ness in his prose, certainly as vigorous and graphic as Rome had yet known, that makes Tacitus an exponent of imperial times. It is the fact that, in spite of his Republican Conservatism, he is forced to make the Imperator the central figure in his Histories and Annals. While his dominant idea, like that of Lucan, is a mistaken belief in the old Roman oligarchy which had been a manifest failure a hundred years before the battle of Actium, it is the personal character of the Cæsar that not only gives their unity to his historic writings, but supplies a false explanation of Roman decline as due to the depravity of the emperors. Extreme individualism had, in fact, reached such a height in Rome that even the historic theorist could only picture the unity of the Roman world in the person of the emperor, and insensibly transferred to it all the dark traits of the selfish units into which Roman society had been broken up. Closely connected with this effect of individualism is another literary characteristic which Tacitus shares with all Roman historians—preference for biography over any description or explanation of social life. So Sallust's Catiline and Jugurtha, and Suetonius' lives of the Cæsars, remind us how an aristocratic and courtly society, in many respects resembling that of Paris a century ago, showed the aptitude for memoir-writing which long characterised the literature of France. Another mark of the individualising spirit shared by Tacitus with such writers as Saint Simon and De Retz is the satirical tone often heard in the Histories and the Annals, but perhaps most distinctly in the Germany—a work which even loses some of its antiquarian credit from its clear intention to contrast the vices of civilisation with the virtues of barbarians.
But, besides these marks of Roman decadence, the prose of Tacitus contains an element which is at once the
