Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II | Page 2

consuls were the twin towers of the world. But he never hoped
to see such days again. He realized that monarchy was essential to
peace, and that the price of freedom was violence and disorder. He had
no illusions about the senate. Fault and misfortune had reduced them to
nerveless servility, a luxury of self-abasement. Their meekness would
never inherit the earth. Tacitus pours scorn on the philosophic
opponents of the Principate, who while refusing to serve the emperor
and pretending to hope for the restoration of the republic, could
contribute nothing more useful than an ostentatious suicide. His own
career, and still more the career of his father-in-law Agricola, showed
that even under bad emperors a man could be great without dishonour.
Tacitus was no republican in any sense of the word, but rather a
monarchist _malgré lui_. There was nothing for it but to pray for good
emperors and put up with bad ones.
Those who decry Tacitus for prejudice against the Empire forget that he
is describing emperors who were indubitably bad. We have lost his

account of Vespasian's reign. His praise of Augustus and of Trajan was
never written. The emperors whom he depicts for us were all either
tyrannical or contemptible, or both: no floods of modern biography can
wash them white. They seemed to him to have degraded Roman life
and left no room for virtus in the world. The verdict of Rome had gone
against them. So he devotes to their portraiture the venom which the
fifteen years of Domitian's reign of terror had engendered in his heart.
He was inevitably a pessimist; his ideals lay in the past; yet he clearly
shows that he had some hope of the future. Without sharing Pliny's
faith that the millennium had dawned, he admits that Nerva and Trajan
have inaugurated 'happier times' and combined monarchy with some
degree of personal freedom.
There are other reasons for the 'dark shadows' in Tacitus' work. History
to a Roman was _opus oratorium,_ a work of literary art. Truth is a
great but not a sufficient merit. The historian must be not only narrator
but ornator rerum. He must carefully select and arrange the incidents,
compose them into an effective group, and by the power of language
make them memorable and alive. In these books Tacitus has little but
horrors to describe: his art makes them unforgettably horrible. The
same art is ready to display the beauty of courage and self-sacrifice.
But these were rarer phenomena than cowardice and greed. It was not
Tacitus, but the age, which showed a preference for vice. Moreover, the
historian's art was not to be used solely for its own sake. All ancient
history was written with a moral object; the ethical interest
predominates almost to the exclusion of all others. Tacitus is never
merely literary. The [Greek: semnotês] which Pliny notes as the
characteristic of his oratory, never lets him sparkle to no purpose. All
his pictures have a moral object 'to rescue virtue from oblivion and
restrain vice by the terror of posthumous infamy'.[2] His prime interest
is character: and when he has conducted some skilful piece of moral
diagnosis there attaches to his verdict some of the severity of a sermon.
If you want to make men better you must uncover and scarify their sins.
Few Christian moralists deal much in eulogy, and Tacitus' diatribes are
the more frequent and the more fierce because his was the morality not
of Christ but of Rome. 'The Poor' are as dirt to him: he can stoop to

immortalize some gleam of goodness in low life, but even then his
main object is by scorn of contrast to galvanize the aristocracy into
better ways. Only in them can true virtus grow. Their degradation
seems the death of goodness. Tacitus had little sympathy with the
social revolution that was rapidly completing itself, not so much
because those who rose from the masses lacked 'blood', but because
they had not been trained in the right traditions. In the decay of
Education he finds a prime cause of evil. And being a
Roman--wherever he may have been born--he inevitably feels that the
decay of Roman life must rot the world. His eyes are not really open to
the Empire. He never seems to think that in the spacious provinces to
which the old Roman virtues had taken flight, men were leading happy,
useful lives, because the strong hand of the imperial government had
come to save them from the inefficiency of aristocratic governors. This
narrowness of view accounts for much of Tacitus' pessimism.
Recognition of the atmosphere in which Tacitus wrote and the objects
at which his history aimed helps one to understand why it sometimes
disappoints modern expectations. Particular scenes are seared on our
memories: persons stand