Tacitus and Bracciolini Part 2

CHAPTER III.

SUSPICIOUS CHARACTER OF THE ANNALS FROM THE POINT OF TREATMENT.

I. Nature of the history.--II. Arrangement of the narrative.-- III. Completeness in form.--IV. Incongruities, contradictions and disagreements from the History of Tacitus.--V. Craftiness of the writer.--VI. Subordination of history to biography.--VII. The author of the Annals and Tacitus differently ill.u.s.trate Roman history.--VIII. Characters and events corresponding to characters and events of the XVth century.--IX. Greatness of the Author of the Annals.

I. Before proceeding to point out the imitations, and show where, in the efforts to write, and make history after the likeness of Tacitus, the author of the Annals fails; and, from the signal nature of his failures, his efforts are seen to be counterfeit, I may observe that a constant endeavour on his part to escape detection renders his imposture difficult to perceive and still more difficult to expose. A man of his penetration and power to enter far into subjects was, of course, deep enough to contrive every species of artifice to conceal his fraud; and as we have no record of his having been seen in the act of fabrication, or of his ever having been even suspected of so doing, I must prove the forgery by a detail of facts and circ.u.mstances. I can do this only by going through the Annals minutely,--examining the matter, manner, treatment, knowledge, views, sentiments, language, style, --in fact, a variety of circ.u.mstances,--everything that can be thought of;--for if it really be a forgery, it cannot be exactly like the History of Tacitus in any one thing, whatever that one thing be;--then I shall leave the reader to himself, to take into account the whole of the circ.u.mstances, and judge whether such a combination could have existed in a genuine work by Tacitus, and is compatible with such a production.

We are to look, first, what the nature of the history purports to be;--whether there is nothing peculiar as to its character.

It will be obvious to the least sagacious that the most paramount and absolutely necessary thing to be accomplished was a vast and comprehensive execution that should correspond to the vast and comprehensive execution of Tacitus. Here was something to be done seemingly insuperable; for how can any one hope to imitate the execution of another, with such marvellous nicety that no distinction can be discerned between the two on the minutest test of microscopic investigation? more especially if the execution to be imitated be that of a man of real genius, consequently unparalleled in its way, of a mighty nature, and, in addition to its mightiness, a thing of the purest individuality. Now, the History of Tacitus is an execution of this description; it is a work of real genius; therefore, it is a distinct essence,--a realization of all the special apt.i.tude possessed by the master-spirit that penned it. But though this cannot be done, yet any one having genius,--and a powerful genius,--by following its bent directly, may expect to exhibit in the execution of a work an ability that shall be considered equal to the ability displayed in the execution of another, even though that other be a man of great genius; but it can only be upon this very sage precaution,--that he exercises his ability, which must necessarily be of a very different kind, in quite a different manner. The forger of the Annals had much too acute a discernment not to know this;--he was also well aware that he had a very strong forte. We know the department in which he excelled,--dealing with despotism, servility and bloodshed. But then, if he was to do this, he would do that, which would be a very strong proof that his work was a forgery; for if he was to do this, he could not take up the continuance of history as Tacitus intended to go on with it namely, with Nerva and Trajan;--that he could not do, because in dealing with those two rulers he would have to deal with men remarkable for mildness, generosity, leniency and good- heartedness;--thus he would have to deal with a subject which must be fatal to his attempt; for it would be opposed to the play of his peculiar gifts, which to be brought out properly required that he should write only of Emperors noted for cruel, unnatural, blood-thirsty tyranny. The plan of his undertaking, to be attended with success, therefore compelled him, whether he liked it or not, to go back to Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero.

II. This must have been greatly against his will as a forger, because this difficulty must have risen up before his mental vision in colossal magnitude--that n.o.body, on careful consideration, could admit that Tacitus would have written the narrative of the half-century from the death of Augustus to the accession of Galba, after what he says at the commencement of his History, that the subject next to engage his attention would be the events that happened in the reigns of Nerva and Trajan. This, I repeat, is a point that brings forcibly before us the certainty of the Annals being forged, unless any one can believe with Niebuhr that, if Tacitus completed his History before the death of Trajan, and could not write of that Emperor as long as that Emperor lived, but "feeling a void," and "desiring to produce another work," he resumed History with the rule of Tiberius; but n.o.body can believe this, because it gets us into this enormous, nay, inexplicable difficulty--Why the writer, who, in the History, had shown an epic construction, with an epic opening and an epic story, should observe in the Annals quite another arrangement, and distribute the narrative in a studiously annalistic form? when, too, the disjointed record of the journalist was to be combined with the distinct arrangement of the historian who took the continued transactions of a nation in their multiplicity of details as they occurred at the same time in different places, and related them in clear and due unity in the subject.

III. Out of this variance in the two works arises another tremendous difficulty which we have to look at:--The Annals and the History are intended, the one to be the complement to the other. Then two works, which are necessary to each other, ought to be, when separated, incomplete: if one man wrote them they would be incomplete when separated; but if two men wrote them, they would be complete in themselves. Now, are the History and the Annals incomplete, when separated? or complete in themselves?

Everybody acknowledges that they are complete in themselves; each contains everything requisite for the full understanding and enjoyment of each; each has its peculiar force; each its distinct beauty; and for uniformity to exist in the two many pa.s.sages in both must be destroyed; and the most ingenious can give no just or adequate cause for the destruction of the pa.s.sages, even as he can give no just or adequate cause for their existence, except that which I am advancing that it was because two men wrote the two works.

IV. This accounts at once for all the incongruities they owe their existence naturally enough to the following simple causes:--the different kinds of information possessed as well as the different views of things entertained by two different individuals; and, along with these, an occasional failing of the memory; for a man, who forges such a very long work as the Annals, must every now and then forget,--however tenacious his memory may be,--what the man, whom he simulates, has said, here and there, in this or that work, upon some minor point in Roman history, not a.s.sociated with nor essential to the princ.i.p.al thing he has always to keep steadily in mind,--his main matter. Thus we find no end of little trips in the Annals, many of which we will point out in their proper places as we proceed with this investigation: at present it is sufficient for the ill.u.s.tration of our remark to call the reader's attention to this fact:--In the Annals Augustus is represented having as his successors in the first degree Tiberius and Livia; in the second degree his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and in the third degree the leading n.o.bles, including even some of those whom he hated, such, we may presume, as Labeo, his detractor, Gallus Asinius, who was thirsting for empire, and Lucius Arruntius, who would have made the attempt to unseat him had the opportunity presented itself:--"Tiberium et Liviam haeredes habuit ... in spem secundam, nepotes p.r.o.nepotesque: tertio gradu primores civitatis scripserat, plerosque invisos sibi, sed jactantia gloriaque ad posteros" (An. I. 8). Such an account of Augustus adopting these relations, and, after them, strangers and enemies, "out of vain-glory and for future renown,"--that is, to be admired by posterity for an unexampled display of humanity,--could not have been written by Tacitus, being different in every respect from what he relates,--and what he says, by the way, is also said by Suetonius,--that Augustus, looking for a successor in his own family, placed next to himself in dignity, so as to be prepared to be his successor, his nephew, Marcellus, then his son-in-law, Agrippa, next his grandsons, and lastly, his step-son, Tiberius Nero:--"divi Augusti, qui sororis filium, Marcellum, dein generum, Agrippam, mox nepotes suos, postremo Tiberium Neronem, privignum, in proximo sibi fastigio collocavit" (Hist. I. 15).

Such disagreements, due,--in all probability, more than to anything else,--to the occasional failure of the memory,--are sufficient in themselves to prove that the Annals and the History did not proceed from the same source. Accordingly, the man who forged the Annals, having apparently, this overwhelming and troublesome difficulty ever uppermost in his mind, seems to have taken measures for guarding against it as well as he could, and with as much care as he could. This taking precautions against the failure of memory must have been one of the main reasons, why he elected writing of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, when, as Tacitus, he ought to have written of Nerva and Trajan. He was thus enabled to relate a series of events prior to, and entirely different from the series of events related by Tacitus; there was thereby no possibility of his narrative clashing with that of his archetype; the most trying difficulties were in this way got over with sufficient ease; the only danger was with regard to a few individuals who lived during the two periods, and a few facts, that trailed their circ.u.mstances from one period into the other; but his main history would have nothing in common with the main history of Tacitus.

V. To borrow a phrase of Gualterius--he ran the risk of "falling into Scylla in trying to avoid Charybdis":

"Incidit in Scyllam, qui vult vitare Charybdin."

How could he convince the world that Tacitus would act with such twofold inconsistency as to write of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, when he had said that he would not do so, on account of the number of writers who had recorded the occurrences of their reigns, and that if he resumed the duties of an historian it would be with the reigns of Nerva and Trajan. The world,--and n.o.body knew it better than the author of the Annals,--is easily convinced; and there is no inconsistency, however monstrous, that it considers unaccountable. He, therefore, set about the task of convincing the world that Tacitus did this. Acting up to his own maxim, that "the way to get out of disgraceful acts that are evident is by audaciousness": "flagitiis manifestis subsidium ab audacia petendum" (An. XI. 26), he resorted to audacity in a trick, which has been hitherto eminently successful,--making the world believe from a single remark which he introduced into his narrative as the double of Tacitus, that that n.o.ble Roman was really guilty of this twofold inconsistency, so that changeableness, unsteadiness of purpose and self-contradiction should seem to be his leading characteristics. Without ever intending to write the history of Augustus,--or he never would have begun the Annals with an introduction in which he epitomizes princ.i.p.al events in the Roman State from its very foundation, otherwise what had he left to himself in a subsequent historical composition of a prior date for an appropriate exordium,--he says in his third book that he would make the memorable events in the reign of Augustus the subject of a new history, should his health and life continue:--"cetera illius aetatis memorabo, si plures ad curas vitam produxero" (An. III. 24)--evidently only because Tacitus had said at the commencement of his History, that he had reserved as the employment of his old age, should his life be long enough, the reigns of Nerva and Trajan:--"quod si vita suppeditet, princ.i.p.atum Divi Nervae et imperium Trajani ... senectuti seposui"

(Hist. I. 1). There was then one and the same man saying in one place:--"I am going to write the History of Augustus when I am an old man;"--(and this being said in the Annals, the author of that book must have wanted the world to presume that the writer would have chosen the form of biography for it):--and in another place: "I am going to write the history of Nerva and Trajan when I am an old man"; (and this being said in the History, the author of the Annals must have supposed that the world might presume that the writer would have chosen the form of history for this continued production).

The author of the Annals having done this, opened out before himself the very widest field for indulging in all sorts of contradictions; for, after this, who would not be, and who is not, prepared for any contradictions? The contradictions come; and they are strange and numerous.

VI. There is a systematic subordination of history to biography throughout the Annals, in which imperial events are sacrificed to the prominence and effect of individual delineations: in the History there is a general, comprehensive review of the Empire at the time of Nero's death; Rome is the centre, and the subject matter the condition of a people affected by the imperial system of government. The History conveys political instruction; the Annals supplies materials for studying the human mind and the motives of human conduct: in imparting a knowledge of events respecting the Roman nation, the writer of the History, who is gifted with graphic power, places _images_ before us, whereas the writer of the Annals, aware that in picturesqueness he was inferior to Tacitus, gives us _impressions_, while he investigates social phenomena and elucidates the principles of human nature.

One work is historic, the other philosophic. One man generalizes, the other particularizes. We are presented with one set of interests in the History, with another set in the Annals.

In the History we see the struggles of an empire and the convulsions of the world; in the Annals we are shut out from such a prospect, to have our view limited to the deeds of one or two emperors, and a few renowned individuals.

VII. Such differences, so striking and so essential, prove the Annals to be a forged book; for all these differences in the two works can only be ascribed to the entirely different turns of mind peculiar to two writers. Tacitus wrote as he did, from having a profounder knowledge of the springs of action in the political world than the author of the Annals. The author of the Annals, surpa.s.sing Tacitus with respect to the moral world, wrote as he did, from knowing better the motives that influence men's minds, and the pa.s.sions that sway their hearts. The result of two such very different men composing two such very different works, is, that the contrast is almost as great when we turn from the History to the Annals, as when we turn from a general history of England by a Hume or a Lingard where we notice the origin of Englishmen's liberties and privileges, the chivalrous scenes of the past and the proud glories of the present, to the local record of some county, as Kent or Lancashire, by a Hasted or a Baines, embodying information of boroughs and parishes, town councils and corporations, where such things become of substantial importance as the clauses of charters, the collection of market dues, donations of maces and drinking cups to mayors, and gold or silver cradles to their ladies on the birth of babies during the year of office.

If the Annals is really to be considered a forgery, this, instead of being a matter of surprise, ought to be just the thing to be expected; because a clever fabricator, foreseeing that he would be suspected, and eager to foil detection, would know that the curious inquirer into a research of the present description would thus become baffled at every turn from inability, if not to discover it himself, at least, to explain to the satisfaction and conviction of others, the incompatibility of the workings of one spirit in one book with the workings of the other spirit in the other book, when the two compositions were so differently contrived. But if the Annals is to be considered as genuine, then n.o.body can explain why the same individual should ill.u.s.trate Roman history in this singular fashion,--both works being designed, as universally admitted, the one to be a complement to the other.

What should be the inducement of the author of the Annals if he did not wish the world to deny that it was his handiwork to write his book so very differently from the History of Tacitus? For what was there in the times of Rome under Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian so very different from what the Roman Empire was under their immediate predecessors, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, that the part which has to do with events in the days of the first-named four emperors should treat of imperial transactions and be deficient in many of the memorials which claim notice in the part dealing with Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero; and, that the part which has to do with events in the times of the last-named four emperors should all but avoid what is amply recorded in the part, dealing with Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian, imperial occurrences finding but an occasional and almost accidental notice in the Annals, where the mind is enc.u.mbered with the minutiae of circ.u.mstantial details of individual deeds.

VIII. The author of the Annals, who (as I shall convincingly show hereafter) lived in the XVth century, seems, on account of that, to have had a still stronger reason than those just given for selecting as his subject the half century after the death of Augustus: its characters and events corresponded closely to the characters of the princes who ruled, and the nature of the movements that were going on all over Europe in his time; for in forging history, that was to pa.s.s as written by Tacitus, it was inc.u.mbent that he should have the same advantage as the Roman,--be on the same level with him in the occupation of ground. Now, the ground occupied by Tacitus was the time of himself, which enabled him to give a complete and copious reflex of a period through which he had lived with thoughtful attention. Thus his colours are bright. Unless antiquity supplied the author of the Annals only the framework of his picture, and the events of the time when he lived gave the scenes for the painting, his colours would fail, and his outlines become unsteady. In other words, there could not be the scrupulous minuteness and the perfect freedom which make history live and breathe, unless, like Tacitus, he registered facts in which he took the deepest interest, from feeling their influence directly and powerfully exerted over himself, and the living and loved around him. Thus his hand, by being guided as the hand of Tacitus, would throw life into his work. And, truly, there is as much life in the Annals as in the History; but, instead of the air of the first century breathing around it, it is the air of the fifteenth.

This can be tested by many a character; one will suffice, that of Caius Piso in the fifteenth book (48). Pliny and Juvenal tell us that Piso was consul suffectus under Claudius: the Tabulae Arvales add that he was a member of the College of Twelve who offered sacrifice when there was increase in the produce of the soil.

Writers and records of antiquity say no more of Caius Piso, not even mentioning the name of his father. On such a little known man a forger of Roman history could safely expatiate; the author of the Annals does so in a portraiture that bears the stamp of the fifteenth century: this is particularly observable when Piso is spoken of as "of brilliant repute among the populace for virtues,"

or, rather, "qualities that wore the form of virtues,"--"species virtutibus similes";--that he was "far from being morosely moral, or restrained by moderation in pleasures; mild in temper and soft in manners; given to pompous show and occasionally steeping himself in luxurious excesses,"--"procul gravitas morum, aut voluptatum parsimonia: lenitati ac magnificentiae et aliquando luxui indulgebat." This does not appear to be at all applicable to the character of any conspicuous personage belonging to the Roman Empire in the first century, when Romans were warriors still, preserving, amid some effeminacy, much of the hardy vigour of their Republican predecessors, ever and anon throwing aside the toga for the sagum, and rushing from the Forum to the field, to battle with ferocious and demi-nude savages, whom ever subduing they carried home captives chained to their triumphal chariots; but it does seem to be uncommonly applicable to a time when many a priest, whose writings manifest a lax habit of thinking and betray a levity, indeed, licentiousness, ill according with a religious turn of mind, rose to the position of a great dignitary of the Church and a powerful arbiter of the destinies of his kind. As that was an age when Alexander VI. was a Pope, and Lucretia Borgia the daughter of a Pontiff and consort of a reigning Duke of Italy, we can readily credit the author of the Annals, and laud him for admirable, life-like portraiture, when he says that a character and conduct, such as Piso's, "met with the approbation of a large number of people, who, indulging in vice as delightful, did not want at the head of affairs a strict practiser of the moral duties and an austere abstainer from vice:"--"pluribus probabatur, qui in tanta vitiorum dulcedine summum imperium non restrictum nec perseverum volunt."

The character is too vague in its outlines to be any particular individual's; but as all its points fit many an Italian priest who became a Cardinal or a Bishop and a chief minister to a prince, in the time of the Renaissance, as well as in the period immediately before it, and that immediately after it,--it shows how men reflect the age they live in,--how the princ.i.p.al biographies in any certain time convey a pretty accurate idea of the tone of mind then prevailing; further, and above all, it shows to what a great degree the books of the Annals reflect the chief features of the period when they were written, and how deeply their author enters into the spirit of his age.

As with characters so with events. Heaps of pa.s.sages in the Annals read like incidents in the fifteenth century. It is more like a picture in an Italian court at that period than in a Roman Emperor's in the first century, when the arrest is made of Cneius Novius for being found treacherously armed with a dagger while mixing with the throng of courtiers bowing to the prince; and then when he is stretched on the rack, no confession being wrung from him as to accomplices; and the doubt that prevailed whether he really had fellow-conspirators. "Cneius Novius, eques Roma.n.u.s, ferro accinctus reperitur in coetu salutantium principem. Nam, postquam tormentis dilaniabatur, de se non infitiatus conscios non edidit, incertum an occultans." (An. XI. 22.)

IX. In this way do I fancy I perceive the author of the Annals chose his subject and worked his materials, so as to do most justice to his talents, and more easily reach the height attained by Tacitus. When he had apparently thus sketched the plan of his edifice, and set about struggling with the difficulties of the elaboration, he encountered these with such eminent success that the reality of his literary labour is one of the most surprising facts in the history of the human mind. He seems never to have once deviated from his design nor to have ever been perplexed by embarra.s.sments in the course of his undertaking, notwithstanding the voluminousness of its nature. In such a procedure, where the time he chose to descant upon fits in with all he wanted to accomplish, we see the first indication of the vast judgment he possessed, as well as the correct notion he had formed of the extent of his superior powers. In detecting in the author of the Annals so much judgment and such an exact estimate of his great mental faculties, we see the difficulty to be coped with in distinguishing between him and Tacitus, and thus in distinguishing between the spurious and the genuine: but this distinguishing can be accomplished by a minute, and only a most minute examination of the two works.

CHAPTER IV.

HOW THE ANNALS DIFFERS FROM THE HISTORY.

I. In the qualities of the writers; and why that difference.

--II. In the narrative, and in what respect.--III. In style and language.--IV. The reputation Tacitus has of writing bad Latin due to the mistakes of his imitator.

I. Statesmen learn the things which are of use to them in government by reading the History, because Tacitus recounts the actions of the world under the imperial rule of Rome. All men can profit in the choice of morals from reading the Annals, on account of its writer relating princ.i.p.ally the actions of sovereign princes and ill.u.s.trious persons in their private capacity.

This diversity of treatment results from the difference in the qualities of the writers. Tacitus possessed a consummate knowledge of the true policy of States, and the use and extent of government. Accordingly, he reveals measures necessary for the successful carrying on of war, or the proper and equitable administration of affairs in peace, while he places before us a graphic and presumably true picture of the mode in which the Romans ruled their Empire in the first century of the Christian aera. The author of the Annals was acquainted with an entirely different form and order of statesmanship and politics. Hence he immerses us in crooked turnings of false policy and dark intrigues of bad ambition, forcibly reminding us of what made the greatest portion of the European art of government in the fifteenth century towards the close of the mediaeval and the commencement of the modern periods. He favours us with a paucity of maxims relating to government in general, or the different branches and offices which make up the body politic; but enters, with tedious fulness, into the rise, operation, consequences and proper restraint of the genuine pa.s.sions and natural propensities of mankind in individuals, public and private.

We search in vain in the History for any trace of the melancholy that we find in the Annals; and in vain do we look in the Annals for any pictures of virtue and lessons of wisdom which in the History are taught us by bright examples and ill.u.s.trious actions.

Had the same hand that wrote the Annals written the History, we should have had in the latter work a very different treatment. The record would have been dark and dismal, even to repulsion, the opportunities being ample for an historian of gloomy disposition to indulge his humour, when the character of the History is thus described with truth in the Preface to Sir Henry Saville's translation of it:--"In these four books we see all the miseries of a torn and declining state; the empire usurped; the princes murdered; the people wandering; the soldiers tumultuous; nothing unlawful to him that hath power, and nothing so unsafe as to be securely innocent." Then, after stating what we learn from the examples of Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian, the writer adds: "In them all, and in the state of Rome under them, we see the calamities that follow civil war, where laws lie asleep, and all things are judged by the sword." In going over such a dreary period of human history, Tacitus is as composed and cheerful as if he was dwelling on the gayest and brightest of themes.

The cause of this is to be found in the fact that there was nothing to overshadow the soul of Tacitus with gloom. However painful and dire may have been the constraint to other Romans during the fifteen years' rule of Domitian, he had no ground of complaint: far from that; for he says that he was advanced by that Emperor further in dignity than by Vespasian and t.i.tus. In the reign of Trajan he must have been supremely happy; for he speaks of it himself as "a time of rare felicity,"--"rara temporum felicitate,"--when men might "think what they pleased and express what they thought." His domestic life must have been blest by the perfect devotion and tender attachment of a wife, who, then in her prime, had surely verified the brilliant hopes of the promising bride. (Agr. 9.) In the maturity of his days he lived again in his children; for that he had children we know from the Emperor Tacitus, a century and a half after, boasting of being his descendant, a pride that was shared in the fifth century by Polemius, a Prefect of Gaul, as we learn from a remark of the Prefect's friend, Sidonius Apollinaris. He enjoyed the most brilliant of literary reputations, as the anecdote sufficiently reveals of a stranger, who, addressing him at a public spectacle, and being informed that he must know him well from his writings, remarked: "Then you must be either Tacitus or Pliny." He was happy in the friendship of Pliny the Younger, and men as good, eminent and distinguished as that elegant disciple of Cicero's.

There was then nothing, in the fortunes of Tacitus to make him trenchant, biting and cynical; but, on the contrary, most gentle, as he was, and most placid and benign. Such being his character, a kind interpretation and a candid sense of actions and individuals meet us on every page of his History. Still in enumerating the virtues of eminent persons he does not omit their vices or failings: his way of doing this is peculiar. He tells us Sabinus served the State for five and thirty years with great distinction at home and abroad, and was of unquestionable integrity, but adds jestingly "he talked too much."--"Quinque et triginta stipendia in republica fecerat, domi militiaeque clarus; innocentiam just.i.tiamque ejus non argueret: _sermonis nimium erat_."

(Hist. III. 75.) Otho and Vitellius quarrel and charge each other with debaucheries and the grossest crimes; the historian then, with dry humour, remarks, "neither was wrong":--"Mox, quasi rixantes stupra et flagitia invicem objectavere: _neuter falso._" (Hist. I. 74.) This witty and ridiculing vein does not prevent him from being always kindly. The benignity of his nature is seen in all his portraitures (which look, by the way, like the portraitures of real men); it is observable in his character of Licinius Mucia.n.u.s (I. 10), Cornelius Fuscus (II. 86), Helvidius Priscus (IV. 5), and others;--lovely portraits where defects or peccadilloes are given along with real and positive virtues, and in an ant.i.thetical manner. His ant.i.thetical manner is preserved in the Annals; but, instead of blandness, we come across a propensity to form unfavourable opinions of character and conduct, as when the Athenians are designated "that sc.u.m of nations":--"colluviem illam nationum" (II. 55); and Octavia, "the sprig of a gipsy fiddler" [Endnote 074]:--"tibicinis Aegyptii subolem." (XIV. 61) There is wit and ridicule in both works, but it is not the wit and ridicule of the same individual; it is sprightly and amusing in the History; it is ungracious and actually cruel in the Annals.

This difference in the writing of Tacitus and the author of the Annals may be accounted for in many ways,--perhaps in none better than this:--When Tacitus lived no one despaired of public cares being attended to, or the plans of the wise being employed in advancing the national welfare; but when the author of the Annals lived, everybody despaired; private profligacy was as rampant as public misery, and, amid the universal degeneracy, scheming politicians disregarded the good and greatness of their country to be intriguers at court for the improvement of their position.

Those were the times when Louis XI. supplied the places of the ministers and marshals, the generals and admirals of France, the Dunois, the La Tremoilles, the Brezes and the Chabannes with mere creatures--new and obscure men who aided him in his artful schemes and plans of government: he made his barber an amba.s.sador, his tailor a herald at arms, and his phlebotomist a chancellor: he imposed enormous taxes on the people, and when the people revolted, he ordered some of the ringleaders to be torn to pieces alive by horses, and the others to be beheaded, as occurred at Rheims, Angers, Alencon and Aurillac. Francis of Carrara, the Lord of Padua, cruelly murdered the Venetian General, Galeaz of Mantua, when the Doge and Council of Venice refused to ratify the terms of a capitulation. Suspicion attached to the peace in which Ivan Basilowitch lived and ruled in his palace at Moscow, surrounded completely by a wooden wall. Enclosed, too, by a very large tract of land, and in a most magnificent mansion which he built for himself and his companions at Ripaglia, a place pleasantly situated on the Lake of Geneva, Amedeus, the last Count and first Duke of Savoy, so abandoned himself in his un.o.bserved private and solitary life, to all kinds of debaucheries, that Desmarets says in his "Tableau des Papes" (p. 167) that from that originated the phrase "to feast and make merry,"--"faire repaille"; yet this very Amedeus afterwards acted the part of the only true Pope at Tonon during the greater portion of the two years, 1440 and 1441, having been elected to the Pontificate by the Fathers of Basle during the Papacy of Eugenius IV. When the throne of Don Carlos, the Infant of Navarre, was usurped, on the death of his mother, Blanche of Navarre, by her husband, John I. of Aragon, a disgraceful quarrel and a prolonged war ensued between father and son, when the son, being repeatedly defeated in battle, was finally captured and cast into prison by the father, and poisoned by his mother-in-law; although he was deserving of a better fate, being an enlightened prince who wrote a History of the Kings of Navarre, which is still preserved in the archives of Pampeluna. A blind and feeble old monarch, Muley Albohacan, King of Granada, ordered the ma.s.sacre of a number of children by his first marriage; Ziska destroyed 550 churches and monasteries in Germany alone; and, for attempting reforms in religion, Huss and Jerome of Prague were cruelly burnt alive at the stake. These and similar horrors of those distressful times, which find fit counterparts in revolting incidents in the Annals, could not but deeply affect the soul of a man ardently loving liberty and devoted to humanity as, unquestionably, was the forger of that work: hence throughout his book the sting which misfortune gives, and the moodiness which melancholy begets.

A spirit of liberty runs through his work; but the spirit is not the same as that which pervades the History of Tacitus any more than that his merits are like the Roman's in precision of delineating actions and characters. The good temper of Tacitus causes him to differ from other writers in the estimation of character. He gives a better account of Galba and Vitellius than Suetonius; of Vitellius and Nero than the abbreviator of Ca.s.sius Dio, Xiphilinus, of Otho than Juvenal; and of Vinius than Plutarch. Galba, who, in Suetonius, puts to death, with their wives and children, the Governors in Spain and Gaul who did not side with his party during the life of Nero, is, with Tacitus, a prince remarkable for integrity and justice, and such faults as he has are not, strictly speaking, his own, but those of worthless friends who abuse his confidence, for we are told that it is the pernicious counsels of t.i.tus Vinius and Cornelius Laco, the former depraved and profligate, the other slothful and incapable, which first lose him the popular favour and ultimately prove his ruin: "Invalidum senem t.i.tus Vinnius et Cornelius Laeo, alter deterrimus mortalium, alter ignavissimus, _odio flagitorum oneratum, contemptu inertiae destruebant_." (Hist. I. 6 _in._) Vitellius, who, according to Suetonius, puts one of his sons to death, and poisons his mother, or starves her to death, is, in Tacitus, a tender father doing all for his offspring that fortune permits him to do in his excess of adversity (Hist. II. 59), and a respectful, sensitive son seeking to abdicate his empire in order to rescue his parent from impending evils. (Hist. III. 67.) Juvenal shows us Otho carrying into the tumult of the battle-field the effeminacy that disgraces him in time of peace; Tacitus represents Otho as an active warrior (Hist. II. 11); and convinces us that there was more of good than evil in that emperor. Xiphilinus paints the wife of Vitellius as wickedly dissolute; Tacitus as a respectable woman of whom the State had no complaint to make in her misfortune. He can find virtues even in Vinius (Hist. I. 13), whom the Roman people execrated and whom Plutarch castigates in terms of unmeasured reprehension.

The Author of the Annals brings before our vision quite opposite reflections from the mirror of life: his pictures are quite horrid of revolting crimes unrelieved by virtuous actions in Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, Seja.n.u.s, Agrippina, Messalina, Albucilla, and other men and women. His character of Tiberius is the wonderfully drawn portrait of the most absolute and artful tyrant that was ever created by the fancy of man; and we may be as certain that such a character never existed as we may be a.s.sured that that the wise maxims and fine things were ever uttered which he tells us pa.s.sed the lips in private of Emperors and Ministers of State.

Though not a single virtue relieves the vices of Tiberius in the Annals, Suetonius speaks of him as showing clemency when a public officer; Ca.s.sius Dio describes him as so humane that he condemned n.o.body for his estate, nor confiscated any man's goods, nor exacted money by force; and Velleius Paterculus makes him all but a pattern of the virtues,--if Velleius Paterculus is an authority,--it being just possible that his "Historiae Romanae ad Marc.u.m Vinicium Consulem" may some of these days be as clearly proved to be as glaring a modern forgery, as I am now attempting to prove the Annals of Tacitus to be: certain it is that what we have of Velleius Paterculus is supplied by only one MS., which was found under very suspicious circ.u.mstances in very suspicious times.

II. The general train of the narrative may be as nervous in the Annals as in the History; but the latter is proof against all objections to imperfection and hurry of narrative: every now and then errors of this description mar the workmanship of the Annals, showing at once that it was not composed by Tacitus. From what he did in the History, he never would have abruptly dropped the proceedings in the Senate with regard to Tiberius and the honours paid to his family: there would have been a measure of time and place in the campaigns of Germanicus: he would have told us what urged Piso to his acts of apparent madness; and whether he was guilty or innocent of poisoning Germanicus: we should have known whether the adopted son of Tiberius came to a violent end; whether Agrippina perished on account of food withheld from her in her dungeon; and how Julia, the granddaughter of Augustus died. This habit of occasionally neglecting to impart complete information, which is not at all in the manner of Tacitus, cannot be due to the difference of arrangement in the two works; which, in itself, is a very suspicious difference; for the plan in the Annals is to give the transactions of every year in chronological order, whereas that in the History is not to keep each year distinct in itself, but allow occurrences to find their proper place according to their nature, before the time when they happen. [Endnote 081]

In addition to this very suspicious difference, there is another producing so much doubt that alone it seems to stamp with truth the theory of the Annals being a forgery.

Tacitus pa.s.ses over in silence men renowned for learning who took no part in the historical events related by him. The author of the Annals, at the end of one historic year, before pa.s.sing on to record the events of that which follows, mentions their deaths, as of the two famous juris-consults, Capito Ateius and Labeo Antistius. (III. 74.) In this style of writing we detect two men differing from each other as widely as De Thou differs from Guicciardini: De Thou, confining himself to his own times, descends into minutiae, so as to record the deaths of the great men of his day; Guicciardini, with his eye fixed on his country, pa.s.ses over memorials of individuals to dwell on the various causes which brought about the great changes in the civil and ecclesiastical policy of his stirring period.

Another thing extremely suspicious is that nowhere in his History, nor even in his biographical work, Agricola, does Tacitus introduce a whole letter. All that he does is to give the substance, and not the contents, as the letter from Tiberius to Germanicus in Germany. (Hist. V. 75.) Elsewhere he refers merely to the contents of letters, as in the second book of the History (64).

Speeches are found in his works, for this reason:--Speeches form no small part of what is transacted in the senate, at the army and before the emperor; they issue to the public, they pa.s.s through the mouths of men, and they form much weighty matter.

Tacitus then seems to have thought that if he inserted speeches, he would be maintaining the majesty of history by attending to great matters, but that if he inserted letters, as they refer generally to private affairs, he would be faulty as an historian, by ceasing to be grave and becoming trifling. There is no accounting, then, for the letter that is found in the Annals (III. 53), if we are to a.s.sume that that work was the composition of Tacitus, except we are ready to admit that he was capable of descending from the accustomed gravity of his lofty historical manner to be a rival for supremacy in the small style of such indifferent memoirists, as Vulcatius Gallica.n.u.s, who has almost as many letters as there are pages in his very short life of the Emperor Avidius Ca.s.sius. [Endnote 083]

n.o.body can satisfactorily explain why, or how it was possible that, Tacitus should have contradicted in the Annals what he says in the History of the Legions of Rome and the Praetorian and Urban Cohorts. He tells us in his History that his countrymen had legions in Britain, Gaul, and Italy; in the Annals we are told that the Romans had no troops in those countries. We gather from the Annals, that there were eight legions in Germany, three in Spain, and two each in Moesia, Africa, and Pannonia; from the History we find that there were seven legions in Germany, three in Moesia, two in Spain, and one each in Africa and Pannonia. We are told in the History that the Praetorian Cohorts were nine, in the Annals ten. So we are told in the History that the Urban Cohorts were four (_quatuor urbanae cohortes_ scribebantur) (Hist. II. 93), and in the Annals three (insideret urbem proprius miles, _tres urbanae_).

(An. IV. 5.) It matters not what are the right statements in these several instances; all that concerns us in our inquiry is that, here beyond all question are two different men, possessing quite a different knowledge, informing us about the same things; and the disagreements would be mighty puzzling on any other theory than that which we are advancing,--that two different men wrote the History and the Annals.

So, again, with respect to the twenty-one, and afterwards twenty-five priests of Apollo, the "Sodales Augustales," otherwise styled "Sacerdotes t.i.tii," the latter name being given to them, according to Varro, after birds similarly called, whose motions it was their duty to watch in certain auguries (though what the ancients called the "t.i.tius," by the way, is about as little known as what Pliny calls the "spinthurnyx,"--Servius and Isidorus thinking they might have been "doves," from such fowls being styled by the common people "tetas" and "tetos"). Livy makes no mention of these priests; neither does Dionysius of Halicarna.s.sus, though Dionysius was very fond of entering into details of Roman antiquities.