HOW THE ANNALS DIFFERS FROM THE HISTORY.
I. In the qualities of the writers; and why that difference.
--II. In the narrative, and in what respect.--III. In style and
language.--IV. The reputation Tacitus has of writing bad Latin
due to the mistakes of his imitator.
I. Statesmen learn the things which are of use to them in
government by reading the History, because Tacitus recounts the
actions of the world under the imperial rule of Rome. All men can
profit in the choice of morals from reading the Annals, on account
of its writer relating principally the actions of sovereign
princes and illustrious persons in their private capacity.
This diversity of treatment results from the difference in the
qualities of the writers. Tacitus possessed a consummate knowledge
of the true policy of States, and the use and extent of
government. Accordingly, he reveals measures necessary for the
successful carrying on of war, or the proper and equitable
administration of affairs in peace, while he places before us a
graphic and presumably true picture of the mode in which the
Romans ruled their Empire in the first century of the Christian
aera. The author of the Annals was acquainted with an entirely
different form and order of statesmanship and politics. Hence he
immerses us in crooked turnings of false policy and dark intrigues
of bad ambition, forcibly reminding us of what made the greatest
portion of the European art of government in the fifteenth century
towards the close of the mediaeval and the commencement of the
modern periods. He favours us with a paucity of maxims relating to
government in general, or the different branches and offices which
make up the body politic; but enters, with tedious fulness, into
the rise, operation, consequences and proper restraint of the
genuine passions and natural propensities of mankind in
individuals, public and private.
We search in vain in the History for any trace of the melancholy
that we find in the Annals; and in vain do we look in the Annals
for any pictures of virtue and lessons of wisdom which in the
History are taught us by bright examples and illustrious actions.
Had the same hand that wrote the Annals written the History, we
should have had in the latter work a very different treatment. The
record would have been dark and dismal, even to repulsion, the
opportunities being ample for an historian of gloomy disposition
to indulge his humour, when the character of the History is thus
described with truth in the Preface to Sir Henry Saville's
translation of it:--"In these four books we see all the miseries
of a torn and declining state; the empire usurped; the princes
murdered; the people wandering; the soldiers tumultuous; nothing
unlawful to him that hath power, and nothing so unsafe as to be
securely innocent." Then, after stating what we learn from the
examples of Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian, the writer adds:
"In them all, and in the state of Rome under them, we see the
calamities that follow civil war, where laws lie asleep, and all
things are judged by the sword." In going over such a dreary
period of human history, Tacitus is as composed and cheerful as if
he was dwelling on the gayest and brightest of themes.
The cause of this is to be found in the fact that there was
nothing to overshadow the soul of Tacitus with gloom. However
painful and dire may have been the constraint to other Romans
during the fifteen years' rule of Domitian, he had no ground of
complaint: far from that; for he says that he was advanced by that
Emperor further in dignity than by Vespasian and Titus. In the
reign of Trajan he must have been supremely happy; for he speaks
of it himself as "a time of rare felicity,"--"rara temporum
felicitate,"--when men might "think what they pleased and express
what they thought." His domestic life must have been blest by the
perfect devotion and tender attachment of a wife, who, then in her
prime, had surely verified the brilliant hopes of the promising
bride. (Agr. 9.) In the maturity of his days he lived again in his
children; for that he had children we know from the Emperor
Tacitus, a century and a half after, boasting of being his
descendant, a pride that was shared in the fifth century by
Polemius, a Prefect of Gaul, as we learn from a remark of the
Prefect's friend, Sidonius Apollinaris. He enjoyed the most
brilliant of literary reputations, as the anecdote sufficiently
reveals of a stranger, who, addressing him at a public spectacle,
and being informed that he must know him well from his writings,
remarked: "Then you must be either Tacitus or Pliny." He was happy
in the friendship of Pliny the Younger, and men as good, eminent
and distinguished as that elegant disciple of Cicero's.
There was then nothing, in the fortunes of Tacitus to make him
trenchant, biting and cynical; but, on the contrary, most gentle,
as he was, and most placid and benign. Such being his character, a
kind interpretation and a candid sense of actions and individuals
meet us on every page of his History. Still in enumerating the
virtues of eminent persons he does not omit their vices or
failings: his way of doing this is peculiar. He tells us Sabinus
served the State for five and thirty years with great distinction
at home and abroad, and was of unquestionable integrity, but adds
jestingly "he talked too much."--"Quinque et triginta stipendia in
republicâ fecerat, domi militiaeque clarus; innocentiam
justitiamque ejus non argueret: _sermonis nimium erat_."
(Hist. III. 75.) Otho and Vitellius quarrel and charge each other
with debaucheries and the grossest crimes; the historian then,
with dry humour, remarks, "neither was wrong":--"Mox, quasi
rixantes stupra et flagitia invicem objectavere: _neuter
falso._" (Hist. I. 74.) This witty and ridiculing vein does not
prevent him from being always kindly. The benignity of his nature
is seen in all his portraitures (which look, by the way, like the
portraitures of real men); it is observable in his character of
Licinius Mucianus (I. 10), Cornelius Fuscus (II. 86), Helvidius
Priscus (IV. 5), and others;--lovely portraits where defects or
peccadilloes are given along with real and positive virtues, and
in an antithetical manner. His antithetical manner is preserved in
the Annals; but, instead of blandness, we come across a propensity
to form unfavourable opinions of character and conduct, as when
the Athenians are designated "that scum of nations":--"colluviem
illam nationum" (II. 55); and Octavia, "the sprig of a gipsy
fiddler" [Endnote 074]:--"tibicinis Aegyptii subolem." (XIV. 61)
There is wit and ridicule in both works, but it is not the wit and
ridicule of the same individual; it is sprightly and amusing in
the History; it is ungracious and actually cruel in the Annals.
This difference in the writing of Tacitus and the author of the
Annals may be accounted for in many ways,--perhaps in none better
than this:--When Tacitus lived no one despaired of public cares
being attended to, or the plans of the wise being employed in
advancing the national welfare; but when the author of the Annals
lived, everybody despaired; private profligacy was as rampant as
public misery, and, amid the universal degeneracy, scheming
politicians disregarded the good and greatness of their country to
be intriguers at court for the improvement of their position.
Those were the times when Louis XI. supplied the places of the
ministers and marshals, the generals and admirals of France, the
Dunois, the La Tremoilles, the Brézés and the Chabannes with mere
creatures--new and obscure men who aided him in his artful schemes
and plans of government: he made his barber an ambassador, his
tailor a herald at arms, and his phlebotomist a chancellor: he
imposed enormous taxes on the people, and when the people
revolted, he ordered some of the ringleaders to be torn to pieces
alive by horses, and the others to be beheaded, as occurred at
Rheims, Angers, Alençon and Aurillac. Francis of Carrara, the Lord
of Padua, cruelly murdered the Venetian General, Galeaz of Mantua,
when the Doge and Council of Venice refused to ratify the terms of
a capitulation. Suspicion attached to the peace in which Ivan
Basilowitch lived and ruled in his palace at Moscow, surrounded
completely by a wooden wall. Enclosed, too, by a very large tract
of land, and in a most magnificent mansion which he built for
himself and his companions at Ripaglia, a place pleasantly
situated on the Lake of Geneva, Amedeus, the last Count and first
Duke of Savoy, so abandoned himself in his unobserved private and
solitary life, to all kinds of debaucheries, that Desmarets says
in his "Tableau des Papes" (p. 167) that from that originated the
phrase "to feast and make merry,"--"faire repaille"; yet this very
Amedeus afterwards acted the part of the only true Pope at Tonon
during the greater portion of the two years, 1440 and 1441, having
been elected to the Pontificate by the Fathers of Basle during the
Papacy of Eugenius IV. When the throne of Don Carlos, the Infant
of Navarre, was usurped, on the death of his mother, Blanche of
Navarre, by her husband, John I. of Aragon, a disgraceful quarrel
and a prolonged war ensued between father and son, when the son,
being repeatedly defeated in battle, was finally captured and cast
into prison by the father, and poisoned by his mother-in-law;
although he was deserving of a better fate, being an enlightened
prince who wrote a History of the Kings of Navarre, which is still
preserved in the archives of Pampeluna. A blind and feeble old
monarch, Muley Albohaçan, King of Granada, ordered the massacre of
a number of children by his first marriage; Ziska destroyed 550
churches and monasteries in Germany alone; and, for attempting
reforms in religion, Huss and Jerome of Prague were cruelly burnt
alive at the stake. These and similar horrors of those distressful
times, which find fit counterparts in revolting incidents in the
Annals, could not but deeply affect the soul of a man ardently
loving liberty and devoted to humanity as, unquestionably, was the
forger of that work: hence throughout his book the sting which
misfortune gives, and the moodiness which melancholy begets.
A spirit of liberty runs through his work; but the spirit is not
the same as that which pervades the History of Tacitus any more
than that his merits are like the Roman's in precision of
delineating actions and characters. The good temper of Tacitus
causes him to differ from other writers in the estimation of
character. He gives a better account of Galba and Vitellius than
Suetonius; of Vitellius and Nero than the abbreviator of Cassius
Dio, Xiphilinus, of Otho than Juvenal; and of Vinius than
Plutarch. Galba, who, in Suetonius, puts to death, with their
wives and children, the Governors in Spain and Gaul who did not
side with his party during the life of Nero, is, with Tacitus, a
prince remarkable for integrity and justice, and such faults as he
has are not, strictly speaking, his own, but those of worthless
friends who abuse his confidence, for we are told that it is the
pernicious counsels of Titus Vinius and Cornelius Laco, the former
depraved and profligate, the other slothful and incapable, which
first lose him the popular favour and ultimately prove his ruin:
"Invalidum senem Titus Vinnius et Cornelius Laeo, alter deterrimus
mortalium, alter ignavissimus, _odio flagitorum oneratum,
contemptu inertiae destruebant_." (Hist. I. 6 _in._) Vitellius,
who, according to Suetonius, puts one of his sons to death, and
poisons his mother, or starves her to death, is, in Tacitus, a
tender father doing all for his offspring that fortune permits him
to do in his excess of adversity (Hist. II. 59), and a respectful,
sensitive son seeking to abdicate his empire in order to rescue
his parent from impending evils. (Hist. III. 67.) Juvenal shows us
Otho carrying into the tumult of the battle-field the effeminacy
that disgraces him in time of peace; Tacitus represents Otho as an
active warrior (Hist. II. 11); and convinces us that there was
more of good than evil in that emperor. Xiphilinus paints the wife
of Vitellius as wickedly dissolute; Tacitus as a respectable woman
of whom the State had no complaint to make in her misfortune. He
can find virtues even in Vinius (Hist. I. 13), whom the Roman
people execrated and whom Plutarch castigates in terms of
unmeasured reprehension.
The Author of the Annals brings before our vision quite opposite
reflections from the mirror of life: his pictures are quite horrid
of revolting crimes unrelieved by virtuous actions in Tiberius,
Claudius, Nero, Sejanus, Agrippina, Messalina, Albucilla, and
other men and women. His character of Tiberius is the wonderfully
drawn portrait of the most absolute and artful tyrant that was
ever created by the fancy of man; and we may be as certain that
such a character never existed as we may be assured that that the
wise maxims and fine things were ever uttered which he tells us
passed the lips in private of Emperors and Ministers of State.
Though not a single virtue relieves the vices of Tiberius in the
Annals, Suetonius speaks of him as showing clemency when a public
officer; Cassius Dio describes him as so humane that he condemned
nobody for his estate, nor confiscated any man's goods, nor
exacted money by force; and Velleius Paterculus makes him all but
a pattern of the virtues,--if Velleius Paterculus is an
authority,--it being just possible that his "Historiae Romanae ad
Marcum Vinicium Consulem" may some of these days be as clearly
proved to be as glaring a modern forgery, as I am now attempting
to prove the Annals of Tacitus to be: certain it is that what we
have of Velleius Paterculus is supplied by only one MS., which was
found under very suspicious circumstances in very suspicious
times.
II. The general train of the narrative may be as nervous in the
Annals as in the History; but the latter is proof against all
objections to imperfection and hurry of narrative: every now and
then errors of this description mar the workmanship of the Annals,
showing at once that it was not composed by Tacitus. From what he
did in the History, he never would have abruptly dropped the
proceedings in the Senate with regard to Tiberius and the honours
paid to his family: there would have been a measure of time and
place in the campaigns of Germanicus: he would have told us what
urged Piso to his acts of apparent madness; and whether he was
guilty or innocent of poisoning Germanicus: we should have known
whether the adopted son of Tiberius came to a violent end; whether
Agrippina perished on account of food withheld from her in her
dungeon; and how Julia, the granddaughter of Augustus died. This
habit of occasionally neglecting to impart complete information,
which is not at all in the manner of Tacitus, cannot be due to the
difference of arrangement in the two works; which, in itself, is a
very suspicious difference; for the plan in the Annals is to give
the transactions of every year in chronological order, whereas
that in the History is not to keep each year distinct in itself,
but allow occurrences to find their proper place according to
their nature, before the time when they happen. [Endnote 081]
In addition to this very suspicious difference, there is another
producing so much doubt that alone it seems to stamp with truth
the theory of the Annals being a forgery.
Tacitus passes over in silence men renowned for learning who took
no part in the historical events related by him. The author of the
Annals, at the end of one historic year, before passing on to
record the events of that which follows, mentions their deaths, as
of the two famous juris-consults, Capito Ateius and Labeo
Antistius. (III. 74.) In this style of writing we detect two men
differing from each other as widely as De Thou differs from
Guicciardini: De Thou, confining himself to his own times,
descends into minutiae, so as to record the deaths of the great
men of his day; Guicciardini, with his eye fixed on his country,
passes over memorials of individuals to dwell on the various
causes which brought about the great changes in the civil and
ecclesiastical policy of his stirring period.
Another thing extremely suspicious is that nowhere in his History,
nor even in his biographical work, Agricola, does Tacitus
introduce a whole letter. All that he does is to give the
substance, and not the contents, as the letter from Tiberius to
Germanicus in Germany. (Hist. V. 75.) Elsewhere he refers merely
to the contents of letters, as in the second book of the History (64).
Speeches are found in his works, for this reason:--Speeches form
no small part of what is transacted in the senate, at the army
and before the emperor; they issue to the public, they pass
through the mouths of men, and they form much weighty matter.
Tacitus then seems to have thought that if he inserted speeches,
he would be maintaining the majesty of history by attending to
great matters, but that if he inserted letters, as they refer
generally to private affairs, he would be faulty as an historian,
by ceasing to be grave and becoming trifling. There is no
accounting, then, for the letter that is found in the Annals (III. 53),
if we are to assume that that work was the composition of
Tacitus, except we are ready to admit that he was capable of
descending from the accustomed gravity of his lofty historical
manner to be a rival for supremacy in the small style of such
indifferent memoirists, as Vulcatius Gallicanus, who has almost as
many letters as there are pages in his very short life of the
Emperor Avidius Cassius. [Endnote 083]
Nobody can satisfactorily explain why, or how it was possible
that, Tacitus should have contradicted in the Annals what he says
in the History of the Legions of Rome and the Praetorian and Urban
Cohorts. He tells us in his History that his countrymen had
legions in Britain, Gaul, and Italy; in the Annals we are told
that the Romans had no troops in those countries. We gather from
the Annals, that there were eight legions in Germany, three in
Spain, and two each in Moesia, Africa, and Pannonia; from the
History we find that there were seven legions in Germany, three in
Moesia, two in Spain, and one each in Africa and Pannonia. We are
told in the History that the Praetorian Cohorts were nine, in the
Annals ten. So we are told in the History that the Urban Cohorts
were four (_quatuor urbanae cohortes_ scribebantur) (Hist. II. 93), and
in the Annals three (insideret urbem proprius miles, _tres urbanae_).
(An. IV. 5.) It matters not what are the right statements in these
several instances; all that concerns us in our inquiry is that,
here beyond all question are two different men, possessing quite
a different knowledge, informing us about the same things; and
the disagreements would be mighty puzzling on any other theory
than that which we are advancing,--that two different men wrote
the History and the Annals.
So, again, with respect to the twenty-one, and afterwards twenty-five
priests of Apollo, the "Sodales Augustales," otherwise styled
"Sacerdotes Titii," the latter name being given to them, according
to Varro, after birds similarly called, whose motions it was their
duty to watch in certain auguries (though what the ancients called
the "titius," by the way, is about as little known as what Pliny
calls the "spinthurnyx,"--Servius and Isidorus thinking they might
have been "doves," from such fowls being styled by the common
people "tetas" and "tetos"). Livy makes no mention of these
priests; neither does Dionysius of Halicarnassus, though Dionysius
was very fond of entering into details of Roman antiquities.
Tacitus gives one origin to this priesthood, the author of the
Annals another; Tacitus, describing the gladiatorial shows by
which the birthday of Vitellius was celebrated in the year 15,
says, that the Emperor Tiberius consecrated those priests to the
Julian House, in imitation of their first institutor, Romulus, who
consecrated them to King Tatius: (facem Augustales subdidere: quod
sacerdotium, ut _Romulus Tatio regi_, ita Caesar Tiberius
Juliae genti, _sacravit_.) (Hist. II. 95.) The author of the
Annals, as if this passage had entirely slipped his attention, or
dropped from his memory, or forgetting that he was engaged in the
forgery of a work by Tacitus, corrects that view by making quite a
different statement, that it was King Tatius, and not Romulus, who
first instituted, and apparently consecrated that order of
priesthood to himself, his exact words being: "that same year saw
established a new religious ceremony, by the priesthood being
added of the 'Augustales Sodales,' as of yore Titus Tatius, to
retain the holy rites of the Sabines, had instituted the 'Sodales
Titii'":--Idem annus novas caermonias accepit, addito sodalium
Augustalium sacerdotio, ut quodam _Titus Tatius_ retinendis
Sabinorum sacris _sodales Titios instituerat_. (An. I. 54.)
As many writings bearing upon the remote time of Romulus and the
Sabine kings may be lost, and the author of the Annals may have
had, in the fifteenth century, authorities not extant now, to
warrant him in writing history so very differently from Tacitus;
and as that Roman in such matters must have taken what he said on
trust from others, we cannot here decide who was right and who
wrong; but what is most important in this investigation is that
the disagreement is quite sufficient to convince us that Tacitus
did not write the Annals.
We shall hereafter more particularly distinguish the two works by
other differences in their matter and form, the manner of their
authors, and the substance of the things treated of: for the
present we may proceed to distinguish them by some differences in
their style and language.
III. In these respects nothing is easier than to detect two
writers, no matter how careful they may be in endeavouring to
imitate the style and language of each other: there will always be
some shade,--and indeed, a very strong shade,--whereby to
distinguish their manner of thinking and their choice and
arrangement of words; there will be more or less purity,
simplicity, grace and propriety in their choice of language; more
or less beauty, precision, cadence and harmony in their
collocation of words: their cogitative faculty will vary in
measure of thought--in force or tenuity; nor will they resemble in
their train of ideas,--be that regular, methodical and uniform, or
unsteady, scattered and disorderly. There must ever be these
important differences; they spring out of individual idiosyncrasy;
their exercise is involuntary, being dependent upon the native
taste and turn of mind of the writer; from such influence he can
no more escape, than he can avoid in his physical qualities a
peculiar gait or tone of voice, look, laugh, or mode of bearing.
If any one question this, let him take up any of the dramas
written conjointly by members of the School of Shakespeare in the
reign of James the First. They all tried to shape themselves in
the same mould; they served apprentices to one another in
constructing and composing the drama; Cartwright strove to write
like his instructor, Ben Jonson; Massinger like his master,
Shakespeare; Shakespeare, too, like Marston and Robert Green (for
Marston taught him how to write tragedy, and Green taught him how
to write comedy): they believed that they eminently succeeded in
catching each other's manner, and to such a nicety, that they
could write together, without the handiwork of one being
distinguishable from the handiwork of the other. In this spirit
Shakespeare wrote with Fletcher; Dekker with William Rowley; Ford,
too, with Dekker; numerous others similarly composed in
companionship, Middleton, Marston, Day and Heywood; but any one
acquainted with their separate productions, consequently, with
their style and language can hardly fail to point out what this
one wrote, and what was written by the other. Test this by
Shakespeare, who, it would be supposed, is the most difficult to
detect because it is generally stated and believed that he wrote
in a variety of styles; it is only a seeming variety; his mode of
versification certainly differs--he changed his measures with his
subjects; still the same fancy is always at work, impressing
images with strength on the mind; there is no change in the
weightiness of the style, the quaintness of the language, the
justness of the representations, the depth of the reflections,
whether he be writing the two worst plays in which he took part
(for portions only seem to have been supplied by him), Pericles
and Titus Andronicus, or his two best, conceived so massively and
executed in such a masterly manner, Macbeth and Othello. In the
Two Noble Kinsmen, which he wrote with Fletcher, any body familiar
with his acknowledged dramas, can trace him as easily as a
traveller follows with his finger the course of the Rhone while
that river is traversing the Lake of Geneva; for one can tell with
as much certainty, as if assured of it, that he wrote the whole
opening of that tragedy, or First Act, while his light, airy and
more sprightly collaborator wrote all the closing part, or last
Act.
Now, the author of the Annals seems to have displayed remarkable
diligence in a careful study of the style and language of Tacitus
with the view of reproducing them in the multiplicity and variety
of expressions that would necessarily occur in the course of the
very long work he meditated forging. To judge from his handiwork,
he was specially struck by certain peculiarities:--such as
dignified and powerful expression, with extraordinary conciseness
joined to loftiness of diction;--hence, his brevity, being
dissembled, and altogether foreign to his own natural diction,
which was most copious, has a hardness and obscurity, of which the
brevity of Tacitus is totally void. He seems to have furthermore
observed how the language of Tacitus has a poetical complexion, is
figurative, nor altogether free from oratorical tinsel with
mixture of foreign, especially Greek construction, and the most
peculiar, new and unusual turns of expression, alliterations and
similar endings of words. Yet notwithstanding all this care and
diligence he was utterly incapable of approaching in language and
style so close to the great original he pretended to be as to be
confounded with him; he was, indeed, not a bit more successful in
approaching his prototype, than that emulous imitator of Tacitus,
Ammianus Marcellinus.
Much might be taken from the Excursus of Roth and the Prolegomena
of Döderlein and Bötticher greatly to strengthen this part of my
argument; but, their treatises being well known, I abstain, merely
observing that, from their remarks, it will be seen that only in
the Annals are verbs constructed in a very uncommon and frequently
archaic manner, as the ancient perfect, _conpesivere_ (IV. 32), of
which there is no example in Tacitus, as there is in Catullus:
O Latonia, maximi
Magna progenies Jovis,
Quam mater prope Deliam
_Deposivit_ olivam. XXXIV. 5-8.
It will be also seen in the above-mentioned most able production
of Döderlein that the infinitive and the particles _ut, ne_
and _quod_ are joined with many verbs; that there is an
interchange of _ad_ and _ut_ (An. II. 62); a joining of
the present and the perfect, and a joining of the infinitive with
those two tenses. In the midst of this damaging criticism
Döderlein quotes Walther, who has also commented upon the Annals,
but in terms of enthusiastic commendation, for he praises such
writing as first-rate workmanship--"adjustments by design," says
the ingenious German; not, of course, the unconscious errors, that
a modern European might make in a case of forgery: the discovery
reminds me of Mr. Ruskin's unqualified eulogies of everything done
by the brush of Turner, which caused the great artist to observe:
--"This gentleman has found out to be beauties what I have always
considered to be blemishes."
Professor Hill, also, in his "Essay upon the Principles of Historical
Composition" has noticed in the Annals some modes of construction
not to be met with in any Roman writer, such as a wrong case after
a verb,--a genitive after _apiscor_ which governs an accusative:
"dum _dominationis_ apisceretur" (VI. 45); and an accusative after
_praesideo_ which governs a dative: "_proximum_ que Galliae _litus_
rostratae naves praesidebant" (IV. 5).
IV. Here let me pause for a moment to glance at a prodigious thing
that has been done to Tacitus: it really has no parallel in
literature: a number of foreigners have impugned his knowledge of
his native tongue. The learned German, Rheinach (Beatus Rhenanus),
began, for he could not admit in his Basle edition in 1533 of the
works of Tacitus that the language of that Roman was equal to the
language of Livy, being florid, affected, stiff and unnatural; his
observation being, that "though Tacitus was without elegance and
purity in his language, from Latin in his time being deteriorated
by foreign turns and figures of speech; yet there was one thing he
retained in its entirety, and that was blood and marrow in his
matter": "Quamvis Tacitus caruerit nitore et puritate linguae,
abeunte jam Romano sermone in peregrinas formas atque figuras;
succum tamen et sanguinem rerum incorruptum retinuit." Eight years
after the famous Tuscan lawyer and scholar, Ferretti, followed by
accusing Tacitus in the preface to the edition of his works
published at Lyons in 1541, of writing with inelegance and
impurity: "consequently," he says, "in the estimation of eminent
literary men Tacitus is not to be ranked after, but rather before
Livy; and yet his style, which was florid, though smacking of the
thought and care that pleased in the days of Vespasian and his
son, and which, from that time,--on account of the Latin language
gradually declining in purity,--steadily degenerated into a kind
of affected composition, ought not to be placed on a par with nor
preferred to Livy's, whose language flows naturally and agreeably,
for his was the age of the greatest purity": "Unde factum, ut
praestantium in literis virorum judicio Livio non sit postponendus
Tacitus, quin potius anteferendus: non quod hujus floridum, ac
meditationem et curam olens dicendi genus, quale sub Vespasianis
placuit, ac indies exin degeneravit in affectatam quandam
compositionem, exolescente paulatim sermonis latini puritate,
Livianae dictioni, illi naturaliter amabiliterque fluenti (nam id
seculum purissimum fuit), aequari debeat, aut praeferri." Next
came the Milanese schoolman, Alciati, who preferred the certainly
sometimes elegant and polished phrases of Paulus Jovius (in his
letter to Jovius himself prefixed to the edition of 1558 of the
renowned Bishop of Nocera de' Pagani's principal production, the
45 books of Historia Sui Temporis):--"they will not ask of you the
reason why you have not reached the soft exuberance of Livy, after
you have thoroughly regretted imitating the calm solemnity of
Sallust, and been satisfied with only the few flowers you have
plucked with a discriminative hand out of the gardens of Quintus
Curtius more frequently than the thorny thickets of Cornelius
Tacitus": "Non reposcent a te rationem, cur lacteam Livii
ubertatem non sis assecutus; postquam et te omnino piguerit
Sallustii sobrietatem imitari, et satis tibi fuerit pauculos
tantum flores ex Quinti Curtii pratis, soepius quam ex Cornelii
Taciti senticetis arguta manu decerpsisse." Then succeeded, as
fast as flakes falling in a snow-storm, a long string of acute
critics, each with his just objections, and each more pointed than
his predecessors in his animadversions, down to the present day,
when, I suppose it may be said that the eminent Dr. Nipperdey
stands foremost amongst the exposers of the bad Latinity of
Tacitus. The Tacitus, thus universally proclaimed, and for nearly
a dozen generations, not to be a competent master of his own
tongue, is not the Tacitus of the History, it is the "Tacitus" of
the Annals; and when hereafter I point out who this "Tacitus" of
the Annals was,--an Italian "Grammaticus," or "Latin writer" of
the fifteenth century,--the reader will not be at all surprised
that he every now and then slips and trips in Latin;--on the
contrary, the reader would be amazed if it were not so; because he
would regard it as a thing more than phenomenal,--as a matter
partaking of the miraculous;--he must consider himself as coming
in contact with a being altogether superhuman;--if the "Tacitus"
of the fifteenth century, who, as a Florentine, may have been a
complete master of the choicest Tuscan, had written with the
correctness of the Tacitus of the first century, who, as befitted
a "civis Romanus" of consular rank, was perfectly skilled in his
native tongue;--aye, quite as much so as Livy, Sallust, or any
other accomplished man of letters of ancient Rome.