between Annals and History. 667 and his unfortunate house, to the destruction of the victims of his tyranny, and the servitude of the senate. In this dreary silence we shudder, and speak in a whisper : all is dark, and wrapt in mystery, doubtful and perplexing. Was Germanicus poisoned ? was Piso guilty ? what urged him to his mad violence.'^ did the son of Tiberius die of poison, Agrippina by the stroke of an assassin? all this was just as uncertain to Tacitus as to us. For the history of a despot's reign, when it does not fall in times of great events, where his personal character is of little moment, biography is the most appropriate form ; and to this Suetonius and his followers were led by the na- ture of the case* But perhaps Tacitus could not overcome the pain of degrading the history of Rome, in form as well as in substance, to a small part of the biography, not merely of a tyrant, who, though he had degenerated through vice, was designed by nature for great and salutary ends, and accomplished not a few, but of an unfortunate and depraved idiot, and of two monsters. It is also possible that the uni- form usage of his predecessors, who seem all to have related the history of this period in the form of annals (omnes an- nalium scriptores^ to whom are only opposed the memoirs of the younger Agrippina, Ann. iv. 53.); this form may have acquired such authority as the one best fitted to the period, that even the free mind of Tacitus decided without scrupulous consideration in its favour. But had he come to the execution of his plan, of writing the history of Augustus after the com- pletion of the Annals, I have no doubt he would have chosen the form of biography for it. The passage in which he speaks of his intention evidently implies a complete work, not a con- tinuation of Livy's, whose last books, a production of his old age, had rambled into inordinate diffuseness : and still, though what his generous spirit expressed, and what it kept back, excited the displeasure of the Ruler himself, he had not ven- tured to touch on the most important points. Tacitus had begun as a historian with a biography ; he would then have ended with one, for he was probably never in earnest about his history of Trajan. Now no one who reads the Annals from beginning to end, can fail to perceive in them the character of those which Vol. II. No. 6. 4 Q
