Part 33 (1/2)

As yet, Tacitus's manner is only half-formed. He must have acquired by painful labour that wonderful suggestive brevity which in the _Annals_ reaches its culmination, and is of all styles the world of letters has ever seen, the most compressed and full of meaning. The _Germania_, however, in certain portions [51] approximates to it, and in other ways shows a slight increase of maturity over the biography of Agricola. His object in writing this treatise has been much contested. Some think it was in order to dissuade Trajan from a projected expedition that he painted the German people as foes so formidable; others that it is a satire on the vices of Rome couched under the guise of an innocent ethnographic treatise; others that it is inspired by the genuine scientific desire to investigate the many objects of historic and natural interest with which a vast and almost unknown territory abounded. But none of these motives supplies a satisfactory explanation. The first can hardly be maintained owing to historical difficulties; the second, though an object congenial to the Roman mind, is not lofty enough to have moved the pen of Tacitus; the third, though it may have had some weight with him, would argue a state of scientific curiosity in advance of Tacitus's position and age, and besides is incompatible with his culpable laziness in sifting information on matters of even still greater ethnographic interest. [52]

The true motive was no doubt his fear lest the continual a.s.saults of these tribes should prove a permanent and insurmountable danger to Rome. Having in all probability been himself employed in Germany, Tacitus had seen with dismay of what stuff the nation was made, and had foreseen what the defeat of Varus might have remotely suggested, that some day the degenerate Romans would be no match for these hardy and virtuous tribes. Thus, the design of the work was purely and pre-eminently patriotic; nor is any other purpose worthy of the great historian, patrician, patriot, and soldier that he was. At the same time subsidiary motives are not excluded; we may well believe that the gall of satire kindles his eloquence, and that the insatiable desire of knowledge stimulates his research while inquiring into the less accessible details of the German polity. The work is divided into two parts. The first gives an account of the situation, climate, soil, and inhabitants of the country; it investigates the etymology of several German names of men and G.o.ds, describes the national customs, religion, laws, amus.e.m.e.nts, and especially celebrates the people's moral strictness; but at the same time not without contrasting them unfavourably with Rome whenever the advantage is on her side. The second part contains a catalogue of the different tribes, with the geographical limits, salient characteristics, and a short historical account of each, whenever accessible.

Next come the _Histories_, which are a narrative of the reigns of Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, t.i.tus, and Domitian, written under Trajan.

This work, of which we possess only four entire books, with part of the fifth, consisted originally of fourteen books, and was the most authentic and complete of all his writings. The loss of the last nine and a half books must be considered irreparable. In the _Germania_ he had shown the power of that liberty which the barbarians enjoyed, had indicated their polity, in which, even then the germs of feudalism, chivalry, the wors.h.i.+p of the s.e.x, troubadour minstrelsy, fairy mythology, and, above all, representative government, existed. In the _Historiae_ he paints with tremendous power the disorganisation, of the Roman state, the military anarchy which made the diadem the gift of a brutal soldiery, and revealed the startling truth that an emperor could be created elsewhere than at Rome.

At this period his style still retains some traces of its former copious flow; it has not yet been pressed tight into the short _sententiae_, which were its final and most characteristic development, and which in the _Annals_ dominate to the exclusion of every other style.

The _Annals, ab excessu divi Augusti_, in sixteen books, treated the history of the Empire until the extinction of the Claudian dynasty. They contain two separate threads of history, one internal, the other external.

The latter is important and interesting; but the former is both in an immeasurably greater degree. It has been likened to a tragedy in two acts, the first terminating with the death of Tiberius, the second with the death of Nero. Tacitus in this work shows his personal sympathies more strongly than in any of the others. He appears as a Roman of the old school, but still more, as an oligarchical partisan. Not that he indulged in chimerical plans for restoring the Republic. That he saw was impossible; nor had he much sympathy with those who strove for it. But his resignation to the Empire as an unavoidable evil does not inspire him with contentment. His blood boils with indignation at the steady repression of the liberty of action of the old families, which the instincts of imperialism forced upon the monarchs from the very beginning; nor do the general security of life and property, the bettered condition of the provinces, and the long peace that had allowed the internal resources of the empire to be developed, make amends for what he considers the iniquitous tyranny practised upon the higher orders of the state. Thus he writes under a strong sense of injustice, which reaches its culmination in treating of the earlier reigns. But this does not provoke him into intemperate language, far less into misrepresentation of fact; if he disdained to complain, he disdained still more to falsify. But he cannot help insinuating; and his insinuations are of such searching power that, once suggested, they grasp hold of the mind, and will not be shaken off.

Of all Latin authors none has so much power over the reader as Tacitus. If by eloquence is meant the ability to persuade, then he is the most eloquent historian that ever existed. To doubt his judgment is almost to be false to the conscience of history. Nevertheless, his saturnine portraits have been severely criticised both by English and French historians, and the arguments for the defence put forward with enthusiasm as well as force. The result is, that Tacitus's verdict has been shaken, but not reversed. The surpa.s.sing vividness of such characters as his Tiberius and Nero forbids us to doubt their substantial reality. But once his prepossessions are known and discounted, the student of his works can give a freer attention to the countervailing facts, which Tacitus is too honourable to hide.

After long wavering between the two styles, he adopted the brilliant one fas.h.i.+onable in his time, but he has glorified it in adopting it. Periods such as those of Pliny would be frigid in him. He still retains some traces (though they are few) of the rhetorician. In an interesting pa.s.sage he complains of the comparative poverty of his subject as contrasted with that of Livy: ”Ingentia illi bella, expugnationes urbium, fusos captosque reges libero egressu memorabant; n.o.bis in arcto et inglorius labor. Immota quippe aut modice lacessita pax maestae urbis res et princeps proferendi imperii incuriosus;”--[53] but he certainly had no cause to complain. The sombre annals of the Empire were not less amenable to a powerful dramatic treatment than the vigorous and aggressive youth of the Republic had been.

Nor does the story of guilt and horror depicted in the _Annals_ fall below even the finest scenes of Livy; in intensity of interest it rather exceeds them.

Tacitus intended to have completed his labours by a history of Augustus's reign, which, however, he did not live to write. This is a great misfortune. But he has left us his opinion on the character and policy of Augustus in the first few chapters of the _Annals_, and a very valuable opinion it is. What makes the historian more bitter in the _Annals_ than elsewhere, is the feeling that it was the early emperors who inaugurated the evil policy which their successors could hardly help themselves in carrying out. When the failure of Piso's conspiracy destroyed the last hopes of the aristocracy, it was hardly possible to retain for the later emperors the same intense hatred that had been felt for those whose tyranny fostered, and then remorselessly crushed, the resistance of the patrician party. The _Annals_, therefore, though the most concentrated, powerful, and dramatic of Tacitus's works, hardly rank quite so high in a purely historical point of view as the _Histories_; as Merivale has said, _they are all satire_.

At the same time, his facts are quite trustworthy. We know from Pliny's letters that he took great pains to get at the most authentic sources, and beyond doubt he was well qualified to judge in cases of conflicting evidence. These diverse excellences, in the opinion of Niebuhr and Arnold, place him indisputably at the head of the Roman historians. We cannot better close this account than in the eloquent words of a French writer: [54] ”In Tacitus subjectivity predominates; the anger and pity which in turn never cease to move him, give to his style an expressiveness, a rich glow of sentiment, of which antiquity affords no other example. This constant union between the dramatic and pathetic elements, together with the directness, energy, and reality of the language, must act with Irresistible force upon every reader. Tacitus is a poet; but a poet that has a spirit of his own. Was he as fully appreciated in his own day as he is in ours? We doubt it. The horrors, the degeneracy of his time, awake in his brooding soul the altogether modern idea of national expiation and national chastis.e.m.e.nt. The historian rises to the sublimity of the judge.

He summons the guilty to his tribunal, and it is in the name of the Future and of Posterity that he p.r.o.nounces the implacable and irreversible verdict.”

The poetical and Greek constructions with which Tacitus's style abounds, the various artifices whereby he relieves the tedium of monotonous narrative, or attains brevity or variety, have been so often a.n.a.lysed in well-known grammatical treatises that it is unnecessary to do more than allude to them here.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE REIGNS OF HADRIAN AND THE ANTONINES (117-180 A.D.).

We now enter on a new and in some respects a very interesting era. From the influence exerted on the last period by the family of Seneca, we might call it the epoch of Spanish Latinity; from the similar influence now exerted by the African school, we might call the present the epoch of African Latinity. Its chief characteristic is ill-digested erudition.

Various circ.u.mstances combined to make a certain amount of knowledge general, and the growing cosmopolitan sentiment excited a strong interest in every kind of exotic learning. With increased diffusion depth was necessarily sacrificed. The emperor set the example of travel, which was eagerly followed by his subjects. Hence a large ma.s.s of information was acquired, which injuriously affected those who possessed it. They appear, as it were, crushed by its weight, and become learned triflers or uninteresting pedants. By far the most considerable writer of this period was Suetonius, but then he had been trained in the school of Pliny, of whom for several years he was an intimate friend. Hadrian himself (76-138 A.D.), among his many other accomplishments, gave some attention to letters. Speeches, treatises of various kinds, anecdotes, and a collection of oracles, are ascribed to his pen. Also certain epigrams which we still possess, and chiefly that exquisite address to his soul, composed on his death-bed: [1]

”Animala vagula blandula Hospes comesque corporis Quae nunc abibis in loca, Pallidula rigida nudula?

Nec ut soles dabis iocos.”

Hadrian was also a patron of letters, though an inconstant one. His vanity led him to wish to have distinguished writers about him, but it also led him to wish to be ranked as himself the most distinguished. His own taste was good; he appreciated and copied the style of the republican age; but he encouraged the pedantic Fronto, whose taste was corrupt and ruinously influential. So that while with one hand he benefited literature, with the other he injured it.

The birth year of C. SUETONIUS TRANQUILLUS is uncertain, but may be a.s.signed with probability to 75 A.D. [2] We may here remark the extraordinary reticence of the later writers on the subject of their younger days. Seneca alone is communicative. All the rest show an oblivion or indifference most unlike the genial communicativeness of Cicero, Horace, and Ovid. His father was one Suetonius Lenis, a military tribune and wearer of the angusticlave. Muretus, however, desirous to give him a more ill.u.s.trious origin, declares that his father was the Suetonius Paulinus mentioned by Tacitus. We learn a good deal of his younger days from the letters of Pliny, and can infer something of his character also.

In conformity with what we know from other sources of the tendencies of the age, we find that he was given to superst.i.tion. [3] At this time (_i.e._ under Trajan) Suetonius wavered between a literary and a political career. Pliny was able and willing to help him in the latter, and got him appointed to the office of tribune (102 A.D.). [4] Some years later (112 A.D.), he procured for him the _jus trium liberorum_, though Suetonius was childless. We see that Augustus's excellent inst.i.tutions had already turned into an abuse. The means for keeping up the population had become a compensation for domestic unhappiness. [5] Suetonius practised for some years at the bar, and seems to have ama.s.sed a considerable fortune. We find him begging Pliny to negotiate for him for the purchase of an estate.

[6] Shortly after this he was promoted to be Hadrian's secretary, which gave him an excellent opportunity of enriching his stores of knowledge from the imperial library. Of this opportunity he made excellent use, and after his disgrace, owing, it is said, to too great familiarity with, the empress (119 A.D.), he devoted his entire time to those multifarious and learned works, which gave him the position of the Varro of the imperial period. His life was prolonged for many years, probably until 160 A.D. [7]

The writings of Suetonius were encyclopaedic. Following the culture of his day, he seems to have written partly in Greek, partly in Latin. This had been also the practice of Cicero, and of many of the greatest republican authors. The difference between them lies, not in the fact that Suetonius's Greek was better, but that his Latin is less good. Instead of a national it is fast becoming a cosmopolitan dialect. Still Suetonius tried to form his taste on older and purer models, and is far removed from the denationalised school of Fronto and Apuleius.

The t.i.tles of his works are a little obscure. Both, following Suidas, gives the following. (1) _peri ton par Ellaesi paidion Biblion_, a book of games. This is quoted or paraphrased by Tzetzes, [8] and several excerpts from it are preserved in Eustathius. It was no doubt written in Greek, but perhaps in Latin also. (2) _peri ton para Romaiois theorion kai agonon biblia g_, an account in three books of the Roman spectacles and games, of which an interesting fragment on the Troia ludus is preserved by Tertullian. [9] (3) _peri tou kata Romaious eniautou biblion_, an archaeological investigation into the theory of the Roman year. (4) _peri ton en tois bibliois saemeion_, on the signification of rare words. (5) _peri taes Kikeronos politeias_, a justification of the conduct of Cicero, in opposition to some of his now numerous detractors, especially one Didymus, a conceited Alexandrine, called Chalcenterus, ”the man of iron digestion,” on account of his immense powers of work. (6) _peri onomaton kai ideas esthaematon kai upodaematon_, a treatise on the different names of shoes, coats, and other articles of dress. This may seem a trivial subject; but, after Carlyle, we can hardly deny its capability of throwing light on great matters. Besides, in ancient times dress had a religious origin, and in many cases a religious significance. And two pa.s.sages from the work preserved by Servius, [10] are important from this point of view.

(7) _peri dusphaemon lexeon aetoi blasphaemiom_, an inquiry into the origin and etymology of the various terms of abuse employed in conversation and literature. This was almost certainly written in Greek.

(8) _peri Romaes kai ton en autae nomimon kai aethon biblia b_, a succinct account of the chief Roman customs, of which only a short pa.s.sage on the Triumph has come down to us through Isidore. [11] (9) _Syngenikon Kaisaron_, [12] a biography of the twelve Caesars, divided into eight books. (10) _Stemma Romaion andron episaemon_, a gallery of ill.u.s.trious men, the plan of which was followed by Jerome in his history of the worthies of the church. But Suetonius's catalogue seems to have been confined to those eminent in literature, and to have treated only of poets, orators, historians, philosophers, grammarians, and rhetoricians.

Of this we possess considerable fragments, especially the account of the grammarians, and the lives of Terence, Horace, and Pliny. (11) _peri episaemon p.o.r.non_, an account of those courtesans who had become renowned through their wit, beauty, or genius. (12) _De Vitiis Corporalibus_, a list of bodily defects, written perhaps to supplement the medical works of Celsus and Scribonius Largus. (13) _De Inst.i.tutione Officiorum_, a manual of rank as fixed by law, and of social and court etiquette. This, did we possess it, would be highly interesting, and might throw light on many now obscure points. (14) _De Regibus_, in three books, containing short biographies of the most renowned monarchs in each of the three divisions of the globe, treated in his usual style of a string of facts coupled with a list of virtues and vices. (15) _De Rebus Variis_, a sort of _ana_, of which we can detect but few, and those insignificant, notices. (16) _Prata_, or miscellaneous subjects, in ten or perhaps twelve books, which work was greatly admired not only in the centuries immediately succeeding, but also throughout the Middle Ages. It is extremely probable, as Teuffel thinks, that many of the foregoing treatises may really have been simply portions of the _Prata_ cited under their separate names. The first eight books were confined to national antiquities and other similar points of interest; the rest were given to natural science and that sort of popular philosophy so much in vogue at the time, which finds a parallel between every fact of the physical universe and some phenomenon of the human body or mind. They were modelled on Varro's writings, which to a large extent they superseded, except for great writers like Augustine, who went back to the fountain head. [13] It is uncertain whether Suetonius treated history; but a work on the wars between Pompey and Caesar, Antony and Octavian, is indicated by some notices in Dio Ca.s.sius and Jerome. All these writings, however, are lost, and the sole work by which we can form an estimate of Suetonius's genius is his lives of the Caesars, which we fortunately possess almost entire.

Suetonius possessed in a high degree some of the most essential qualifications of a biographer. He was minute, laborious, and accurate in his investigation of facts; he neglected nothing, however trivial or even offensive, which he thought threw light upon the character or circ.u.mstances of those he described. And he is completely impartial; it would perhaps be more correct to say indifferent. His accounts have been well compared by a French writer to the _proces verbal_ of the law courts.