Tacitus (Donne)/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X.
THE HISTORIAN.
There was a time when the works of Tacitus were far more familiar to English readers than they are now,—when sages like Bacon, and historians like Clarendon, drew from them moral and political adages, and appealed to them as manuals for statesmen. But in proportion as the power of the Crown in this country has diminished, and that of Parliament increased, the chronicler of ten Cæsars has ceased to be an oracle for our public men. He shares the fate of Cicero—he lives almost in name alone.
Quite otherwise is it with his reputation in Europe, and especially in France. There Tacitus is still reverenced, and often consulted as a guide for statists, historians, and orators. If we except the work of Dean Merivale, the merits of which are so obvious that it would be almost impertinent to praise it in this little volume, it would be difficult to name any treatise on the 'History' or 'Annals' that has been written by an Englishman worth reading: while, on the other hand, it would be tedious to enumerate the French or German writers who, in the present century alone, have either built on the foundations of Tacitus, or thrown new light on his works.
The different tone of the 'History' and 'Annals' has already been hinted at; probably had the reign of Domitian come down to us, it would be found that the later books of the 'History' were a preparation, at least in the spirit pervading them, for the records of the Julian and Claudian Cæsars. That the 'Annals' place the emperors in a most unfavourable light has often been noted. Voltaire, who was by no means a partisan of kings in general, and Napoleon the First, who may have had a fellow-feeling with military despots, have bath pointed out the bias of Tacitus, and maintained that in the 'Annals' at least we have a political satire, rather than a fair or trustworthy narrative.
Could we read some of the authors whom Tacitus had before him while engaged on his latest work,—still more, could we peep into some of the family journals of the time—for the upper classes in Rome at all times kept journals of public events or private feuds,—we might very probably obtain a clue to the spirit which guided him in the selection and structure of the 'Annals.' Vanity, or the desire for sympathy from an audience, led the keepers of such journals or memoirs to read them occasionally to a few particular friends, and these friends appear to have been not always discreet, and even occasionally faithless, and so the contents of these private papers got wind, and reached the ears of some vigilant informer, and the journalist had every reason to repent of having been so communicative. "I remember," writes Seneca the rhetorician, "hearing Labienus recite portions of a manuscript which he entitled 'History:' now and then he would pass over many pages of the scroll in his hand, saying, this must not be read until after my decease." Apparently there was some very treasonable matter in Labienus's 'History,' since he avoided the trouble of being put to death by burying himself alive in the tomb of his ancestors; and his book, after his death, was ordered by the senate to be publicly burnt.
Nor did Tacitus confine his attention to private memoirs. He plumes himself on not excluding tales, resting on common rumour only, from his 'Annals.' Drusus Cæsar, the son of Tiberius, was poisoned by Sejanus, and his partner in guilt, Livia. But there was another version of the story, which Tacitus disbelieved, yet which he cannot refrain from repeating. The story was this: that Sejanus contrived to poison the cup which Drusus was about to present to his father, and warned Tiberius not to drink out of it. Drusus, having no suspicion of the fraud, drained the poisoned chalice, and Tiberius was persuaded that his son committed suicide through dread of being discovered. Tacitus says—"In my account of the death of Drusus, the best and most authentic of historians have been my guides. A report, however, which found credit at the time, and has not yet died out, ought not to be omitted." He admits that "the report cannot stand the test of examination." He gives excellent reasons for disbelieving it. He says, in another portion of the 'Annals,' that Rome was the most credulous and scandalous of cities; and yet he cannot refrain, sceptical as he was, from telling and commenting upon this monstrous story. The true reason peeps out at the last. The story furnished him with an arrow against the Cæsar. "The truth is," he writes, "Sejanus was capable of every species of villainy, however atrocious: the emperor's partiality for him increased the number of his enemies; and, both the sovereign and the favorite being objects of public detestation, malignity itself could coin no tale so black, and even improbable, that men were not willing to believe."
The drift of the 'Annals' can hardly be mistaken: it is an elaborate protest against Cæsarianism: it is also, what Pliny's 'Panegyric' was directly, an indirect, encomium on Trajan. Nothing is more agreeable to the ears of a new dynasty than a picture of a former one drawn with the darkest colours. A golden age has come; an iron age has passed away.
"Tacitus," observes Dean Merivale, "constructs the history of the empire with reference to a dominant idea in his own mind." It was such an "idea" that, in his writings on the French Revolution, misled and indeed perverted the genius of Burke, and rendered the veteran champion of English liberty the advocate of a corrupt monarchy and a still more corrupt Church. It was a fixed belief with Tacitus that Rome owed all her greatness to a senatorial government, or rather to an oligarchy. In feeling and in theory he was a patrician of the patricians; and consequently he attributed to Cæsarian usurpation the decline and decay of Rome. The battle of Actium was for him the Hegira from which dated the beginning of evil days. Rome, governed by consuls and tribunes chosen by a free people, was virtuous and valiant; governed by despots, she was profligate and faint-hearted. The once noble and patriotic senators were succeeded by a sordid and servile race, who, shrinking like dogs under the huntsman's whip, crouched under their lords in peace, and did not resent humiliation in war. Julius Cæsar had admitted to the benches of the senate, Gauls, Spaniards, and Africans: upstart foreigners and enfranchised bondmen, it was said, sat beside men whose forefathers had expelled the Tarquins, and humbled the pride of the Marsian and the Samnite; two-thirds of the conscript fathers might have been puzzled, if asked to produce their pedigree. It was the policy of the last and noblest of dictators to extend the privileges of Roman citizens to the provincials, and to recruit the senate with the best subjects of the empire. But this wise as well as generous scheme was an abomination to the historian.
A very slight acquaintance with the annals of Rome in the last century of the commonwealth is sufficient to dispel the illusion that, as a city, having merely municipal laws and functions, she was great; but as the head of an empire reaching from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, from the Grampian mountains to the first cataract of the Nile, mean and inglorious. As for the city, in the good days envied and extolled by the historian, we have Cicero's authority for describing it as a theatre in which "domestic fury and fierce civil strife" were almost annually the performances; and as for the provinces, until they found Cæsars for their protectors, they were the unvarying scene of the most cruel and covetous tyranny that, if we except Asiatic despotisms, ever afflicted the human race. Even the poet Lucan, whose 'Pharsalia' is really an indictment of Cæsar and the Marian party, does not disguise the licentiousness of the era which he and Tacitus profess to lament.
Even from translations English readers may derive very fair conceptions of the Satires of Juvenal and the writings of Tacitus—at all events, so far as to perceive that the poet confirms many opinions on men and manners held by the historian. Living in the same age, though probably moving in different circles of society, they both bear witness to the general profligacy of life in Rome. But there is a difference in their portraits of it. Tacitus, not concealing the depravity of the upper classes, ascribes it to the evil example set by the emperors. Juvenal, in this respect more impartial, shows us that there was, in many a noble house, a Nero or a Domitian. Keeping ever in view his repugnance to the system of government framed by Augustus, the historian concentrates in the Cæsars themselves the vices that were common to the age. But long before there was an emperor there were imperial vices in Rome. But the profligacy, political or personal, of consuls and senators, had not a Tacitus to brand it, and we are left to infer from other writers the enormities of the commonwealth in its later years. The speeches and letters of Cicero alone supply sufficient evidence that the crimes of the emperors had been at least rehearsed by the nobles of his time: that the vices of the palace had been practised in the halls of conscript fathers. The exaggerations of an orator, however, are allowed for by hearers or readers of his speeches; and how often Cicero fluctuated, as his interest at the moment required, in his judgment of public men, is palpable in his letters. He merely used the common privilege of barristers and political writers in every age, to exhibit his friends in the fairest and his foes in the foulest light. Tacitus is a prosecutor of the Cæsars—those at least who are described in the 'Annals'—quite as much as Marcus Tullius was of Catiline or Antonius. But his accusations and insinuations are rarely called in question: and carried away by the force and beauty of his language, by the skilful arrangement of his facts, and his enthusiasm for republican virtues, the reader of his works, passive in his hands, often yields implicit evidence to his record of imperial enormities.
Tacitus admits that the affairs of Tiberius, Caius (Caligula), Claudius, and Nero were misrepresented while they survived by fear, and after their deaths, by hatred; and, as regards Nero, this admission is repeated by Josephus. There is, indeed, reason for believing that the odium in which Tiberius was held, increased as time went on. In spite, however, of this statement, the historian throughout the 'Annals' appears to lean to the detractor's side, and represents the Claudian and Julian Cæsars in the spirit of his own generation; the third, that is, after their respective reigns. In the time both of the Flavian emperors and of Nerva and Trajan, there was a strong reaction against the despotism of the earlier dynasty;—a recoil from the extravagance of the Caian, Claudian, and Neronian period. From the bondage in which the senate was held by the emperors, from the influence of women and freedmen, and the liberty, or more truly the licence, granted to public informers, a writer contemporary with Trajan, and one who had escaped from the caprices of Domitian, naturally looked back on a period of general misrule with aversion on a par with that which the Long Parliament felt for the administration of Charles, Strafford, Buckingham, and Laud, or with that which the statesmen of 1789 felt for the Bastille, the taxes and services of the ancient régime, and its feudal and royal abuses. Towards the earlier emperors, perhaps not excluding Augustus, the feelings of Tacitus may be aptly conveyed in the words which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Cassius, when denouncing the usurpation of the First Cæsar:—
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was fam'd with more than one man?
When could they say, till now, that talked of Rome,
That her wide walks encompassed but one man?
Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough;
When there is in it but one only man.
O! you and I have heard our fathers say,
There was a Brutus once, that would have brook'd
The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome,
As easily as a king."
In the pages of Tacitus there is often a spirit visible akin to that of Dante. The Roman indeed had not the advantage of the Florentine in a sure and certain faith that there was a region of bale reserved for his political enemies, and accordingly could not exhibit Tiberius in a red-hot tomb like Farinata's, nor imprison Nero in a pool of ice, like the Archbishop Ruggieri. But he did all that lay in his power to make both of these emperors infamous for ever, and in the following words of the 'Annals,' points at the secret tortures that await the wicked even on earth. Tiberius had addressed a letter to the senate, in which were the following words (the English reader may be reminded that we have not the letter itself, and so cannot divine the context of these words, which may merely have related to physical sufferings): "What to write, conscript fathers—in what terms to express myself, or what to refrain from writing—is a matter of such perplexity, that if I knew how to decide, may the just gods, and the goddesses of vengeance, doom me to die in pangs, worse than those under which I linger every day." "We have here," proceeds the historian, "the features of the inward man. His crimes retaliated upon him with the keenest retribution; so true is the saying of the great philosopher [Socrates], the oracle of ancient wisdom, that if the minds of tyrants were laid open to our view, we should see them gashed and mangled with the whips and stings of horror and remorse. By blows and stripes the flesh is made to quiver, and, in like manner, cruelty and inordinate passions, malice and evil deeds, become internal executioners, and with unceasing torture goad and lacerate the heart. Of this truth Tiberius is a melancholy instance. Neither the imperial dignity, nor the gloom of solitude, nor the rocks of Capreæ, could shield him from himself. He lived on the rack of guilt, and his wounded spirit groaned in agony." Such a passage as this would have harmonised with the gloom of the 'Inferno.' In the opening stanzas of the 'Purgatorio,' Dante records his sense of relief from the regions of sorrow, and return to the light of day:—
The light bark of my genius lifts the sail,
Well pleased to leave so cruel sea behind,
And of that second region will I sing."
[Cary's Translation.]
And in the 'Agricola,' we find a corresponding welcome to the advent of Nerva and Trajan: "At length we begin to revive from our lethargy: the Emperor Nerva, in the beginning of this glorious era, has found means to reconcile two things, till now deemed incompatible,—civil liberty and the prerogative of the prince: and his successor Trajan continues to heal our wounds, and, by a just and wise administration, to diffuse the blessings of peace and good order through every part of the empire. Hopes are conceived of the constitution by all orders of men, and not conceived only, but rising every hour into confidence and public security."
Perhaps the affinity of his works to modern rather than ancient history may account for their mutilation. Their author strode before his time, and accordingly the men of the time could not relish his productions. Centuries passed by before Tacitus attracted the notice and attained the rank due to him among the great writers of antiquity. Pliny the younger, indeed, and a narrow circle of personal friends, awaited with deep interest, and doubtless, when they were published, crowned with zealous applause, each of his great works. But beyond that circle Tacitus apparently was little known. At the time he was writing nearly all narrative was assuming a biographical form; and hence Suetonius and his followers, the wretched chroniclers of the Cæsars from the death of Trajan to Constantine—the so-called "Augustan historians"—were read eagerly, while Tacitus slumbered on the shelf. His namesake, if not his remote relative, the emperor, directed that copies of all his writings should be made and deposited in every great library of the empire. But the reign of Tacitus, the Cæsar, was too brief for his instructions to be carried out; and indeed the times were too perturbed for literature of the highest order to be much in request. The gravity of the historian's temper, his concise style, his profound thought, were not favourable to the preservation of his manuscripts in ages when shallow and superficial authors were in vogue; and it is among the ironies of fate that we have nearly complete the works of such epitomists as Florus, Eutropius, and Aurelius Victor, while at least thirty books of the most consummate of Roman chroniclers have fallen a prey to oblivion. A tardy compensation was indeed awarded to Tacitus, but far too late to atone for the injury he received from the negligence or caprice of his own countrymen. Gradually such portions of his writings as we have now were rescued piecemeal from the worms or the damp of their hiding-places; but not until the beginning of the sixteenth century of our era were the first five books of the 'Annals' found in the Abbey of Cernay, in Westphalia, and published for the first time in Rome, in 1515. From that date, with few dissenting voices, the historian has been the object of honour and applause. Bayle pronounced the 'Annals' and 'History' one of the grandest efforts of human intellect. That consummate scholar, Justus Lipsius, was so deeply versed in the books of Tacitus, that he offered to recite any passage with a dagger at his breast to be used against himself on a failure of memory. Politicians and philosophers, from the sixteenth century downwards, have regarded him as an oracle, in practical and speculative wisdom alike. That keen commentator on the foibles and vices of mankind, the essayist Montaigne, speaks of him with unusual enthusiasm; the greatest of Italian historians, Machiavelli, took Tacitus for his model; and the recreation of the great French mathematician D'Alembert, was to read the 'Annals' or the 'History' in those moments when he "let Euclid rest and Archimedes pause."
It is well observed by Heeren that, "of all political characters, Demosthenes is the most sublime and purely tragic with which history is acquainted. When still stirred by the vehement force of his language—when reading his life in Plutarch—when transferring ourselves into his times and situation—we are carried away by a deeper interest than is excited by any hero in epic or tragic poem. What a crowd of emotions must have struggled through his breast amid the interchange of hope and despair for Athenian freedom! How natural was it that the lines of melancholy and of indignation, such as we yet behold in his bust, should have been imprinted on his severe countenance!"
We have no authentic bust of Tacitus. Yet it is not difficult to imagine him to have been, like the great Athenian orator, a man on whose features alternate hope and despair had traced deep lines. Knowing so little of his life, we cannot pronounce him austere. Yet it is evident from the 'Agricola' alone that he was not sanguine in expectation, while there can be no doubt, from the general tenor of his works, that he was sarcastic—a man of whom it might fairly be said,—
He is a great observer, and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men:
Seldom he smiles; and smiles in such a sort
As if he mocked himself, and scorned his spirit
That could he moved to smile at anything."
—Julius Cæsar, act i.
END OF TACITUS.