In both parts of the Annals, he displays the same spirit of contradiction; first he praises, then condemns the same things; in the last part he defends Popular Revels (XIV. 20) and objects to them immediately afterwards (ibid); so in the first part he lauds luxury in the second book (33) and censures it in the third (53).
We find the same contradiction with respect to Augustus and deification; in the first book of the Annals we are told that if a man has temples reared to him and is worshipped in the likeness of a god, he commits a grievous wrong, because he deprives divine beings of all their honours: this it is stated was done by Augustus:—"Nihil Deorum honoribus relictum cum se templis et effigie numinum coli vellet" (An. I. 10). After this we should be mightily surprised, did we not know of the humour of the writer with whom we are dealing, to find it asserted in the fourth book, when the people of Lusitania and Boetica (now Portugal, Andalusia and Granada), offer to erect a temple to Tiberius, and he refuses (IV. 37, 38), that that Emperor "showed degeneracy of spirit, because men of the highest virtue have ever sought the greatest honours: thus Hercules and Bacchus were added to the number of the Gods among the Greeks, and Romulus among the Romans: accordingly that Augustus who hoped for deification chose the nobler part, for when we scorn fame we scorn the virtues:—"quidam, ut degeneris animi, interpretabantur: optumos quippe mortalium altissima cupere. Sic Herculem et Liberum apud Graecos; Quirinum apud nos, deum numero, additos. Melius Augustum, qui speraverit … contemtu famae, contemni virtutes" (IV. 38).
VIII. A few words, in conclusion, may be said about the oldest manuscript containing the first six, and, consequently, all the books of the Annals. This, which, it has been stated, is the First Florence MS., I take to be the identical one that came out of the Abbey of Corvey through the hands of Arcimboldi, because, like its mendacious brother, the Second Florence, it bears upon it the unmistakable stamp of an impudent forgery. Just as the Second Florence pretends to be of the fourth century, if not earlier, from having the attestation of Salustius the Philosopher, so the First Florence professes to be as old as, at the very least, the twelfth century, from being written in characters, which, Taurellus says (Praef. ad Pand. Floren.), are the same as those in the Florentine MS. of the Pandects of Justinian. Now, the Florentine Pandects, which were found at Amalfi, were plundered from that town and taken to Pisa in 1137 by Lotharius Saxe after his successful war with Pope Innocent II., though the two costly volumes were not first deposited in the Grand Duke's Library at Florence until 1406.
Danesius, Bishop of Lavaur (in Languedoc), also bears testimony to the great antiquity of the First Florence MS. But this was nineteen years after the first publication of all the Annals in Rome, it being in 1534 that Danesius, examining it with other ancient works, pronounced upon its very old age.
Ernesti, in his preface to the works of Tacitus, quotes a passage from a letter of Graevius to his friend Heinsius where the great Hellenist is of opinion that the MS. bore the marks of being copied from a supposititious and half learned original; "exemplar, unde illud fluxit, mendosum et ab semidocto interpolatum" (Tom. IV. Coll. Burm. p. 496). But suppose that the manuscript is no copy, but, as I maintain, an original, then the opinion of Graevius becomes extremely valuable in this inquiry, because it actually corroborates what I have said about the manuscript,—that it was transcribed by an ignorant monk, and that it is an audacious forgery.
We have, then, no evidence whatsoever that can be relied upon of the great antiquity of this manuscript: on the contrary what we do know about it as a fact is utterly subversive of such an assumption: this copy in the Mediceo-Laurentian Library in Florence of all the Annals of Tacitus cannot be traced further back than to the possession of a man who flourished in the days of Leo X. and the Emperor Maximilian I.,—Johannes Jocundus of Verona; so that it turns out, on careful investigation that all positive knowledge of this MS. stops at the commencement of the sixteenth century, exactly as all positive knowledge of the other Florentine MS. stops at the commencement of the fifteenth century.
IX. I have now done; and think that I have said quite enough for the spuriousness of the Annals never to be hereafter argued as a moot point, but accepted as an established fact. I need not go into further consideration; because further consideration cannot give more weight to what has been put forward. I, therefore, pause, assured that with only these few facts and observations placed before him, the reader has come to the same conclusion as myself, that, strange as it may be, yet, nevertheless, there is truth in the theory now started for the first time, I dare say, to the amazement of the reader, as to the amazement of everybody, that Tacitus is, and has been, for century after century, wrongly accredited with the authorship of the Annals. It is to dispel all cavil about this, that I have examined the History and the Annals from every imaginable point of view, so as to enable the reader to see the two works as clearly as they can be seen—not that the reader has seen them as clearly as objects are seen under the open sky by the blaze of the noontide sun; still I hope that he has seen them, as objects in broad day are seen,—where there must he some shadows in corners,—in a room, when all the blinds are drawn up and all the windows are thrown open.
T H E E N D.
[ENDNOTES]
[Endnote 013] Here we find the most learned Father of the Church using "volumen" in an unusual acceptation, not as a whole work, nor a part of a literary composition rolled into a scroll among the ancients, or separately bound among ourselves, but a division of a subject in the same "volume," just as Cornelius Nepos, once, and once only,—in his Life of Atticus (16),—speaks of the sixteen "books" of Letters which Cicero addressed to Atticus: "Sexdecim volumina Epistolarum … ad Atticum missarum"; yet three or four "books" must have formed a "volumen," when we find Ovid, in his "Tristia" (III. 14, 19) speaking of the "five volumes" that contained his Metamorphoses:—