Tacitus and Bracciolini Part 13

that enlist our sympathies in both parts of the Annals; and of these people, with their

"hair-breadth 'scapes in the imminent deadly breach,"

"you have little else," says that severe critic of the Annals, the Vicar of Wrexham (p. 89), "but tumults, advances, retreats, kings recalled, kings banished, kings slain, and all in such confusion and hurry," as to be devoid of "satisfaction and pleasure"; and the Rev. Thomas Hunter likens these mean tribes so signalized by immortality to the ill-conditioned natives of India whom the Great Mogul styled "Mountain Rats."

XII. Another great resemblance which induces the reader to believe that both parts of the Annals were composed by a single author is a monotony so very peculiar as to be characteristic of the same individual: it is a monotony quite equal to that of an ancient mansion in an English county, where one pa.s.ses from apartment to apartment to be reminded of Gray's "Long Story," for the rooms are still s.p.a.cious, the ceilings still fretted, the panels still gilded, the portraits still those of beauties rustling in silks and tissues, and still those of grave Lord Keepers in high crowned hats and green stockings;--or the monotony is like that which meets one when walking about a town, where at the corners of all the streets and squares and the beginning and end of every bridge and viaduct; the entrance to a palace or a public office; the gateway to a market or a subway, a park or a garden; the foot of a lamp-post or a statue; a curbstone running round an open s.p.a.ce, or a wall ab.u.t.ting on a roadway, the same thing is always found for the purpose of keeping off the wheels of vehicles as they roll by,--a round stone: so one finds in the Annals always the same form given to every subject: that form is policy; through policy everything is done; by policy every person is actuated; policy is the motive of every action; policy is the solution of every difficulty.

Augustus on his deathbed chooses a worse master than himself to be his successor in order that his loss may be the more regretted by the State. Tiberius makes Piso governor of Syria only that he may have a spy for Germanicus as governor of Egypt, for he was envious of the fame and virtues of the successful, popular young general.

Nero sends Sylla into exile from mistaking his dullness for dissimulation. Arruntius kills himself because he is intolerant of iniquity. The stupidity of Claudius is discovered to be astuteness, the b.e.s.t.i.a.lities of Nero elegance. Nothing is easy, nothing natural; everything is forced, everything artificial.

XIII. Nor does Bracciolini shine as a depicter of character. What a contrast between him and Livy in that respect! And as a describer of imperial occurrences, what a contrast between him and Tacitus! He does not touch the Paduese in his grand form of painting all people and all things in their proper colours: Livy places before us the Kings of old Rome in their pride and the Consuls in their variety; the former with their fierce virtue, the latter with their degraded love of luxury;--Decemvirs in the austerity of their rule and Tribunes with their popular impulses.

Tacitus makes us see the movements of mighty events, as clearly as we behold objects shining in the broad light of day,--their vicissitudes, relations, causes and issues;--armies with their temper and feelings; provinces with their disposition and sentiments;--the Empire in the elements of its strength and weakness; the Capital in its distracted and fluctuating state; --all political phaenomena that marked the dreary reality of dominion in the declining days of the Roman Commonwealth. But Bracciolini puts before us nothing like this;--only incongruous, unimaginable and un-Romanlike personages,--people who gibber at us, as idiots in their asylums, as that unfortunate simpleton, the Emperor Claudius;--murderous criminals who glower and scowl upon us, as those two monsters of iniquity, Tiberius and Nero;--pimps and parasites beyond number, who so plague us with their perpetual presence, that the revolted soul at length wonders how so many such beings can be acting together, and be so degenerate, when Nature might have designed most, if not all, of them, for greater and more salutary purposes. While Bracciolini does not, in the least, resemble either of the two great historians of Rome, he is the very reverse of the historical cla.s.sic of Spain, Mariana, who, in the thirty volumes of his Historia de Rebus Hispaniae, places before us the different characters of different people, distinguishing Mussulmans from Christians, Moors from Arabs, and Carthaginians from Romans; whereas, in the Annals, we perceive no difference between the Parthians and the Suevians, the Romans and the Germans, the Dandarides and the Adiabenians, the Medes and the Iberians.

CHAPTER II.

LANGUAGE, ALLITERATION, ACCENT AND WORDS.

I. The poetic diction of Tacitus, and its fabrication in the Annals.--II. Florid pa.s.sages in the Annals.--III. Metrical composition of Bracciolini.--IV. Figurative words: (_a_) "pessum dare"; (_b_) "voluntas".--The verb foedare and the Ciceronian use of foedus.--VI. The language of other Roman writers,--Livy, Quintus Curtius and Sall.u.s.t.--VII. The phrase "non modo ... sed", and other anomalous expressions, not Tacitus's.--VIII. Words not used by Tacitus, distinctus and codicillus.--IX. Peculiar alliterations in the Annals and works of Bracciolini.--X. Monotonous repet.i.tion of accent on penultimate syllables.--XI. Peculiar use of words: (_a_) properus; (_b_) annales and scriptura; (_c_) totiens.

--XII. Words not used by Tacitus: (_a_) addubitare; (_b_) exitere.--XIII. Polysyllabic words ending consecutive sentences.

--XIV. Omission of prepositions: (_a_) in; (_b_) with names of nations.

I. Any student of Thucydides and Tacitus must have observed that, though both support their opinions by sober, rational remarks, Thucydides expresses himself with logical accuracy in the calm and cold phraseology of pa.s.sionless prose, whereas Tacitus ever and anon indulges in figures of rhetoric and poetic diction.

He changes things which can be considered only with reference to thought into solid, visible forms, as when he speaks of "wounds,"

instead of "the wounded," being taken to mothers and wives: "ad matres, ad conjuges _vulnera_ ferunt" (Germ. 7). He ascribes to the lifeless what can be properly attributed only to the living, as when he makes "day and the plain _reveal_,"

"_detexit_ dies et campus" (Hist. II. 62). He speaks of things done in a place as if they were done by the place itself, as Judaea _elevating_ Libanon into its princ.i.p.al mountain": "praecipuum montium Libanon _erigit_" i.e., Judaea (Hist. V. 6).

He applies epithets to objects that are local, as if they were mental or moral, as we hear of "a _chaste_ grove" ("nemus _castum_") in the Germany (40).

Any one who had carefully a.n.a.lyzed his writings with the view of imitating him by forgery could not have failed to notice this; the consequence is that if we were to have a forgery, we should have a very close reproduction of this style of expression, and it would show itself to be forgery, by being without the boldness, spontaneity and novelty of the original; it would be timid, forced, and elaborately close and cramped. Now just this copying of a fabricator is what we find in the Annals. Exactly corresponding, to Tacitus's "_wounds_" instead of "the wounded," is seeing _blood streaming_ in families," meaning "suicides," and "the _hands of executioners_," meaning "the executed": "aspiciens _undantem_ per domos _sanguinem_ aut _ma.n.u.s carnific.u.m_ (An. VI. 39). Precisely akin to Tacitus's "day and the plain revealing" is "night _bursting_ into wickedness": "noctem in scelus _erupturam_" (An. I. 28).

For "a country lifting up a mountain into its highest alt.i.tude,"

is the a.n.a.logous subst.i.tute, "the upper part of a town on fire _burning_ everything": "incensa super villa omnes _cremavit_"

(An. III. 37): Here, too, is a further extension of poetical phraseology, more clearly proving forgery by denoting the hand of n.o.body so much as Bracciolini, who was remarkably fond of borrowing the language of Virgil, (never resorted to by Tacitus), "super" for "desuper":

"Haec _super_ e vallo prospectant Troies"

(Aen. IX. 168).

For Tacitus's "chaste grove" we have the expression, like the note of a mockbird, "_just_ places",--when places do not favour either combatant: ("fundi Germanos acie et _justis locis"_ An. II. 5).

This imitation is found not only in the first but also in the last part of the Annals.

By tropes of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and in other ways, Tacitus produces effects that we look for in poets, but not in historians, as he uses "bosom" or "lap" ("sinus"), in the metaphorical sense of a "hiding place", ("latebrae"), in the History (II. 92), and of "a retreat", ("recessus"), in the Agricola (30). So, instead of his "bosom," or "lap", for "hiding place," or "retreat," we find "tears" for "weeping persons," where Seneca endeavours to recall his distracted friends to composure by words of suasion or authority: "Simul _lacrymas_ eorum modo sermone, modo intentior in modum coercentis, ad firmitudinem revocat" (An. XV. 62).

The close crampness of the whole of these instances raises a very strong suspicion that it cannot be the writing of Tacitus, but merely a servile imitation of his manner. It shows, too, that both parts of the Annals proceeded from the same hand.

II. When in the course of the autumn before last an announcement was made of this work in some of the public journals, the compliment was paid to me in one of the most enlightened of them, the _Daily News_, by a brilliant and learned writer, who was a perfect master of his subject, questioning whether it could be possible that Bracciolini had forged the Annals, on account of his mode of composition being so thoroughly different from that of Tacitus. The pa.s.sages of Bracciolini were properly p.r.o.nounced to be florid at times, and to bear resemblance to the high-flown magniloquence of Chateaubriand rather than the cla.s.sic staidness of Tacitus. I have already pointed out how varied was Bracciolini in style, and his variety proved how by an effort he could, if it pleased him, imitate anybody. Still there is truth in the remark, that let him be as guarded as he might, he would, sometimes, fall quite unconsciously into a natural peculiarity. It might then be questioned whether he had forged the Annals unless it can be shown that in both parts of that work he now and again fell into the florid style found in his "Ruinarum Urbis Romae Descriptio", as quoted by the accomplished writer in the _Daily News_, (who took, as he said, the translation of Gibbon), to wit: "The temple is overthrown, the gold is pillaged, the wheel of Fortune has accomplished her revolution."

I cannot do better than give the four instances that are adduced by Famia.n.u.s Strada in his Prolusions (II. 3) by way of ill.u.s.trating how every now and then Bracciolini wrote sentences that are marked by the qualities of poetry rather than of prose.

The first occurs in the eleventh book, where Messalina is described in the following manner: "such was her furious l.u.s.t, that, in mid autumn, she would celebrate in her home the vintage festival; the presses were plied, the vats flowed, and women girt with skins bounded about like sacrificing or raving Bacchantes, she, with hair flowing loosely, waving the thyrsus, and Silius by her side wreathed with ivy and shod with the cothurnus, tossing his head, while a crew of female wantons shrieked around them":--"Messalina non alias solutior luxu, adulto autumno, simulacrum vindemiae per domum celebrabat: urgeri prela, fluere lacus, et faeminae pellibus accinetae a.s.sultabant, ut sacrificantes vel insanientes Bacchae; ipsa crine fluxo, thyrsum quatiens, juxtaque Silius hedera vinetus, gerere cothurnos, jacere caput, strepente circ.u.m procaci choro."

(An. XI. 31). It is not possible in any translation to convey an adequate notion of the all but rhythmical flow of the last few concluding words, as may be more clearly seen by their being arranged thus:--

"Juxtaque Sillus, Hedera Vinctus, Gerere _c_othurnos, Jacere _c_aput, Strepente _c_irc.u.m Procaci _c_horo."

The second instance given by Famia.n.u.s Strada is in the first part of the Annals, where the Roman commander in Lower Germany, Aulus Caecina, is beset by Armin and the Germans at the causeway called the Long Bridges. Speaking of both armies, the historian says: "It was a restless night to them from different causes whilst the barbarians with their festive carousals, their triumphal songs or their savage yells woke the echoes in the low-lying parts of the vallies and the resounding groves, among the Romans there were feeble fires, broken murmurs, and everywhere the sentinels leant drooping against the pales, or wandered about the tents more asleep than awake: awful dreams, too, horrified the commander; for he seemed to see and hear Quinctilius Varus, smeared with blood and rising out of the marsh, calling aloud, as it were, to him he paying no heed, and pushing back the hand that was held forth to him." "Nox per diversa inquies: c.u.m barbari festis epulis, laeto cantu aut truci sonore subjecta vallium ac resultantis saltus complerent; apud Romanos invalidi ignes, interruptae voces, atque ipsi pa.s.sim adjacerent vallo, oberrarent tentoriis, insomnes magis quam pervigiles; ducemque terruit dira quies: nani Quinctilium Varum sanguine oblitum et paludibus emersum, cernere et audire visus est, velut vocantem, non tamen obsecutus, et manum intendentis repulisse" (An. I. 65). As in the preceding sentence the closing words are arranged in musically measured cadences, as will be more clearly distinguished when thus presented to the eye:

Sanguine oblitum Et paludibus emersum, Cernere et audire Visus est, velut vocantem, Non tamen obsecutus, Et manum intendentis repulisse. [Endnote 357]

Famia.n.u.s Strada was also struck at the extravagantly florid phraseology in the fifteenth book with respect to Scaevina's dagger being sharpened to a point the day before the intended execution of a plot: "Finding fault with the poniard which he drew from its sheath that it was blunted by time, he gave orders it should be whetted on a stone, and be made to FLAME UP _into a point_." "Promptam v.a.g.i.n.a pugionem 'vetustatem obtusum,'

increpans, asperari saxo, et in _mucronem_ ARDESCERE" (An. XV. 24).

High-flown, poetical language is also used in the first book when the Romans visit the scene of the defeat of Varus. "Caecina," says the historian, "having been sent on to explore the hidden recesses of the forest, and make bridges and conveyances over the waters of the bog and the insecure places in the plains, the soldiers reach the _sad spot, hideous both in its appearance and from a.s.sociation_."

"Praemisso Caecina, ut occulta saltuum scrutaretur, pontesque et aggeres humido paludum et fallacibus campis imponeret, incedunt _moestos locos, visuque ac memoria deformes_" (An. I. 61).

III. A writer so poetically inclined would naturally fall every now and then without being aware of it into metrical composition; Bracciolini frequently does so: for instance: writing to his friend Niccoli from London, he says that at that moment he fancies he is speaking to him, "hearing his tones and returning his speeches": --"jam jam videor tec.u.m loqui, et au/dire no/tas et/reddere voces"

(Ep. II. 1).

In another of his letters he falls into hexametrical measure: "la/bris nos/tris om/ni re/rum strepi/tu vacu/us" (Ep. II. 17), about as inharmonious as the complete, inelegant hexameter which we find him writing in the opening words of the Annals:--

"Urbem / Romam a / principi/o re/ges habu/ere."

The whole of this is in imitation of his two favorite authors, --Sall.u.s.t, who occasionally wrote in hexametrical measure as, "ex vir/tute fu/it mul/ta et prae/clara re/i mili/taris." Jug. V.; --and Livy, who, if Sall.u.s.t sometimes exceeded the number of feet, sometimes fell short of them, as in the opening words of the Preface to his History: "factu rusne oper/ae preti/um sim."

IV. Another circ.u.mstance which causes us to credit Bracciolini with having written the first part of the Annals is that we find there certain poetical or figurative words, which are nowhere to be found in any of the works of Tacitus. One of these is "pessum dare," which means literally "to sink to the bottom," but is figuratively used for "destroying" or "ruining," as when Bracciolini in one of his letters says that he is "desirous of guarding against the weight of present circ.u.mstances _sinking him to the bottom_," that is "ruining him:" "id vellem curare, ne praesentiarum onus me _pessumdaret_" (Ep. II. 3). So in the first book of the Annals (9), he speaks of Mark Antony being "sunk to the bottom," that is "ruined" "by his sensualities": "per libidines _pessum datus_ sit"; or of the over-eagerness of Brutidius to grasp at honours undoing him, as it had "sunk to the bottom" "many, even good men": "multos etiam bonos _pessumdedit_"

(An. III. 66).

Bracciolini uses "voluntas" as the equivalent of "benevolentia."

In the second "Disceptatio" of his Historia Tripart.i.ta, "where he means to speak of laws being framed for the good they do the greatest number," he expresses himself: "leges pro _voluntate_"

(_i.e._ benevolentia) "majorum conditae" (Op. p. 38). So in the first part of the Annals when he says that "there was no getting any good to be done by Seja.n.u.s except by committing crime," he expresses himself in the same way: "neque Sejani _voluntas_"

(_i.e._ benevolentia) "nisi scelere, quaerebatur" (An. IV. 68).

V. The meaning "to disgrace," or "dishonour" is given to the verb "foedare." In the first part of the Annals when it is said that silk clothes are _a disgrace_ to men," the expression is "vestis serica viros _foedat_" (II. 33). When in the last part eloquence (periphrastically styled "the first of the fine arts") is spoken of as "_disgraced_ when turned to sordid purposes," the phrase is "bonarum artium principem sordidis ministeriis _foedari_" (An. XI. 6).

This meaning is not to be found in any ancient Roman work, in prose or poetry; it might then be taken to be mediaeval; but it seems to be cla.s.sical; for this reason: Bracciolini in one of his letters to Niccoli says, and truly enough, that he had formed himself on Cicero: whence it is easy to see that the idea occurred to him of coining that signification for the verb from the meaning which is given to the adjective by the writer whom he regarded as the greatest among the Romans, for Cicero certainly gives that meaning to "foedus" in this pa.s.sage in his "Atticus" (VIII. 11) "nihil fieri potest miserius, nihil perditius, nihil _foedius_," that is, "nothing can be more miserably, nothing more flagitiously, nothing more _disgracefully_ done"; and this other pa.s.sage in his Offices (I. 34): "l.u.s.t is most _disgraceful_ to old age": "luxuria ... senectuti _foedissima_ est": directly following Cicero, and altogether ignoring Tacitus, Bracciolini in the first part of the Annals, when speaking of the dishonourable fawning of the Roman senators, expresses "that _disgraceful_ servility,"

"_foedum_ illud servitium" (IV. 74).

VI. As this is the language of Cicero, and not Tacitus, so we find in other places in both parts of the Annals Bracciolini using the language of other leading Roman writers, in preference to that of the historian whom he was feigning himself to be. The following few instances will suffice:--Tacitus makes the adjective agree with the substantive: Livy does not. In imitation of Livy Bracciolini, throughout both parts of the Annals, puts the adjective in the neuter, and makes the substantive depend upon it in the genitive. Tacitus never uses the rare form "jutum." It is used in both parts of the Annals (III. 35, XIV. 4). Quintus Curtius uses the form of ere instead of erunt as the termination of the third person plural of the perfect active: it is then in imitation of Quintus Curtius that Bracciolini uses the form ere so constantly throughout the Annals. Tacitus always uses "dies" in the masculine, but Livy sometimes in the feminine when speaking of a specified day.

"Postera die" in the third book of the Annals (10 _in._) is then more in the style of Livy than Tacitus.

As for Sall.u.s.t, Bracciolini was never able to conceal his unbounded admiration of him; nor forbear from imitating him: this did not escape the notice of his contemporaries, who likened him to that ancient historian: he is perpetually borrowing his phrases, from the very first words in the Annals: "_Urbem Romam_ a principio reges _habuere_," after Sall.u.s.t's "_Urbem Romam ... habuere_ initio Trojani" (Cat. 6) down to the close of his forgery, as in the XVth book (36), "haec atque talia _plebi volentia_ fuere," after Sall.u.s.t's "multisque suspicionibus _plebi volentia_ facturus habebatur"

(Fragmenta. Lib. IV. Delph. Ed. p. 317). To give a few instances from the First Six Books of the Annals: his "ambulantis Tiberii _genua advolveretur_" (I. 13) is Sall.u.s.t's "_genua_ patrum" _advol- vuntur_ (Fragm.): his "_adepto_ princ.i.p.atu" (I. 7) is Sall.u.s.t's "magistratus _adeptus_" (Jug. IV.), and "_adepta_ libertate" (Cat.7): his "_spirantem_ adhuc Augustum" (I. 5) is Sall.u.s.t's "Catilina paullulam etiam _spirans_" (Cat. in fin. 61): his "excepere Graeci _quaesitissimis_ honoribus" (II. 53) is Sall.u.s.t's "epulae _quaesitis- simae_" (Frag.): his "_magnitudinem paecuniae_ malo vertisse" (VI. 7) is Sall.u.s.t's "_magnitudine paecuniae_ a bono honestoque in pravum abstractus est" (Jug. 24); and numerous other phrases are so precisely and peculiarly of the same kind as Sall.u.s.t's, that we know they were taken or stolen from him. But Tacitus does not borrow from anybody; he is himself a great original. As in his unadmitted forgeries, so in his acknowledged works, whether it be a treatise as in his "De Miseria Humanae Conditionis" (I. Op. p. 107), Bracciolini goes on borrowing his choice phrases from Sall.u.s.t, as "_libidini obnoxios_ fortuna fecit," which is Sall.u.s.t's "neque delicto, neque _libidini obnoxius_"

(Cat. 52); or whether it be one of his Funeral Orations as in that over Cardinal Florian (Op. p. 258), "nunquam ne parvula quidem nota ejus fama _labefactaretur_," or one of his essays, as that from which we have just quoted,--"On the Misery of the Human Condition,"--"vires Imperii _labefactarent_ flagitiis" (Op. p. 125), which are both Sall.u.s.t's "vitiis obtentui quibus _labefactatis_" (Fragm. p. 357).

So he prefers Sall.u.s.t's archaic word "inquies"; for just as Sall.u.s.t writes "humanum ingenium _inquies_ atque indomitum"

(Frag. Lib. p. 172), he, too, writes "nox per diversa _inquies_"

(I. 65), and "dies ploratibus _inquies_" (An. III. 4), forgetting that Tacitus always uses the modern word, "inquietus," as "inquieta urbs" (Hist. I. 20).