” he at once proceeds to record the strengthening of two colonies by drafts of veterans, a money dole to the people, a payment into the exchequer, and the remission of a 4 per cent tax on slaves for sale—most of these being facts of social or economic import rather than res illustres.

Over and above authors whom he actually mentions, we know of several who might have provided material. For the period of the Histories there were Cluvius, Vespasian in his memoirs, and Antonius Julianus; and for the Annals the elder Seneca, Paterculus, Tiberius in his autobiography, Aufidius Bassus, Servilius Nonianus, Suetonius Paulinus, and Claudius. But in all this there are no more than possibilities. Indeed, throughout the whole question of Tacitus’s sources, one is always brought back to a baffling uncertainty due to the loss of even such sources as he specifies.⁠[1716] One avenue which at first sight promised to lead to something definite was the investigation into the striking coincidences between Tacitus’s Latin and Plutarch’s Greek in their handling of Galba and Otho.⁠[1717] There have been upholders of the theory that in this case Plutarch used Tacitus; but the general conviction is that both used the same authority, and apparently with considerable closeness.⁠[1718] Beyond that, in spite of much ingenuity in argument, nothing tangible has been attained. A wide diversity of opinion prevails on the identification of this particular source. No less uncertainty has resulted from the attempts at assessing Tacitus’s debt to his authorities in general and his method of employing them. Nissen, and after him Fabia, would have us believe that Tacitus’s method was to follow closely the subject-matter of a single author for large tracts of his work, neglecting secondary sources (especially in composing the Histories), and devoting his attention to the embellishment of his borrowed material so as to produce a composition highly effective from the standpoint of style. It is as difficult now, as it was when Boissier first criticised Nissen’s hypothesis, to accept an attitude which would imply a slavish lack of independence in Tacitus, and a dishonest pretence of consulting several authors at a time. The idea does not agree with Tacitus’s known desire to get first-hand knowledge, as proved by the letters in which he secured from the younger Pliny information about the eruption of Vesuvius. In the entire absence of the original sources, there is the utmost difficulty in comprehending how one can comfortably assert that Tacitus drew from a single main source for large tracts of his work, or how one can claim to identify the source as the elder Pliny for the Histories, Aufidius Bassus for earlier parts of the Annals, and Cluvius Rufus for the reign of Nero.

Modern historical research demands methods of rigorous investigation which it is futile to expect in Tacitus. He will leave a matter of debate unsettled, and the uninitiated might wonder whether this is due to impartiality or natural hesitancy or an academic suspension of judgement. His criterion for decision in face of a conflict of evidence was usually what he deemed probable in the circumstances. The subjectivity of such a test, while it removes him from the category of strictly scientific historians, at the same time makes it important to note that personal outlook on the world, on politics and on history, which was certain to colour his interpretation of facts. Broadly his leanings are Stoic, though he wavers between freewill and predestination. At one time his language postulates an overmastering fate; at another it ascribes an event to the combined operation of a transcendental fate and human agency;⁠[1719] at yet another it betrays a doubt whether “mortal affairs proceed by the unchangeable necessity of fate or by chance” (in incerto iudicium est fatone res mortalium et necessitate immutabili an forte uoluantur, Ann. VI. xxii.). If his views of the world are chaotic,⁠[1720] he is not the only great writer who has found its mystery indefinable. He well realised how the adversity of the good and the prosperity of the wicked lent plausibility to the Epicurean creed that the gods take no interest in mankind (non denique homines dis curae, VI. xxii.); for himself, his melancholy observation of life made him not an atheist but a believer in the frequent wrath of heaven.⁠[1721] Yet even this was a matter of the prevailing mood, for he was ready to think it a kindly intervention of providence that vouchsafed a brilliant starlit night with the calm of a tranquil sea, as it were to unmask the crime of Nero’s attempt to drown his mother.⁠[1722] With all this is mixed up a share of superstitious credulity towards prodigies and divination; but the essential point for us is that Tacitus, on the whole, believed in some law or principle which holds good among historical occurrences and so gives meaning to the quest after a cause. Early in the Histories he says:

Before composing my purposed work, I intend to survey the condition of the capital, the temper of the armies, the attitude of the provinces, and what made for strength or weakness anywhere in the world, so that one may recognize not merely the incidents and issues of events, which are mainly affairs of chance, but also their meaning and causes.⁠[1723]⁠

With such expectations Tacitus could feel confidence in the dignity of history⁠[1724] and in its power to instruct the future:

My design is not to set forth all motions made in the Senate, but only those which were remarkable for nobility or by reason of notorious infamy. This I consider the outstanding function of history to save excellence from oblivion and to confront evil words and evil deeds with the menace of reprobation from posterity (ne uirtutes sileantur utque prauis dictis factisque ex posteritate et infamia metus sit, Ann. III. lxv.).

Towards this aim at teaching by example, character is of vital importance; and among the causes of events which most engage Tacitus’s attention are human temperament and motives; so that, whatever the defects which made him in Mommsen’s eyes the most unmilitary of historians, he is at the same time one of the most psychological.

In theory Tacitus was republican, and in his writings a laudator temporis acti, whether he had to contemplate the pre-imperial state or its eloquence, its education, its historians. Yet he admitted that circumstances had rendered inevitable the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual.⁠[1725] The old free republic, to him ideally preferable,⁠[1726] could never come again.⁠[1727] The duty of the citizen was therefore to pray for good emperors, but put up with such as one had,⁠[1728] and to choose the safe path between brusque insolence and unseemly toadying (inter abruptam contumaciam et deforme obsequium, Ann. IV. xx.). We have noted in the Agricola his admiration for moderate aristocrats and his disapproval for intransigent members of the opposition who concluded a defiant parade of independence with a theatrically ostentatious death (ambitiosa morte, Agr. xlii.). Some consolation was obtainable from the fact that emperors like Nerva or Trajan could, he points out, square the principate with freedom. But, after all, the Empire remained for him a pis aller. With some emperors he could not but associate despotic cruelty, and with the period which he himself had to treat “barbarous edicts, perpetual prosecutions, treacherous friendships, the ruin of the innocent, the same causes producing the same consequences while one meets only a surfeit of sameness (obuia rerum similitudine et satietate).”⁠[1729] It is nothing short of a triumph of intellect and art that, insisting as he does upon his depressingly sombre theme, Tacitus should still be able to captivate his reader. The reader must, however, be content to be thus held while he is subtly indoctrinated;⁠[1730] for dispassionate history is not to be expected from a hostile judge.

The ineradicable prepossession in Tacitus is his conviction that Rome had fallen on evil days. No less than in the Histories, the opening chapters in the Annals have a sombre tone as of one looking back upon a long period of national woe. The rapid conspectus, in a sentence or two, of the evolution of Roman history towards one-man-rule closes in a glimpse at a world outworn with civil strife and subject to an emperor. Immediately one breathes an asphyxiating atmosphere of oppression and adulation which Tacitus feels must have impaired history. The deeds of the old Roman people, he remarks with pride, were recorded by famous historians, and even under the newly established Empire the Augustan age produced fine intellects capable of assessing and transmitting its achievements, had not court influence militated against the free utterance of opinion. But with later reigns came a blighting terrorism, so that, for the times of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero, contemporary evidence was vitiated by dishonest flattery, and subsequent criticism vitiated by the reaction of loathing. From such extremes of feeling—from partiality as from bitterness—Tacitus at least claims to be exempt.⁠[1731] He proceeds to note the concentration of supreme power in the person of Augustus and the acquiescence of the provinces in an imperial control which guaranteed them protection against the worst rapacity of arbitrary officialdom. If this latter fact be viewed as a bright spot in the new system, the dynastic plans of Augustus to support his disguised despotism by recognized heirs are described as clouded by a series of misfortunes. The death of the young Marcellus, the untimely ends of the “princes of the youth,” Gaius and Lucius Caesar, “cut off by destiny or by their stepmother Livia’s treachery,” and the unfair banishment of the aged emperor’s only grandson, Agrippa Postumus, served in turn, through a tragically entangled network of intrigue, to open for Livia’s son Tiberius the path to the succession.

Such is the way in which the stage is cleared for the entrance of the figure around which the battle concerning Tacitus’s credibility has been most fiercely fought.⁠[1732] It is noticeable that in several points this introduction anticipates the summary in which he takes leave of the life and character of Tiberius at the close of the sixth book. That summary divides his life into phases, and implies that a signal deterioration took place in his final years of seclusion on the island of Capri, when, throwing off the habitual mask of hypocrisy, he came out in his true colours (remoto pudore et metu suo tantum ingenio utebatur). During a first perusal of the Annals one is so far overmastered by the accumulated effect attained by reprobation and innuendo as to take Tiberius for an execrable though accomplished tyrant. The author’s skill whereby he first disarms suspicion with a profession of impartiality, and thereafter loses few opportunities of imputing sinister motives to the emperor, bears its intended fruit in the reader’s willingness to accept the historian’s hostility for independence. By a train of devices one is almost unconsciously enrolled as a sympathizer with the aristocratic opposition to empire. But in time, upon reflection, there arise questionings. On a broad survey of facts, how came it that the Roman Empire of the first century was on the whole so well managed and so contented, if it was cursed with such monsters for its governors as Tiberius, Caligula, Nero and Domitian were traditionally represented to have been? And as to Tiberius in particular—whose portrayal is the great test for the veracity of Tacitus—how came it that his competence as ruler and his advanced years could stand the strain of the prolonged debauchery which is alleged to have disgraced his retirement at Capri?

The rehabilitation of an over-maligned Tiberius, however, runs a risk of going so far as to do injustice to Tacitus in turn. Tacitus can scarcely be charged with having invented libels upon the emperor: for everything he most likely had some authority, and he believed in his own impartiality. What can be pressed against him is the indictment that his own imperfectly realized prejudice debarred him from weighing judicially his information, drawn, as much of it was, from authorities with strong senatorial sympathies. Tacitus had no canon of the credible and incredible where his partisan passions were concerned. It is not, therefore, surprising that great inconsistencies can be pointed out in Books I-VI of the Annals. Reports of contemporary comments do not necessarily make historical evidence; and whether Tacitus did or did not set them down in malice, it was in malice that many of them were conceived. The suspicion is not an unreasonable one that he drew from tainted sources, like the memoirs of the younger Agrippina, which would be decidedly anti-Tiberian in tone. If we consider the alleged orgy of sensuality by Tiberius on Capri, the story may have originated in gossip provoked by the ruler’s impenetrable seclusion on the island, or, according to another guess, it may have been a legacy from scurrilous writings designed to damage his moral character during his previous retirement in Rhodes, and then, if submitted confidentially to Augustus, possibly retained among state-papers to which a century later both Tacitus and Suetonius had access. Whatever the genesis of such tales, Tacitus’s fault lay not in creating slanders but in failing to reject them critically. It is true that Suetonius, in ascribing loathsome profligacy to Tiberius, descends into details which Tacitus would pass over in lofty disdain;⁠[1733] but Tacitus ought to have noted the inherent unlikelihood of this particular scandal, which is not substantiated by anything in writers like Philo and Josephus. The view that Tacitus of set purpose draws Tiberius with the conventional qualities of the tyrant in rhetoric (such as cruelty, injustice, suspicion, craft, lust, and anguish of soul) seems too mechanical a conception. What one can admit is that Tacitus is not above visiting upon Tiberius the faults of some of his worst successors, and that just as Velleius, an admiring rhapsodist, overstresses his hero’s merits, so Tacitus, although he records examples of the emperor’s ability, wisdom, fairness, and even generosity, allows prejudice so to blind him to many commendable traits in Tiberius that he paints him too black. Tacitus had no more unfortunate limitation than the inability to think imperially: he never grasped the stupendous achievement involved in Augustus’s reorganization of the Empire, and he betrays a cardinal weakness when he misjudges Tiberius for his statesman-like adherence to the Augustan policy of consolidation in preference to aggrandisement.

The Latin of Tacitus, considered from the standpoint of vocabulary, grammar and syntax, bears the impress of his age; but no mere analysis of language can estimate the qualities of his style.⁠[1734] Words were for him instruments handled with an individual touch of genius which makes his Latin different from that of all other writers. Careful investigators have examined his language and recorded their results in books or pamphlets written in Latin and various modern languages: here a few leading aspects may be noted. It has become almost traditional, and it remains sensible, to approach the subject under Bötticher’s headings of brevity, variety, and poetic colour. Brevity is so inseparable from Tacitus that the schoolboy recognizes it as a difficulty to be overcome. Verbs and connectives are freely dropped, and puzzlingly elliptical bits of syntax occur.⁠[1735] It was a condensation reached by a long process of experiment in thought and expression—an abrupt terseness pushed sometimes to the verge or over the verge of obscurity. The developed manner of the Annals, which is in strong contrast to what some might call the cloying amplitude of Ciceronian prose, indicates that Tacitus has travelled far from the comparative fullness of his own earliest work. Though he can at times employ the period with fine effect, his sentence-structure in general represents a reaction from the Ciceronian. In Tacitus, as in Virgil, thought or feeling is compressed into chosen expressions of a brevity so profoundly significant that they capture the imagination. The soul which he breathed into prose makes his words live: almost unbidden, they revisit the memory, haunting it with their ironic, melancholy, often tragic power. One does not easily forget sayings like “Heaven’s wrongs are heaven’s concern” (deorum iniurias dis curae, Ann. I. lxxiii.), or “shortlived and ill-starred are the darlings of the Roman people” (breues et infaustos populi Romani amores, II. xli.). His terseness is at its most effective pitch in his epigrams and summaries of character. Again and again the finished neatness of the Latin seems to elude rendering. Take the picture of the inscrutability of Tiberius:

His words were always halting and mysterious, but, now that his aim was the thorough concealment of his feelings, they became more than ever a tangled maze of uncertainty (suspensa semper et obscura uerba: tunc uero nitenti ut sensus suos penitus abderet, in incertum et ambiguum magis implicabantur, Ann. I. xi.).

A deep glance into a warped nature is conveyed in the thumbnail sketch of a martinet’s cruelty—“an old hand at hard military tasks and the crueller for having suffered” (uetus operis ac laboris et eo immitior quia tolerauerat, I. xx.). The policy of taking no notice of personal insults is inimitably expressed—“calumnies wither up, if ignored: resentment gives them seeming recognition” (spreta exolescunt: si irascare, agnita uidentur).

Variety is a phase of his independence. He gives changed meanings to words,⁠[1736] indulges in novel extensions of idiom (e.g. pudet dictu, Agr. xxxii.); and, with a passion for the irregular, departs from the normal symmetry of expression where there is a balance in thought.⁠[1737] It is not surprising that a long list is available of words which occur only, or for the first time, in Tacitus, such as adcumulator, adulatorius, concertator, eiectamentum, imitamentum, inlacessitus, instigator, instigatrix, peramoenus, regnatrix. In keeping with this goes a preference for the less usual form of a word, claritudo and firmitudo rather than claritas and firmitas;⁠[1738] the form in -men like fragmen, medicamen, tegumen, where the commoner prose forms end in -mentum; and conversely, those in -mentum, like cognomentum and leuamentum rather than cognomen and leuamen. The so-called Graecisms are to be set down to the same pursuit of variety, although linguistically they are mainly not so much direct borrowings from the Greek as inheritances from native Latin idiom developed under Greek influence,⁠[1739] or actual imitations of previous Roman writers: thus what is termed the Greek attracted dative (quibus bellum uolentibus erat, Agr. xviii.) had already appeared in Sallust and Livy, both of whom exerted influence upon Tacitus.

The poetic colouring is ubiquitous. It is noticeable in poetic, and especially Virgilian, words, which he often shares with prose-writers of the Silver Age as a result of the predominance of poetry in academic education. Examples are adolere (also in Columella), breuia (“shallows,” Virgil and Lucan), crebrescere (Quintil. and younger Pliny), densere (Lucret. and Virg.), exspes (Hor.), gestamen (elder Pliny), meatus (Lucr., Virg., younger Pliny), regnator (Plaut., Virg.). It is noticeable also in turns of phrase which recall Virgil, in frequent metaphors, and in personifications such as “the informers’ eloquence dripping with blood” (sanguinantis eloquentiae, Dial. xii.); “nowhere is the sea more widely a queen” (nusquam latius dominari mare, Agr. x.); “a night that threatens and will break forth into crime” (noctem minacem et in scelus erupturam, Ann. I. xxviii.).⁠[1740]⁠

Partly poetic association, partly a desire for variety sent Tacitus back sometimes to old-fashioned words, though, in spite of his liking for Sallust, he is more of an innovator than an archaizer. He occasionally employs Plautine words like mercimonium or truculentia, and by a kindred impulse substitutes the simple verb for the compound, e.g. cernere for decernere and firmare for affirmare. But he does not resort to the antique in the manner of Apuleius and Gellius later in his century. Like one of the interlocutors in his Dialogus, he recognized the current demand for novel smartness and poetic turns “unstained by the rust (ueterno) of Accius and Pacuvius, but taken from the sacred treasury of Horace, Virgil or Lucan.”⁠[1741] It is an unwarrantable assumption to regard his hexametric opening in the Annals (urbem Romam a principio reges habuere) as a citation from Ennius.⁠[1742]⁠

Yet to scrutinize his language is only to note the mechanism of his style. What most matters is the use to which he could put his words, and his achievement of imperishable effects through his mastery over vividness, irony and an elevation of style too dignified to tolerate lapses into the petty or the repulsive. Many of his qualities, like his epigrams, sprang from rhetoric: it would be idle to pretend that he is free from affectation, but it is an affectation tempered with sound sense that never allows him to be carried into exuberance. Brilliant in his brevity, Tacitus does not depend for his fame solely on his bright flashes. His style is one of sustained power which does not admit triviality or dullness. “Le plus grand peintre de l’antiquité,” as Racine called him, showed himself a master of portraiture and description when his theme was a character, a conflict, a mutiny, a disaster, a plot, a trial, a debate. All is rapidity and the interest never flags. His originality is a phase of his intense subjectivity. He leaves his imprint on his writings because, as we have seen, he abandons the normal for a surprising terseness and for daring novelties, and because his vigour of expression reflects his realistic conception of the men and events which made his material.

Strange vicissitudes mark the history of Tacitus’s posthumous fame.⁠[1743] Notwithstanding Pliny’s confidence in his friend’s literary immortality, the immediately succeeding generations showed faint interest in his writings. He was not spicy enough in detail for admirers of the Suetonian type of biography, not quaint enough in style for the archaizing school later in the century, not appreciative enough of either Christians or Jews to please the Fathers of the Church. Even his monograph on Agricola seems to have been little read, and grammarians do not quote him. In the final quarter of the third century, the emperor Tacitus claimed relationship with the historian, and, in alarm lest his works should be lost lectorum incuria, issued orders for the multiplication of copies, making it compulsory for libraries to possess them.⁠[1744] In the fourth century it was the fond ambition of Ammianus Marcellinus, the last considerable historian in antiquity, to prove himself another Tacitus by continuing his works in thirty-one books (of which the last eighteen survive) on the Empire from the reign of Nerva to that of Valens. We can prove that Tacitus was known to the Aquitanian presbyter Sulpicius Severus, to Augustine’s Spanish friend Orosius, and to Sidonius Apollinaris; but when Cassiodorus in the sixth century, on the subject of amber, refers to “a certain Cornelius” as having mentioned it, we realize how misty his reputation had grown.⁠[1745] That the Carolingian period had access to the Germania and the earlier books of the Annals can be demonstrated from the works of Robert of Fulda in the second half of the ninth century. Thereafter silence falls for some centuries until we find Boccaccio possessed of a manuscript, perhaps identical with our “Second Medicean,” containing the later books of the Annals with the Histories. The facts concerning the arrival at Rome from Germany in 1455 of the sole source for the minor works and the discovery at Corbey in 1509 of the “First Medicean,” the sole source for the earlier part of the Annals, are thrilling reminders how near the world came to losing Tacitus. All that we possess of him has been available in print since 1515, and has interested generations of politicians, historians, and essayists from Macchiavelli, Guicciardini and Montaigne onwards. When one reads of French revolutionaries relying upon Tacitean doctrine, one is amused to think that Milton had to rebut Salmasius’s misreading of him as an upholder of autocratic rule.

His influence upon early English drama should not be forgotten. It may be illustrated by Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall, first acted in 1603 (when Shakespeare played a part), but not published till 1605. The playwright’s address “To the Readers” acknowledges his debt to Tacitus, Dio and Suetonius; and the same three sources were drawn upon some years later for the anonymous play of Nero. Abroad, Tacitus’s stimulus towards dramatic production is visible under Louis XIV in Corneille’s Otho and Racine’s Britannicus; towards the end of the eighteenth century in Alfieri’s Ottavia; and about the beginning of the nineteenth in Marie-Joseph Chénier’s Tibère and Arnault’s Germanicus.

His style militated against popularity with humanists so strictly trained on the norm of Ciceronianism as to be unable to see the merits of a different type of prose; but one most interesting phase of his influence is traceable in Justus Lipsius, whose edition of Tacitus in 1574 was a masterpiece of scholarship. Lipsius’s editorial labours transformed his Latin from Ciceronian into Tacitean and, in establishing his claim to breadth of literary taste, at the same time bore witness to the vital power transmitted by the great historian of the early empire.