Chapter II: Tacitus (2)

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.