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 surpassing 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 fashionable 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 passage 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; nobis 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 chastisement. 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 pronounces 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 analysed 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 circumstances 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 mass 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."