‘The style of the Historiae still retains some traces of the influence of Cicero: it has not yet been pressed tight into the short sententiae which were its final and most characteristic development, but shows in a marked degree the influence of Vergil.’—Cruttwell.
In the Historiae, as Tacitus himself says, ‘the secret of the imperial system was divulged—that an emperor could be made elsewhere than at Rome’; or, in other words, that the imperial system was a military and not a civil institution.
(5) The Annales, ab excessu divi Augusti, in sixteen Books, containing the history of the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, 14-68 A.D. There are extant only Books I-IV, parts of V and VI, and XI-XVI.
‘The old criticism, tracing the characteristics of the style of Tacitus to poetic colouring (almost wholly Vergilian) and to the study of brevity and of variety, is well founded. They may be explained by the fact that he was the most finished pleader of an age which required above all that its orators should be terse, brilliant, and striking, and by his own painful consciousness of the dull monotony and repulsive sadness of great part of his subject, which needed the help of every sort of variety to stimulate the flagging interest of the reader.’—Furneaux.
His aim as an historian is best given in his own words: ‘I hold it the chief office of history to rescue virtue from oblivion, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds’ (Ann. iii. 65).
The greatest of Roman historians.
PUBLIUS TERENTIUS AFER, circ. 185-159 B.C.
1. Life
TERENCE.
Terence was born probably at Carthage, reached Rome as a slave-boy, and passed there into the possession of a rich and educated Senator, P. Terentius Lucanus, by whom he was educated and manumitted, taking from him the name of Publius Terentius the African. ‘A small literary circle of the Roman aristocracy admitted young Terence to their intimate companionship; and soon he was widely known as making a third in the friendship of Gaius Laelius with the first citizen of the Republic, the younger Scipio Africanus. Six plays had been subjected to the criticism of this informal academy of letters and produced on the stage, when Terence undertook a prolonged visit to Greece for the purpose of further study. He died of fever in the next year, 159 B.C., at the early age of twenty-six.’—Mackail.