Tacitus and Bracciolini. The Annals Forged in the XVth Century

by John Wilson Ross

THE CHARACTER OF BRACCIOLINI.

I. The audacity of the forgery accounted for by the mean opinion Bracciolini had of the intelligence of men.—II. The character and tone of the last Six Books of the Annals exemplified by what is said of Sabina Poppaea, Sagitta, Pontia and Messalina.—III. A few errors that must have proceeded from Bracciolini about the Colophonian Oracle of Apollo Clarius, the Household Gods of the Germans, Gotarzes, Bardanes and, above all, Nineveh.—IV. The estimate taken of human nature by the writer of the Annals the same as that taken by Bracciolini.—V. The general depravity of mankind as shown in the Annals insisted upon in Bracciolini's Dialogue "De Infelicitate Principum".

I. There is a great difference between the first six books of the Annals and the last six books; the latter portion is more historical, and less biographical than the first portion: there is an obvious attempt to assimilate it as closely as possible to the work of Tacitus; and any material difference in the character of the two productions is not to be detected at a superficial glance. Hence many most intelligent readers are led astray in believing that the Annals and the History of Tacitus proceeded from the same hand, from not sufficiently bearing in mind that whatever a history may be, the general character must always be the same; plots and intrigues being alike, as well as stratagems and revolutions; also persons and passions: the reason is clear: man ever remains the same, affording the same examples of virtues and vices, and carrying on wars in the same way, according to interest and ambition, while the most important events in which he plays a part resemble in having their origin from trivial causes, as rivers, even the mightiest, take their source from insignificant springs.

But while nobody discerns any such material difference in the character of the Annals and the History of Tacitus as to be struck with wonder, everybody is filled with amazement at there being in the two works two such very different conceptions of historical composition. In the History only full light is thrown on important events and leading characters: that this may shine the brighter every common action is thrown into the shade, and every small individual passed over unmentioned. But the pages in the last six books of the Annals are crowded with incidents, great and small, and figures, good, bad and indifferent. Contrary also to Tacitus, who disposes materials in a just order, arranging those together that refer to the same thing at different times, the writer of the Annals speaks of cognate things, that should be associated, separately, as they occur from year to year, thus reducing his narrative from the height of a general history to the level of a mere diary.

The audacity of the forgery is here something absolutely marvellous;—and it never would have been attempted by any one who was not made of the stuff of Bracciolini: it was the stuff that makes a forger: anyone with proper appreciation of men's intelligence would not have dared to do this; but, instead of regarding the majority of his kind as sagacious, or even more so than they are, and knowing much, or more than they do,—as is the case with well-disposed people,—Bracciolini, who was far from being of a benevolent nature, fell into the very opposite extreme, of looking upon men as remarkably stupid and ignorant. Nothing is more common than meeting in his works with contemptuous disparagements of his kind; he scoffs at human nature for its deficiency of understanding; he does not hesitate decrying its want of thought, as in his Essay "De Miseriâ Humanae Conditionis": "we must at times recollect," says he, "that we are men, silly and shallow in our nature":—"aliquando nos esse homines meminerimus, hoc est, imbecillis fragilisque naturae" (p. 130); or, "I admit the silliness of mankind to be great": "fateor—magnam esse humani generis imbecillitatem" (p. 90); or, "Knowledge is cultivated by a few on account of the general stupidity": "quoniam communi stultitia a paucis virtus colitur" (p. 9l): pretty well this for one work. Then opening his "Historia Disceptativa Convivalis," the reader lights on him sneering at the "shallowness and silliness of his age":—"haec fragilis atque imbecilla aetas" (p. 32). As in his elaborate and carefully conned works, so in his Epistles thrown off on the spur of the moment,—as when he is inviting his friend Bartolomeo Fazio to stay with him in Florence, he continues: "Though I have lived in this city now for a great many years, from my youth upwards, yet every day as if a fresh resident I am overcome with amazement at the number of the remarkable objects, and very often am roused to enthusiasm at the sight of those public buildings which fools, from the stupidity of their understandings, speak of as erected by supernatural beings":—"quamvis in ea jam pluribus annis ab ipsa juventute fuerim versatus, tamen quotidie tamquam novus incola tantarum rerum admiratione obstupesco, recreoque persaepe animum visu eorum aedificiorum, quae stulti propter ingenii imbecillitatem a daemonibus facta dicunt" (Ep. IX. Bartol. Facii Epist. p. 79, Flor. Ed. 1745).

II. With such a low notion of men's intelligence and the stupidity of his age (though it was a clever one,—at least, so far as Italy was concerned, the country of which he had the closest knowledge and with which he had the most constant intercourse), it is to be expected,—quite natural, in fact, that he should have regarded lightly the difficulties he had to encounter in his endeavours to imitate Tacitus; and though he must have been thoroughly conscious that it was not in his power victoriously to surmount them, yet he cared not, for he did not fear detection, viewing, as he did, with such withering and lordly disdain the want of perspicacity which, in his fancy, characterized his species. He worked on, then, as best he could, with courage and confidence; every now and then doing things that never would have been done by Tacitus: the story, for example, of Sabina Poppaea in the 14th book; Tacitus would have surely passed it over as, though having some relation to the public, coming within the province of biography. Unquestionably, Tacitus would have rejected as strictly unhistorical the dark tale of murder and adultery of the tribune of the people, Sagitta, and the private woman, Pontia, which has no more to do with the historical affairs of the Romans, than a villainous case of adultery in the Divorce Court, or a monstrous murder tried at the Old Bailey is in any way connected with the public transactions of Great Britain. [Endnote 231]

What history, then, we have in the last six books of the Annals does not remind us in its character of the history taken note of by Tacitus.

The tone and treatment, too, are not his.

The Jesuit, Réné Rapin, in his Comparisons of the Great Men of Antiquity (Réflexions sur l'Histoire, p. 211), may, with a violent seizure of ecstacy, fall, like a genuine Frenchman, into a fit of enthusiasm over the description, as "exquisite in delicacy and elegance" ("tout y est décrit dans une délicatesse et dans une élégance exquise" says he), of the lascivious dancing of Messalina and her wanton crew of Terpsichorean revellers when counterfeiting the passions and actions of the phrenzied women-worshippers of Bacchus celebrating a vintage in the youth of the world, when the age was considered to be as good as gold: the gay touches in the lively picture may be introduced with sufficient warmth to enrapture the chaste Jesuit priest, and judiciously enough to contrast boldly with the dreadful, tragic details of the shortly ensuing death of the Empress; but they are not circumstances that would have ever emanated with their emotional particularities from the solemn soul of Tacitus. The passage is only another powerful proof how absolutely ineffectual was the attempt of Bracciolini to render history after the style of the stern, majestic Roman.

III. Every now and then, too, the most extraordinary errors with respect to facts cannot be explained by the hypothesis that Tacitus wrote the Annals; for there could not have been such deviations from truth on the part of any Roman who lived in the time of the first Caesars: on the other hand, the errors are just of the character which makes it look uncommonly as if they were the unhappy blunders of a mediaeval or Renaissance writer such as Bracciolini. An instance or two will best illustrate what is meant.