THE policies of Nerva and Trajan liberated the suppressed mind of Rome, and gave to the literature of their reigns a note of fierce resentment against a despotism that had gone but might come again. Pliny’s Panegyric voiced it in welcoming the first of three great Spaniards to the throne; Juvenal seldom sang any other note; and Tacitus, the most brilliant of historians, became a delator temporis acti, an accuser of times past, and excoriated a century with his pen.
We do not know the date or place of Tacitus’ birth, nor even his given name. Probably he was the son of Cornelius Tacitus, procurator of imperial revenue in Belgic Gaul; through this man’s advancement the family was raised from the equestrian class into the new aristocracy.1 Our first definite fact about the historian is his own statement: “Agricola, during his consulship (78) . . . agreed to a marriage between myself and his daughter, who might certainly have looked for a prouder connection.”2 He had received the usual education, and had learned to the full those oratorical arts which enliven his style, that skill in pros and cons which marks the speeches in his histories. The younger Pliny often heard him in the courts, admired his “stately eloquence,” and acclaimed him as the greatest orator in Rome.3 In 88 Tacitus was praetor; thereafter he sat in the Senate and confesses with shame 4 that he failed to speak out against tyranny, and joined in the Senatorial condemnation of Domitian’s Senatorial victims. Nerva made him consul (97), and Trajan appointed him proconsul of Asia. He was evidently a man of affairs and practical experience; his books were the afterthought of a full life, the product of a leisurely old age, and of a mature and profound mind.
One theme unites them—hatred of autocracy. His Dialogue on Orators (if it is his) attributes the decline of eloquence to the suppression of liberty. His Agricola—the most perfect of those brief monographs to which the ancients confined biography—proudly recounts the achievements of his father-in-law as general and governor, and then bitterly records Domitian’s dismissal and neglect of him. The little essay On the Situation and Origin of the Germans contrasts the virile virtues of a free people with the degeneration and cowardice of Romans under the despots. When Tacitus praises the Germans for considering infanticide an infamy, and giving no advantage to childlessness, he is not describing Germans but denouncing Romans. The philosophical purpose destroys the objectivity of the study, but allows a remarkable breadth of view in a Roman official praising the German power of resisting Rome.5 I
The success of these essays induced Tacitus to illustrate the evils of tyranny by indicting the record of the despots in ruthless detail. He began with what was freshest in his memory and in the testimony of his older friends—the period from Galba to the death of Domitian; and when these Historiae were acclaimed by a grateful aristocracy as the best historical writing since Livy, he continued his story a fronte by describing, in the Annales, the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. Of the fourteen (some say thirty) “books” of the Histories four and a half remain, all devoted to the years 69 and 70; of the Annals twelve books survive from an original sixteen or eighteen. Even in this mutilated form they are the most powerful works in extant Roman prose; we may vaguely imagine the grandeur and impress of the whole. Tacitus had hoped to chronicle also the reigns of Augustus, Nerva, and Trajan, mitigating the gloom of his published works with some commemoration of constructive statesmanship. But the years were not given him; and posterity has judged him, as he judged the past, from a somber aspect alone.
“The chief duty of the historian,” he thought, “is to judge the actions of men, so that the good may meet with the reward due to virtue, and pernicious citizens may be deterred by the condemnation that awaits evil deeds at the tribunal of posterity.”6 It is a strange conception, which turns history into a Last Judgment and the historian into God. So conceived, history is a sermon—ethics teaching by horrible examples—and falls, as Tacitus assumed, under the rubric of rhetoric. It is easy for indignation to be eloquent but hard for it to be fair; no moralist should write history. Tacitus remembered tyranny too intimately to view tyrants calmly; he saw nothing in Augustus but the destruction of freedom and supposed that all Roman genius had ended with Actium.7 He seems never to have thought of tempering his indictments by recording the excellent administration and growing prosperity of the provinces under the imperial monsters; no one would suspect, from reading him, that Rome was an empire as well as a city. Perhaps the lost “books” viewed the provincial world; those that remain make Tacitus a deceptive guide, who never lies but never reveals the truth. He often cites, and sometimes critically examines, his sources—histories, speeches, letters, Acta Diurna, Acta Senatus, and the traditions of old families; but for the most part he has heard only the stories of the persecuted nobility, and never imagines that the executions of senators and the assassinations of emperors were incidents in a long contest between vicious, cruel, and competent monarchs and a decadent, cruel, and incompetent aristocracy. He is fascinated by striking personalities and events rather than by forces, causes, ideas, and processes; he draws the most brilliant and unjust character portraits in history, but he has no conception of economic influences upon political events, no interest in the life and industry of the people, the stream of trade, the conditions of science, the status of woman, the vicissitudes of belief, the achievements of poetry, philosophy, or art. In Tacitus Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius die, but they do not write; the emperors kill, but they do not build. Perhaps the great historian was limited by his audience; probably he read parts of his work—following the custom of the time—to the aristocratic friends whom Pliny describes as crowding to his receptions; he would have told us that these men and women knew Roman life, industry, literature, and art, and did not have to be reminded of them; what they wanted to hear, again and again, was the exciting story of the evil emperors, the heroic deeds of stoic senators, the long war of their noble class against tyrannical power. We cannot condemn Tacitus for not succeeding in what he did not attempt; we can only regret the narrowness of his great purpose and the limitations of his powerful mind.
He does not pretend to be a philosopher. He praises Agricola’s mother for dissuading her son, who “had acquired a keener zest for philosophy than became a Roman and a senator.”8 His imagination and art, like Shakespeare’s, were too creatively active to let him ponder quietly the meaning and possibilities of life. He is as rich in illuminating comment as in unverified scandal; but it is difficult to find in him any consistent view of God, or man, or the state. He is cautiously ambiguous on matters of faith, and suggests9 that it is wiser to accept one’s native religion than to try to replace it with knowledge. He rejects most astrologers, auguries, portents, and miracles, but accepts some; he is too much of a gentleman to deny the possibility of what so many have affirmed. In general, events seem to prove “the indifference of the gods to good and bad alike,”10 and the existence of some unknown, perhaps capricious, force that drives men and states fatally onward to their destiny11*—urgentibus imperii fatis.12* He hopes that Agricola has departed to a happy life, but he obviously doubts it, and contents himself with the last delusion of great minds—an immortality of fame.13
Nor does any Utopian aspiration console him. “Most plans of reformation are at first embraced with ardor; but soon the novelty ceases, and the scheme ends in nothing.”14 Matters are temporarily better in his time, he reluctantly admits; but not even the genius of Trajan will prevent renewed deterioration.15 Rome is rotten literally to the core, in the hearts of men, of a populace whose disorder of soul has made an anarchy of freedom,16 a rabble “fond of innovation and change, and ever ready to shift to the side of the strongest.”17 He mourns the “malignity of the human mind,”18 and scorns like Juvenal the alien stocks in Rome. After blackening the Empire he does not dream of returning to the Republic, but hopes that the adoptive emperors will reconcile the Principate with liberty.19 In the end, he thinks, character is more important than government; what makes a people great is not its laws but its men.
If, despite our surprise in finding a sermon and a drama where we had looked for history, we must nevertheless rank Tacitus among the greatest of historians, it is because the power of his art redeems the limitations of his view. Above all he sees intensely, sometimes deeply, always vividly. The portraits he draws stand out more clearly, stride the stage more livingly, than any others in historical literature. Here, too, however, there are blemishes. Tacitus composes speeches for his varied personages, all in his own fashion and majestic prose; he describes Galba as a simpleton and makes him talk like a sage.20 And he does not rise to the difficult art of making his characters develop in time. Tiberius is the same at the beginning of his reign as at the end; and if he appeared to be human at the outset it was, Tacitus thinks, pure dissimulation.
First and last in Tacitus is the splendor of his style. No other author has ever said so much so compactly. This does not mean that he is brief; on the contrary, he is desultory and diffuse and takes 400 pages of the Histories to chronicle two years of time. Sometimes the condensation is extreme to the point of affectation or obscurity; every second word then requires a sentence to translate it; verbs and conjunctions are disdained as crutches for crippled minds. This is the culmination of Sallust’s concise rapidity, of Seneca’s pithy epigrams, of the balanced clauses taught in the schools of rhetoric. In a long work such a style, unrelieved with passages of a more even tenor, becomes an exhausting excitement to the reader, who nevertheless returns to it with mounting fascination. This martial brusqueness, more economical of words than of men, this scorn of the props of syntax, this passion of feeling and clearness of visualization, this tang of a novel vocabulary and murderous pungency of unhackneyed phrase, give to the writing of Tacitus a swiftness, color, and force which no ancient author has equaled. The color is dark, the mood is gloomy, the sarcasm stings, and the tone of the whole is that of a Dante without tenderness; but the cumulative effect is overwhelming. Along this black river of relentless exposure we are carried, despite our reservations and objections, by a narrative at once dignified and turbulent, stately and impetuous. Character after character rises upon the stage and is struck down; scene after scene rushes on until all Rome seems ruined and all the participants are dead. We can hardly believe, when we emerge from this chamber of horrors, that this period of despotism, cowardice, and immorality flowed into the zenith of monarchy under Hadrian and the Antonines, and the quiet decency of Pliny’s friends.
Tacitus was wrong in scorning philosophy—that is, perspective; all his faults were due to lack of it. If he could have disciplined his pen to the service of an open mind, he would have placed his name first on the list of those who have labored to give form and permanence to the memory and heritage of mankind.