Complete Works of Tacitus (Delphi Classics) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 24)

by Publius Cornelius Tacitus

  The silver age produced no men who “attained unto these first three.” But there are not wanting other bright names to associate with Tacitus, though most of them lived a little earlier than he. There was Seneca, the Philosopher, whose style, with its perpetual antitheses, is the very worst of the age, but his sentiments, perhaps more or less under the influence of Christianity, approach nearer to the Christian code of morals than those of any other Latin author. There were Martial and Juvenal, whose satires made vice tremble in its high places, and helped to confer on the Romans the honor of originating one species of literary composition, unknown to the Greeks. There were Suetonius and Plutarch; the one natural, simple, and pure in his style, far beyond his age, but without much depth or vigor of thought; the other involved and affected in his manner, but in his matter of surpassing richness and incalculable worth. There was the elder Pliny, a prodigy of learning and industry, whose researches in Natural History cost him his life, in that fatal eruption of Vesuvius which buried Herculaneum and Pompeii. There was also the judicious Quintilian, at once neat and nervous in his language, delicate and correct in his criticisms, a man of genius and a scholar, a teacher and an exemplar of eloquence. Finally, there were the younger Pliny and Tacitus, rival candidates for literary and professional distinction, yet cherishing for each other the most devoted and inviolable attachment, each viewing the other as the ornament of their country, each urging the other to write the history of their age, and each relying chiefly on the genius of the other for his own immortality (Plin. Epis. vii. 33). Their names were together identified by their contemporaries with the literature of the age of Trajan: “I never was touched with a more sensible pleasure,” says Pliny, in one of his beautiful Letters [Eleven of these are addressed to Tacitus, and two or three are written expressly for the purpose of furnishing materials for his history.] (which rival Cicero’s in epistolary ease and elegance), “than by an account which I lately received from Cornelius Tacitus. He informed me, that at the last Circensian Games, he sat next a stranger, who, after much discourse on various topics of learning, asked him whether he was an Italian or a Provincial. Tacitus replied, ‘Your acquaintance with literature must have informed you who I am.’ ‘Aye,’ said the man, ‘is it then Tacitus or Pliny I am talking with?’ I cannot express how highly I am pleased to find, that our names are not so much the proper appellations of individuals, as a designation of learning itself” (Plin. Epis. ix. 23). Critics are not agreed to which of these two literary friends belongs the delicate encomium of Quintilian, when, after enumerating the principal writers of the day, he adds, “There is another ornament of the age, who will deserve the admiration of posterity. I do not mention him at present; his name will be known hereafter.” Pliny, Tacitus, and Quintilian, are also rival candidates for the honor of having written the Dialogue de Claris Oratoribus, one of the most valuable productions in ancient criticism.

  As a writer, Tacitus was not free from the faults of his age. The native simplicity of Greek and Latin composition had passed away. An affected point and an artificial brilliancy were substituted in their place. The rhetoric and philosophy of the schools had infected all the departments of literature. Simple narrative no longer suited the pampered taste of the readers or the writers of history. It must be highly seasoned with sentimentalism and moralizing, with romance and poetry. Tacitus, certainly, did not escape the infection. In the language of Macaulay, “He carries his love of effect far beyond the limits of moderation. He tells a fine story finely, but he cannot tell a plain story plainly. He stimulates, till stimulants lose their power.” [See a fine article on history, Ed. Her., 1828. Also in Macaulay’s Miscellanies.] We have taken occasion in the notes to point out not a few examples of rhetorical pomp, and poetical coloring, and even needless multiplication of words, where plainness and precision would have been much better, and which may well surprise us in a writer of so much conciseness. Lord Monboddo, in a very able, though somewhat extravagant critique on Tacitus, has selected numerous instances of what he calls the ornamented dry style, many of which are so concise, so rough, and so broken, that he says, they do not deserve the name of composition, but seem rather like the raw materials of history, than like history itself (Orig. and Prog. of Lang., vol iii. cha).

  Still, few readers can fail to pronounce Tacitus, as Macaulay affirms, and even Lord Monboddo admits him to be, the greatest of Latin historians, superior to Thucydides himself in the moral painting of his best narrative scenes, and in the delineation of character without a rival among historians, with scarcely a superior among dramatists and novelists. The common style of his narrative is, indeed, wanting in simplicity, and sometimes in perspicuity. He does not deal enough in the specific and the picturesque, the where, the when and the how. But when his subject comes up to the grandeur of his conceptions, and the strength of his language, his descriptions are graphic and powerful. No battle scenes are more grand and terrific than those of Tacitus. Military men and scholars have also remarked their singular correctness and definiteness. The military evolutions, the fierce encounter, the doubtful struggle, the alternations of victory and defeat, the disastrous rout and hot pursuit, the carnage and blood, are set forth with the warrior’s accuracy and the poet’s fire; while, at the same time, the conflicting passions and emotions of the combatants are discerned, as it were, by the eye of a seer — their hidden springs of action, and the lowest depths of their hearts laid bare, as if by the wand of a magician. In the painting of large groups, in the moral portraiture of vast bodies of men under high excitement and in strenuous exertion, we think that Tacitus far surpasses all other historians. Whether it be a field of battle or a captured city, a frightened senate or a flattering court, a mutiny or a mob, that he describes, we not only see in a clear and strong light the outward actions, but we look into the hearts of all the mixed multitude, and gaze with wonder on the changing emotions and conflicting passions by which they are agitated.

  His delineations of individual character are also marked by the same profound insight into the human soul. Like the old Latin Poet, he might have said,

  “Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto.”

  There is scarcely a landscape picture in his whole gallery. It is full of portraits of men, in groups and as individuals, every grade of condition, every variety of character, performing all kinds of actions, exhibiting every human passion, the colors laid on with a bold hand, the principal features presented in a strong light, the minuter strokes omitted, the soft and delicate finish despised. We feel, that we have gained not a little insight into the character of those men, who are barely introduced in the extant books of Tacitus, but whose history is given in the books that are lost. Men of inferior rank even, who appear on the stage only for a short time, develope strongly marked characters, which are drawn with dramatic distinctness and power, while yet the thread of history is never broken, the dignity of history never sacrificed. And those Emperors, whose history is preserved entire, — with them we feel acquainted, we know the controlling principles, as well as the leading events of their lives, and we feel sure that we could predict how they would act, under almost any imaginable circumstances.

  In a faithful portraiture of the private and public life of the degenerate Romans, there was much to call for the hand of a master in satire. And we find in the glowing sketches of our author, all the vigor and point of a Juvenal, without his vulgarity and obscenity; all the burning indignation which the Latin is so peculiarly capable of expressing, with all the vigor and stateliness by which the same language is equally characterized. Tacitus has been sometimes represented as a very Diogenes, for carping and sarcasm — a very Aristophanes, to blacken character with ridicule and reproach. But he is as far removed from the cynic or the buffoon, as from the panegyrist or the flatterer. He is not the indiscriminate admirer that Plutarch was. Nor is he such a universal hater as Sallust. It is the fault of the times that he is obliged to deal so much in censure. If there ever were perfect monsters on earth, such
were several of the Roman Emperors. Yet Tacitus describes few, if any, of them without some of the traits of humanity. He gives us in his history neither demons nor gods, but veritable men and women. In this respect, as also in his descriptions of battles, Tacitus is decidedly superior to Livy. The characters of Livy are distinguishable only as classes — the good all very good, the bad very bad, the indifferent very indifferent. You discover no important difference between a Fabius and a Marcellus, further than it lies on the face of their actions. In Tacitus, the characters are all individuals. Each stands out distinctly from the surrounding multitude, and not only performs his own proper actions, but is governed by his own peculiar motives. Livy places before us the statues of heroes and gods; Tacitus conducts us through the crowd of living men.

  In an attempt to sketch the most striking features of Tacitus, as a writer, no critic can omit to mention his sage and pithy maxims. Apothegms abound on every page — sagacious, truthful, and profound in sentiment, in style concise, antithetic and sententious. Doubtless he is excessively fond of pointed antithesis. Perhaps he is too much given to moralizing and reflection. It was, as we have said, the fault of his age. But no one, who is familiar with Seneca, will severely censure Tacitus. He will only wonder that he should have risen so far above the faults of his contemporaries. Indeed, Tacitus interweaves his reflections with so much propriety, and clothes his apothegms with so much dignity — he is so manifestly competent to instruct the world by maxims, whether in civil, social, or individual life, that we are far from wishing he had indulged in it less. His reflections do not interrupt the thread of his narrative. They grow naturally out of his incidents. They break forth spontaneously from the lips of his men. His history is indeed philosophy teaching by examples; and his pithy sayings are truly lessons of wisdom, embodied in the form most likely to strike the attention, and impress the memory. We should love to see a collection of apothegms from the pen of Tacitus. It would make an admirable book of laconics. No book would give you more ideas in fewer words. Nowhere could you gain so much knowledge, and lose so little time. The reader of Tacitus, who will study him with pen in hand, to mark, or refer to the most striking passages, will soon find himself master of a text book in moral and political science, we might say a text book in human nature, singularly concise and sententious, and what is not always true even of concise and sententious writers, as singularly wise and profound. In such a book, many of the speeches would find a place entire; for many of them are little else than a series of condensed, well-timed, and most instructive apothegms. [E.g. the speech of Galba to Piso. His. i. 15, 16.]

  But the scholar, who is on the lookout, will find lurking in every section, and almost every sentence, some important truth in morals, in politics, in the individual or social nature of man. Neither the editor nor the teacher can be expected to develope these sentiments, nor even, in many instances, to point them out. That labor must be performed by the scholar; and his will be the reward.

  No hasty perusal, no single reading of Tacitus, will give a just conception of the surpassing richness of his works. They must be studied profoundly to be duly appreciated. They are a mine of wisdom, of vast extent and unknown depth, whose treasures lie chiefly beneath the surface, imbedded in the solid rock which must be entered with mining implements, explored with strong lights, and its wealth brought up by severe toil and sweat.

  INTRODUCTION TO TACITUS by W. Hamilton Fyfe

  Tacitus held the consulship under Nerva in the year 97. 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. ‘I shall find it a pleasant task to put together, though in rough and unfinished style, a memorial of our former slavery and a record of our present happiness.’ His intention was to write a history of the Principate from Augustus to Trajan. He began with his own times, and wrote in twelve or fourteen books a full account of the period from Nero’s death in 68 A.D. to the death of Domitian in 96 A.D. These were published, probably in successive books, between 106 and 109 A.D. Only the first four and a half books survive to us. They deal with the years 69 and 70, and are known as The Histories. The Annals, which soon followed, dealt with the Julian dynasty after the death of Augustus. Of Augustus’ constitution of the principate and of Rome’s ‘present happiness’ under Trajan, Tacitus did not live to write.

  The Histories, as they survive to us, describe in a style that has made them immortal one of the most terrible and crucial moments of Roman history. The deadly struggle for the throne demonstrated finally the real nature of the Principate — based not on constitutional fictions but on armed force — and the supple inefficiency of the senatorial class. The revolt on the Rhine foreshadowed the debacle of the fifth century. Tacitus was peculiarly well qualified to write the history of this period. He had been the eye-witness of some of the most terrible scenes: he was acquainted with all the distinguished survivors: his political experience gave him a statesman’s point of view, and his rhetorical training a style which mirrored both the terror of the times and his own emotion. More than any other Roman historian he desired to tell the truth and was not fatally biassed by prejudice. It is wrong to regard Tacitus as an ‘embittered rhetorician’, an ‘enemy of the Empire’, a ‘détracteur de l’humanité’. He was none of these. As a member of a noble, though not an ancient, family, and as one who had completed the republican cursus honorum, his sympathies were naturally senatorial. He regretted that the days were passed when oratory was a real power and the consuls were the twin towers of the world. But he never hoped to see such days again. He realized that monarchy was essential to peace, and that the price of freedom was violence and disorder. He had no illusions about the senate. Fault and misfortune had reduced them to nerveless servility, a luxury of self-abasement. Their meekness would never inherit the earth. Tacitus pours scorn on the philosophic opponents of the Principate, who while refusing to serve the emperor and pretending to hope for the restoration of the republic, could contribute nothing more useful than an ostentatious suicide. His own career, and still more the career of his father-in-law Agricola, showed that even under bad emperors a man could be great without dishonour. Tacitus was no republican in any sense of the word, but rather a monarchist malgré lui. There was nothing for it but to pray for good emperors and put up with bad ones.

  Those who decry Tacitus for prejudice against the Empire forget that he is describing emperors who were indubitably bad. We have lost his account of Vespasian’s reign. His praise of Augustus and of Trajan was never written. The emperors whom he depicts for us were all either tyrannical or contemptible, or both: no floods of modern biography can wash them white. They seemed to him to have degraded Roman life and left no room for virtus in the world. The verdict of Rome had gone against them. So he devotes to their portraiture the venom which the fifteen years of Domitian’s reign of terror had engendered in his heart. He was inevitably a pessimist; his ideals lay in the past; yet he clearly shows that he had some hope of the future. Without sharing Pliny’s faith that the millennium had dawned, he admits that Nerva and Trajan have inaugurated ‘happier times’ and combined monarchy with some degree of personal freedom.

  There are other reasons for the ‘dark shadows’ in Tacitus’ work. History to a Roman was opus oratorium, a work of literary art. Truth is a great but not a sufficient merit. The historian must be not only narrator but ornator rerum. He must carefully select and arrange the incidents, compose them into an effective group, and by the power of language make them memor
able and alive. In these books Tacitus has little but horrors to describe: his art makes them unforgettably horrible. The same art is ready to display the beauty of courage and self-sacrifice. But these were rarer phenomena than cowardice and greed. It was not Tacitus, but the age, which showed a preference for vice. Moreover, the historian’s art was not to be used solely for its own sake. All ancient history was written with a moral object; the ethical interest predominates almost to the exclusion of all others. Tacitus is never merely literary. The [Greek: semnotês] which Pliny notes as the characteristic of his oratory, never lets him sparkle to no purpose. All his pictures have a moral object ‘to rescue virtue from oblivion and restrain vice by the terror of posthumous infamy’. His prime interest is character: and when he has conducted some skilful piece of moral diagnosis there attaches to his verdict some of the severity of a sermon. If you want to make men better you must uncover and scarify their sins.

  Few Christian moralists deal much in eulogy, and Tacitus’ diatribes are the more frequent and the more fierce because his was the morality not of Christ but of Rome. ‘The Poor’ are as dirt to him: he can stoop to immortalize some gleam of goodness in low life, but even then his main object is by scorn of contrast to galvanize the aristocracy into better ways. Only in them can true virtus grow. Their degradation seems the death of goodness. Tacitus had little sympathy with the social revolution that was rapidly completing itself, not so much because those who rose from the masses lacked ‘blood’, but because they had not been trained in the right traditions. In the decay of Education he finds a prime cause of evil. And being a Roman — wherever he may have been born — he inevitably feels that the decay of Roman life must rot the world. His eyes are not really open to the Empire. He never seems to think that in the spacious provinces to which the old Roman virtues had taken flight, men were leading happy, useful lives, because the strong hand of the imperial government had come to save them from the inefficiency of aristocratic governors. This narrowness of view accounts for much of Tacitus’ pessimism.