[[5]] The origin, the meaning, the number, and even the gender of this word have all been disputed. Thus the use of the original is convenient as it avoids committal to any one of the numerous theories of theologians or Hebraists. Delitzsch has sifted the evidence with scrupulous care and impartiality, whilst Renan's monograph possesses both erudition and charm.
[[6]] What figures from the Comédie Humaine of Roman society of the first century throng the pages of Tacitus—Sejanus, Arruntius, Piso, Otho, Bassus, Caecina, Tigellinus, Lucanus, Petronius, Seneca, Corbulo, Burrus, Silius, Drusus, Pallas, and Narcissus; and those tragic women of the Annals—imperious, recklessly daring, beautiful or loyal—Livia, Messalina, Vipsania, the two Agrippinas, mothers of Caligula and of Nero, Urgulania, Sabina Poppaea, Epicharis, Lollia Paulina, Lepida, Calpurnia, Pontia, Servilia, and Acte!
[[7]] In Richard Greneway's translation, London, 1598, one of the earliest renderings of Tacitus into English, this passage stands as follows:
"When I heare of these and the like things, I can give no certaine judgement, whether the affaires of mortall men are governed by fate and immutable necessitie; or have their course and change by chaunce and fortune. For thou shalt finde, that as well those which were accounted wise in auncient times, as such as were imitators of their sect, do varie and disagree therein; some do resolutlie beleeve that the gods have no care of man's beginning or ending; no, not of man at all. Whereof it proceedeth that the vertuous are tossed and afflicted with so many miseries; and the vitious (vicious) and bad triumphe with so great prosperities. Contrarilie, others are of opinion that fate and destinie may well stand with the course of our actions: yet nothing at all depend of the planets or stars, but proceede from a connexion of naturall causes as from their beginning. And these graunt withall, that we have free choise and election what life to follow; which being once chosen, we are guided after, by a certain order of causes unto our end. Neither do they esteeme those things to be good or bad which the vulgar do so call."
Murphy's frequent looseness of phraseology, false elegance, and futile commentary, are nowhere more conspicuous than in his version of the sixth book of the Annals and of this paragraph in particular.
[[8]] Life, Love, Fame, and Death are themes of Petrarch's Triumphs. The same profound sense of the transiency of things, which meets us in the studied pages of his confessional—the Latin treatise De Contemptu Mundi—pervades these exquisite poems. Du Bellay's Antiquities, which Spenser's translation under the title of The Ruines of Rome has made familiar, were written after a visit to Rome in attendance upon the Cardinal du Bellay, and first published in 1558. The beautiful Songe sur Rome accompanied them. Two years later Du Bellay, then in his thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year, died. The preciousness of these poems is enhanced rather than diminished if we imagine that the friend of Ronsard endeavoured to wed the music of Villon's Ballades to the passing of empires and of Rome.
[[9]] In the generation succeeding that of St. Augustine, the fall of Rome formed the subject of a work in six books by Zosimus, an official of high rank at Constantinople. The fifth and sixth books deal with the period between the death of Theodosius and the capture of the city by Alaric (A.D. 395-410). Zosimus ascribes the disaster to the revolution effected in the life and conduct of the Romans by the new religion. The tone of the whole history is evidently inspired by the brilliant but irregular works of the Syrian Eunapius whom hero-worship and the regret for a lost cause blinded to all gave the imposing designs of the Emperor Julian.