In those fearful times he himself says, that “as old Rome had witnessed the greatest glories of liberty, so her descendants had been cast down to the lowest depths of slavery; and would have been deprived of the use of memory, as well as of language, if it were equally in man’s power to forget as to be silent.”[[1225]] In such times prudence was a duty, and daring courage would have been unavailing rashness. In his praise of Agricola, and his blame of Pætus, he enunciates the principles which regulate his own conduct—that to endanger yourself without the slightest prospect of benefiting your country is mere ostentatious ambition. “Sciant,” he writes, “quibus moris illicita mirari, posse etiam sub malis principibus magnos viros esse; obsequiumque ac modestiam, si industria ac vigor adsint, eo laudis excedere quo plerique per abrupta, sed in nullum reipublicæ usum ambitiosa morte inclaruerunt.”[[1226]] Again, “Thrasea Pætus sibi causam periculi fecit, cæteris libertatis initium non præbuit.”[[1227]]
In the style of Tacitus the form is always subordinate to the matter; the ideas maintain their due supremacy over the language in which they are conveyed. There is none of that striving after epigrammatic terseness which savours of affectation. His brevity, like that which characterizes the style of Thucydides, is the necessary condensation of a writer whose thoughts flow more quickly than his pen can express them. Hence his sentences are suggestive of far more than they express: they are enigmatical hints of deep and hidden meaning, which keep the mind active and the attention alive, and delight the reader with the pleasures of discovery and the consciousness of difficulties overcome. Nor is this natural and unintentional brevity unsuitable to the cautious reserve with which all were tutored to speak and think of political subjects in perilous times. It is extraordinary how often a similarity between his mind and that of Thucydides inadvertently discovers itself—not only in his mode of thinking, but also in his language, even in his grammatical constructions, especially in his frequent substitution of attraction for government, in instances of condensed construction, and in the connexion of clauses grammatically different, although they are metaphysically the same.
Nor is his brevity dry or harsh—it is enlivened by copiousness, variety, and poetry. He scarcely ever repeats the same idea in the same form. No author is richer in synonymous words, or arranges with more varied skill the position of words in a sentence. As for poetic genius, his language is highly figurative; no prose writer deals more largely in prosopopœia: his descriptions of scenery and incidents are eminently picturesque; his characters dramatic; the expression of his own sentiments and feelings as subjective as lyric poetry.
CHAPTER VII.
C. SUETONIUS TRANQUILLUS—HIS BIOGRAPHY—SOURCES OF HIS HISTORY—HIS GREAT FAULT—Q. CURTIUS RUFUS—TIME WHEN HE FLOURISHED DOUBTFUL—HIS BIOGRAPHY OF ALEXANDER—EPITOMES OF L. ANNÆUS FLORUS—SOURCES WHENCE HE DERIVED THEM.
C. Suetonius Tranquillus.
C. Suetonius Tranquillus[[1228]] was the son of Suetonius Lenis, who served as tribunus angusticlavus of the thirteenth legion at the battle of Bedriacum, in which the Emperor Otho was defeated by Vitellius. The time of his birth is uncertain; but from a passage at the end of his Life of Nero[[1229]] it may be inferred that he was born very soon after the death of that emperor, which took place A. D. 68; for in it he mentions that, when twenty years subsequent to Nero’s death, a false Nero appeared, he was just arriving at manhood (adolescens.) The knowledge of language and rhetorical taste displayed in the remains of his works on these subjects prove that he was well instructed in these branches of a Roman liberal education: and a letter of the younger Pliny,[[1230]] whose intimate friend he was, speaks of him as an advocate by profession. This letter represents him as unwilling to plead a cause, which he had undertaken, because he was frightened by a dream. It is probable that this anecdote is an authentic one, because so many examples occur in his memoirs of his superstitious belief in dreams, omens, ghosts, and prodigies.[[1231]]
The affectionate regard which Pliny entertained for his friend was very great, and led him to form too high an estimate of his talents as a writer and an historian. On one occasion he used his influence at court to get him a tribuneship; which, however, he did not accept.[[1232]] On another he obtained for him, from Trajan,[[1233]] the “jus trium liberorum,” although he had no children. But this privilege, as in the case of Martial, was sometimes granted under similar circumstances. In this letter, which he wrote to the Emperor, he speaks of Suetonius as a man of the greatest probity, integrity, and learning; and adds that, after the experience of a long acquaintance, the more he knows of him the more he loves him.
Subsequently Suetonius became private secretary (Magister Epistolarum) to Hadrian,[[1234]] but was deprived of the situation. Owing to the only sources of information respecting Suetonius being his own works, and the few scattered notices in the letters of Plinius Secundus, nothing more is known respecting his life.
A catalogue of his numerous writings is given by Suidas:[[1235]] but, with the exception of the Lives of the Twelve Cæsars, it does not contain his chief extant works. These are notices of illustrious grammarians and rhetoricians, and the lives of the poets Terence, Horace, Persius, Lucan, and Juvenal.
Niebuhr[[1236]] believed that the history, or rather the biography of the Cæsars was written when Suetonius was still young, before he was secretary to Hadrian, and previous to the publication of the Histories of Tacitus. If so, he neither enjoyed the opportunities of consulting the imperial records which his situation at court would have given him, nor of profiting by the accurate guidance and profound reflection of Tacitus. Krause,[[1237]] on the other hand, adduces many parallelisms between the language of Tacitus and Suetonius; and as Tacitus did not publish his earliest historical work before A. D. 117,[[1238]] assumes that Suetonius did not write his biographies until after the accession of Hadrian.