Germania and Agricola | Page 4

often an important, not to say, essential
means of elucidating his writings.
CAIUS CORNELIUS TACITUS was born in the early part of the reign
of Nero, and near the middle of the first century in the Christian Era.
The probability is, that he was the son of Cornelius Tacitus, a man of
equestrian rank, and procurator of Belgic Gaul under Nero; that he was

born at Interamna in Umbria, and that he received a part of his
education at Massilia (the modern Marseilles), which was then the
Athens of the West, a Grecian colony, and a seat of truly Grecian
culture and refinement. It is not improbable that he enjoyed also the
instructions of Quintilian, who for twenty years taught at Rome that
pure and manly eloquence, of which his Institutes furnish at once such
perfect rules, and so fine an example. If we admit the Dialogue de
Claris Oratoribus to be the work of Tacitus, his beau-idéal of the
education proper for an orator was no less comprehensive, no less
elevated, no less liberal, than that of Cicero himself; and if his theory of
education was, like Cicero's, only a transcript of his own education, he
must have been disciplined early in all the arts and sciences--in all the
departments of knowledge which were then cultivated at Rome; a
conclusion in which we are confirmed also by the accurate and minute
acquaintance which he shows, in his other works, with all the affairs,
whether civil or military, public or private, literary or religious, both of
Greece and Rome.
The boyhood and youth of Tacitus did, indeed, fall on evil times.
Monsters in vice and crime had filled the throne, till their morals and
manners had infected those of all the people. The state was distracted,
and apparently on the eve of dissolution. The public taste, like the
general conscience, was perverted. The fountains of education were
poisoned. Degenerate Grecian masters were inspiring their Roman
pupils with a relish for a false science, a frivolous literature, a vitiated
eloquence, an Epicurean creed, and a voluptuous life.
But with sufficient discernment to see the follies and vices of his age,
and with sufficient virtue to detest them, Tacitus must have found his
love of wisdom and goodness, of liberty and law, strengthened by the
very disorders and faults of the times. If the patriot ever loves a
well-regulated freedom, it will be in and after the reign of a tyrant,
preceded or followed by what is still worse, anarchy. If the pure and the
good ever reverence purity and goodness, it will be amid the general
prevalence of vice and crime. If the sage ever pants after wisdom, it is
when the fountains of knowledge have become corrupted. The reigns of
Nero and his immediate successors were probably the very school, of
all others, to which we are most indebted for the comprehensive
wisdom, the elevated sentiments, and the glowing eloquence of the

biographer of Agricola, and the historian of the Roman Empire. His
youth saw, and felt, and deplored the disastrous effects of Nero's
inhuman despotism, and of the anarchy attending the civil wars of
Galba, Otho, and Vitellius. His manhood saw, and felt, and exulted in
the contrast furnished by the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, though the
sun of the latter too soon went down, in that long night of gloom, and
blood, and terror, the tyranny of Domitian. And when, in the reigns of
Nerva and Trajan, he enjoyed the rare felicity of thinking what he
pleased, and speaking what he thought, he was just fitted in the
maturity of his faculties, and the extent of his observation and
reflections, "to enroll slowly, year after year, that dreadful reality of
crimes and sufferings, which even dramatic horror, in all its license of
wild imagination, can scarcely reach, the long unvarying catalogue of
tyrants and executioners, and victims that return thanks to the gods and
die, and accusers rich with their blood, and more mighty as more
widely hated, amid the multitudes of prostrate slaves, still looking
whether there may not yet have escaped some lingering virtue which it
may be a merit to destroy, and having scarcely leisure to feel even the
agonies of remorse in the continued sense of the precariousness of their
own gloomy existence." [Brown's Philosophy of the Mind.]
Tacitus was educated for the bar, and continued to plead causes,
occasionally at least, and with not a little success, even after he had
entered upon the great business of his life, as a writer of history. We
find references to his first, and perhaps his last appearance, as an
advocate, in the Letters of Pliny, which are highly complimentary. The
first was, when Pliny was nineteen, and Tacitus a little older (how
much we are not