Tacitus’s two main works are the Histories and the Annals. The first dealt chiefly with the Roman civil wars of 69 ce, the Year of the Four Emperors, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian; the second is a yearly account, beginning in 14 ce (the year of the death of Augustus) and ending in 68 ce, which takes up the leading Roman events, domestic and foreign, as they occurred. Tacitus remarks that he hoped to go on to recount the reigns of Nerva and Trajan, but whether he did or not, we shall never know. He had earlier published his Agricola and his Germania, the latter a geographical and ethnological study of the German tribes to the west of Rome; “Germany” at that time included what are today the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, the Baltic countries, and Scandinavia. In part a paean to the barbaric tribes of Germany as noble savages, the Germania was used by the Nazis to glorify the German warrior tradition. Finally, one of his first surviving compositions, the Dialogus, is a treatise, in dialogue form, on the rudiments and principles of oratory and on its value for intellectual development and personal advancement.
Modern scholars have found in Tacitus inaccuracies, biases, deep stretches of ignorance—see, especially, his few pages on the Jews—but none of this ultimately has diminished the grandeur of what he wrote. The reason is that Tacitus was as fully a literary artist as he was a historian. His was a style that abandoned the periodic sentence, eschewed the flowery, commanded devastating metaphors, lanced pretensions with exquisite irony, selected the perfect details—a style that meted out the just literary punishment for the multiplicity of egregious crimes of which he was chief chronicler. Sir Ronald Syme, his best biographer, calls Tacitus “the crown and summit of imperial literature,” and there is no reason to dispute the claim.
About his own motives as a historian, Tacitus was unambiguous. “It seems to me,” he wrote in the Annals, “a historian’s foremost duty is to ensure that merit is recorded, and to confront evil words and deeds with the fear of posterity’s denunciations.” Tacitus was, in other words, a moralist, with a pessimist’s view of human nature and a talent for describing human nature outraged, which, under the rule of the Roman emperors, it frequently was.
“I shall write without indignation or partisanship,” he claimed, “in my case the customary incentives to these are lacking.” Tacitus felt no personal disappointments, bore no grudges, took no partisan positions. Yet he was a man of pitiless insight with a strong sense of honor and distaste for hypocrisy. Montaigne, who claimed to have read the Histories in a single sitting, held that “Tacitus was a great man, upright and courageous, not of a superstitious but of a philosophical and high-minded virtue.” This, ipso facto, rendered him a relentless critic of Rome under the emperors.
Tacitus understood (as Syme has it) that, since Augustus, “the Roman constitution was a screen and a sham.” He never took seriously the pretensions of Augustus, Tiberius, and other emperors that the Roman Republic was still intact. Under the principate, all power rested with one man, the emperor, and the lure of power and its subsequent attainment, with only rare exceptions, brought its own corruptions. In Tacitus, some emperors are better than others; but most soon leave the path of virtue, and all die unhappily.
Describing life under the Caesars restricted Tacitus chiefly to recording cowardly betrayals, petty rivalries of courtesans and freedmen and slaves, acts of vengeance, and horrific cruelty. Assassination, execution, enforced suicide, regicide, patricide, matricide, siblicide—in the Roman Empire, during the first century ce, enormity was business as usual. Recounting the relentless executions and suicides demanded by Nero, Tacitus writes that “this slavish passivity, this torrent of wasted bloodshed far from active service, wearies, depresses, and paralyzes the mind.”
Tacitus claimed to envy the historians of the Roman Republic. They
told of great wars, of the storming of cities, of kings vanquished and taken captive; and in home affairs, of the contentions of tribunes and consuls, of the land laws and corn laws, of the struggles of the people with the Senate; it was a wide and spacious theme in which they could move with ease.
Montaigne disagreed, arguing that in tracing “the lives of the emperors of his time, so strange and extreme in every way, and the many notable actions that their cruelty in particular produced in their subjects, he had a stronger and more attractive matter to treat and narrate than if he had to tell of battles and universal commotions.” Most readers would agree with Montaigne.
Not that Tacitus was entirely condemnatory. To quote Syme again, he knew that “an evil man may be a sagacious ruler; an autocrat is not omnipotent; a tyrant or a fool may be guided by wise counselors.” Good men crop up in his pages, but they are few. Thrasea Paetus, the Stoic philosopher and senator condemned by Nero, was among those Tacitus seems genuinely to have admired; Germanicus, grandson-in-law of Augustus and the adoptive son of Tiberius, and Corbulo, Nero’s successful general, are two others. More than once he apologizes for the grim events he is under obligation to record, but such was life in Roman society, “where to corrupt and to yield to corruption is called living in the fashion of the day.”
The degradation of the senate and other political institutions since the time of the republic is a theme that plays through Tacitus. The cause of this degradation was the enlarged powers of the emperors. “From time immemorial, man has had an instinctive love of power,” he wrote in Histories.
With the growth of our empire, this instinct has become a dominant and uncontrollable force. It was easy to maintain equality when Rome was weak. Worldwide conquest and the destruction of all rival communities or potentates opened the way to the secure enjoyment of wealth and an overriding appetite for it.
Grand themes interest Tacitus less than shoddy behavior. As a moralist, he is less concerned with economic development or the conditions of the populace than in the drama of human nature as played out by people in power, the men (and sometimes the women) who led Rome during the dark years covered by his histories. The personalities of princes, their wives, consorts, counselors, and enemies dominate his pages.
During the conga line of emperors in 69 ce, one finds one’s antipathies nicely divided by the comparative wretchedness of each of Rome’s rulers. The line begins with Galba, old and feeble, rumored to be brutal and miserly, dominated by counselors whose crimes further tarnished his legacy. Otho ascended the throne after the assassination of the disappointing Galba, who “by common consent possessed the making of a ruler—had he never ruled.” Vitellius next contested Otho for the emperorship. Each shamelessly sucked up to the army, which now, in effect, selected Rome’s emperors and for whom money was more important than character.
“Here then,” Tacitus writes of Otho and Vitellius, “were the two most despicable men in the whole world by reason of their unclean, idle and pleasure-loving lives, apparently appointed by fate for the task of destroying the empire.” In any struggle between the two, he notes, “the only certainty was that the winner would turn out to be worse.” Not that the populace was likely to notice: So debased had Roman society become that “few Romans had any capacity to judge or real desire for the public good.”
Otho ruled for four months and then, when defeated in battle by Vitellius’s troops, took his life by stabbing himself. Not long after, Vitellius was stabbed by one of his own soldiers. His final view was of his jeering troops and the sight of his statues being pulled down from the very spot where Galba was murdered. “Thereupon,” writes Tacitus, “he fell lifeless beneath a rain of blows. And still the mob reviled him in death as viciously as they had flattered him while he lived.”
Character sketches drawn with masterly concision supply some of the most brilliant passages in Tacitus. “In the delineation of character,” Macaulay wrote,
Tacitus is unrivaled among historians, and has very few superiors among dramatists and novelists. By the delineation of character we do not mean the practice of drawing up epigrammatic catalogues of good and bad qualities, and append
ing them to the names of eminent men. No writer, indeed, has done this more skillfully than Tacitus; but this is not his peculiar glory. All the persons who occupy a large space in his works have an individuality of character which seems to pervade all their words and actions. We know them as if we lived with them.
“Of audacious character and untiring physique, secretive about himself and ever ready to incriminate others, a blend of arrogance and servility,” Tacitus writes of Sejanus, to whom Tiberius entrusted the running of Rome while he was off in Caprae, “he concealed behind a carefully modest exterior an unbounded lust for power.” Tacitus calls Sejanus a “small-town adulterer” and notes that the cause of this vicious man’s rise to power “was rather heaven’s anger against Rome— to which the triumph of Sejanus and his downfall, too, were catastrophic.” As for heaven’s anger, Tacitus’s theodicy was encapsulated in his belief that “Rome’s unparalleled suffering supplied ample proof that the gods are indifferent to our tranquility, but eager for our punishment.”
Under the empire, women came to wield greater power than under the republic—not, usually, for the better. Livia, the two Agrippinas (older and younger), Messalina, Poppaea, the empowered Roman women are often subtler, but no less cruel, than the men, and equally shorn of virtue. Men used swords, the women’s weapons of choice were seduction and poison. Poppaea, who replaced Octavia as Nero’s wife and later plotted her murder, is described by Tacitus as having
every womanly asset except goodness. . . . To her, married or bachelor bedfellows were alike. She was indifferent to her reputation—insensible to men’s love and unloving herself. Advantage dictated the bestowal of her favors.
Poppaea died, pregnant, when, in a fit of anger, Nero kicked her in the stomach.
Women in Tacitus are also capable of acts of great courage. A woman named Epicharis, indirectly in on the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero, after a day of excruciating torture strangled herself lest under further torture she betray others. Tacitus writes:
What admirable courage in a freed slave, in a woman who, doomed to so awful an ordeal, screened by her fidelity people who were strangers, almost unknown to her, while freeborn men of a stronger sex, Roman knights and senators, waited not for tortures to betray in mutual emulation their nearest and dearest.
The violence, the sheer bloodiness, of Roman life Tacitus conveys almost by the way. If a company of Roman troops showed cowardice or other dereliction in battle, they risked decimation, in which 1 of every 10 among them was arbitrarily put to death. If a slave killed his master, under Roman law, all the slaves in the household were executed. Such was his rage against Sejanus that Tiberius ordered his friends and all his family executed, including his son and young daughter. Of the daughter, Tacitus reports: “Because capital punishment of a virgin was unprecedented, she was violated by the executioner with the noose beside her.”
Tiberius is Tacitus’s greatest portrait—a “classic,” as Donald R. Dudley calls it, “of denigration.” Tiberius is the major figure in the Annals, for he reigned for 22 years, longer than any emperor in the Julio-Claudian line except Augustus, who ruled for 40 years. Tacitus’s skill at balancing the emperor’s cruelty is nicely set off against his deceptive subtlety. Tiberius’s paranoia is at the forefront of Tacitus’s portrait. Yet he is given credit for his accomplishments: He kept Rome prosperous and at peace. In the portrait provided by Suetonius in his Lives of the Caesars, Tiberius is a relatively modest ruler who, once he deserts Rome for Caprae, becomes a monstrous pervert. “Some aspects of his criminal obscenity are almost too vile to discuss,” Suetonius writes—and then, of course, discusses them: “Imagine training little boys, whom he called his ‘minnows,’ to chase him while he went swimming and get between his legs to lick and nibble him.” Such, according to Suetonius, was “the filthy old man [Tiberius] had become.”
Tacitus reports it was in the year 23 ce that Tiberius, then 65, “turned tyrannical—or gave tyrannical men power.” On his perversions, Tacitus omits details, noting only that
his criminal lusts shamed him. Their uncontrollable activity was worthy of an oriental tyrant. Free-born children were his victims. He was fascinated by beauty, youthful innocence, and aristocratic birth. New names for types of perversion were invented.
These perversions, as Tacitus the literary artist knew, were better imagined than described. The brief obituary of Tiberius in the Annals is crushing:
While he was a private citizen or holding commands under Augustus, his life was blameless. . . . [H]e concealed his real self, cunningly affecting virtuous qualities. However, until his mother [Livia, wife of Augustus] died, there was good in Tiberius as well as evil. Again, as long as he favored (or feared) Sejanus, the cruelty of Tiberius was detested, but his perversions unrevealed. Then fear vanished, and with it shame. Thereafter he expressed his own character by unrestrained crime and infamy.
Attempts have been made by modern historians to rehabilitate the reputation of Tiberius, but Tacitus’s portrait lives on, persuasive both as history and as great literature.
“A degenerate ruler,” wrote the historian Sallust (86–35 BCE), “is always supplanted by better men than himself.” Sallust did not live long enough to see his maxim refuted under the principate. Of the emperors who followed Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius had much blood on their hands. Nero, who took up rule at the age of 17 at the death of his adoptive father Claudius, brought Roman decadence to new heights. He was the first Roman emperor to live on borrowed eloquence, for his former tutor, the Stoic philosopher Seneca, was his speechwriter. Nero would eventually order Seneca’s suicide. No great crime, this, for an emperor who had earlier arranged for the deaths of his stepbrother Britannicus and his mother Agrippina.
Tacitus writes of Nero’s reign: “Even in good surroundings people find it difficult to behave well. Here every form of immorality competed for attention, and no chastity, modesty, or vestige of decency could survive.” For those who like to discover past history foreshadowing the present, Nero, toward the end of his reign, staged a wedding in which, Tacitus writes, “the emperor, in the presence of witnesses, put on the bridal veil. Dowry, marriage bed, marriage torches, all were there. Indeed everything was public which even in a natural union is veiled by night.”
Everywhere Tacitus saw “striking proofs of the nature of fortune, whose treacherous surface combines the peak and the abyss.” He held that “the more I think about history, ancient or modern, the more ironical all human affairs seem.” The Roman notion of the afterlife, murky at best, held that men lived on only in the memory of their accomplishments or of their evil deeds. Recording those accomplishments and deeds in memorable language has also allowed Tacitus to live on, unsurpassed among Roman historians and, alongside Herodotus and Thucydides, one of the three great historians of antiquity.
Encyclopaedia Britannica—The Eleventh
(2016)
Encyclopedia, in its root definition, means circle of knowledge. Pliny the Elder (23–79 ce), perhaps the world’s first encyclopedist, used the word to describe his “Natural History.” The circle implies all-round education, which in turn suggests everything worth knowing, hence omniscience. In 1751, under Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert, the famous French Encylopédie began publication with roughly this ambitious intention. Seventeen years later, in Edinburgh, a printer and antiquary named William Smellie brought out the first of a three-volume set of books under the title Encyclopaedia Britannica, a work that would see its final print version—32,640 pages in 32 volumes—published in 2010. We all live now of course with that useful, if not always reliable, hodgepodge called Wikipedia.
Self-improvement is at the heart of the encyclopedic enterprise. People certified with degrees from what the world considers the best universities and colleges sometimes forget that we are all autodidacts, on our own in the endless attempt to patch over the extraordinary gaps in our knowledge. Doing so in an efficient way is the promis
e held out by an encyclopedia, which claims to provide all the world’s pertinent knowledge, right there in 24, 29, 32 volumes, usually with a bookcase thrown in at no extra charge.
Encyclopedias, and by extension encyclopedists, can and have had their not especially hidden agendas. The French Encyclopédie was, in effect, a house organ for the Enlightenment; its editors wished to change the way people thought, which meant that they wanted to secularize learning, thereby striking a blow against the educational dominance of the Jesuits. The program of many lesser encyclopedias was more straightforward: to make a profit. The one encyclopedia that set out to do both, show a profit while embodying the spirit of its age, was the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910–1911).
The Eleventh was the last great encyclopedia. Its greatness derived not alone from its contributors or its organization but from the spirit infusing it. This spirit was one of confidence in progress—material, scientific, artistic, if not religious then spiritual. The society in which the Eleventh was composed and published considered itself, as Denis Boyles notes in Everything Explained That Is Explainable, to be “the Rome to the long nineteenth-century’s Greece, an era in which engineers spoke the language of visionaries. And it was English.”
English the Eleventh Edition indubitably was, in its principal editors, in the vast majority of its contributors, in its imperialist confidence. Behind the scenes, though, the work was the inspiration of an American huckster named Horace Everett Hooper. A huckster with a difference, Hooper was also an idealist: He was wily for the public good, or at least that portion of the public intent on its own educational betterment.
In American publishing, the decades preceding the appearance of the Eleventh were marked by highbinders and sidewinders. Pirating English books was all but standard practice. (Charles Dickens, much aggrieved by these offenses when practiced upon his own books, demonstrated his grievance in his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, a chronicle of American operators and charlatans.) In this freewheeling publishing atmosphere, Mr. Boyles reports, the English Encyclopaedia Britannica was “a very lucrative target.” The encyclopedia had better sales in the United States than in England. The hunger for self-improvement among Americans made Britannica fine game for publishing poachers, who served it up to their readers in revised and bogus versions. “Entries,” Mr. Boyles writes, “were edited, omitted, and added at will, and sometimes without much regard for quality.”
The Ideal of Culture Page 35