dialogue on oratory. In the _Agricola_ and _Germania_ the distinctively
Tacitean style is still immature, though it is well on the way towards
maturity. The _Germania_ is less read for its literary merit than as the
principal extant account, and the only one which professes to cover the
ground at all systematically, of Central Europe under the early Roman
Empire. It does not appear whether, in the course of his official
employments, Tacitus had ever been stationed on the frontier either of
the Rhine or of the Danube. The treatise bears little or no traces of
first-hand knowledge; nor does he mention his authorities, with the
single exception of a reference to Caesar's _Gallic War_. We can hardly
doubt that he made free use of the material amassed by Pliny in his
_Bella Germaniae,_ and it is quite possible that he really used few other
sources. For the work, though full of information, is not critically
written, and the historian constantly tends to pass into the moralist.
His Ciceronianism has now completely worn away, but his manner is still
as deeply rhetorical as ever. What he has in view throughout is to bring
the vices of civilised luxury into stronger relief by a contrast with the
idealised simplicity of the German tribes; and though his knowledge and
his candour alike make him stop short of falsifying facts, his selection
and disposition of facts is guided less by a historical than by an
ethical purpose. His lucid and accurate description of the amber of the
Baltic seems merely introduced in order to point a sarcastic reference to
Roman luxury; and the whole of the extremely valuable account of the
social life of the Western German tribes is drawn in implicit or
expressed contrast to the elaborate social conventions of what he
considers a corrupt and degenerate civilisation. The exaggeration of the
sentiment is more marked than in any of his other writings; thus the fine
outburst, _Nemo illic vitia ridet, nec corrumpere et corrumpi seculum
vocatur,_ concludes a passage in which he gravely suggests that the
invention of writing is fatal to moral innocence; and though he is candid
enough to note the qualities of laziness and drunkenness which the
Germans shared with other half-barbarous races, he glosses over the other
quality common to savages, want of feeling, with the sounding and
grandiose commonplace, expressed in a phrase of characteristic force and
brevity, _feminis lugere honestum est, viris meminisse_.
The _Agricola,_ perhaps the most beautiful piece of biography in ancient
literature, stands on a much higher level than the _Germania,_ because
here his heart was in the work. The rhetorical bent is now fully under
control, while his mastery over "disposition" (to use the term of the
schools), or what one might call the architectural quality of the book,
could only have been gained by such large and deep study of the art of
rhetoric as is inculcated by Quintilian. The _Agricola_ has the
stateliness, the ordered movement, of a funeral oration; the peroration,
as it might not unfairly be called, of the two concluding chapters,
reaches the highest level of the grave Roman eloquence, and its language
vibrates with a depth of feeling to which Lucretius and Virgil alone in
their greatest passages offer a parallel in Latin. The sentence, with its
subtle Virgilian echoes, in which he laments his own and his wife's
absence from Agricola's death-bed--_omnia sine dubio, optime parentum,
adsidente amantissima uxore superfuere honori tuo; paucioribus tamen
lacrimis comploratus es, et novissima in luce desideraverunt aliquid
oculi tui_--shows a new and strange power in Latin. It is still the
ancient language, but it anticipates in its cadences the language of the
Vulgate and of the statelier mediaeval prose.
Together with this remarkable power over new prose rhythms, Tacitus shows
in the _Agricola_ the complete mastery of mordant and unforgettable
phrase which makes his mature writing so unique. Into three or four
ordinary words he can put more concentrated meaning than any other
author. The likeness and contrast between these brief phrases of his and
the "half-lines" of Virgil might repay a long study. They are alike in
their simple language, which somehow or other is charged with the whole
personality of the author; but the personality itself is in the sharpest
antithesis. The Virgilian phrases, with their grave pity, are steeped in
a golden softness that is just touched with a far-off trouble, a pathetic
waver in the voice as if tears were not far below it. Those of Tacitus
are charged with indignation instead of pity; "like a jewel hung in
ghastly night," to use Shakespeare's memorable simile, or like the red
and angry autumnal star in the _Iliad_, they quiver and burn. Phrases
like the famous _ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant_, or the _felix
opportunitate mortis_, are the concentrated utterance of a great but
deeply embittered mind.
In this spirit Tacitus set himself to narrate the history of the first
century of the Empire. Under the settled equable government of Trajan,
the reigns of the Julio-Claudian house rapidly became a legendary epoch,
a region of prodigies and nightmares and Titanic crimes. Even at the time
they happened many of the events of those years had thrown the
imagination of their spectators into a fever. The strong taint of
insanity in the Claudian blood seemed to have communicated itself to the
world ruled over by that extraordinary series of men, about whom there
was something inhuman and supernatural. Most of them were publicly
deified before their death. The _Fortuna Urbis_ took in them successive
and often monstrous incarnations. Augustus himself was supposed to have
the gift of divination; his foreknowledge overleapt the extinction of his
own house, and foresaw, across a gap of fifty years, the brief reign of
Galba. Caligula threw an arch of prodigious span over the Roman Forum,
above the roofs of the basilica of Julius Caesar, that from his house on
the Palatine he might cross more easily to sup with his brother, Jupiter
Capitolinus. Nero's death was for years regarded over half the Empire as
incredible; men waited in a frenzy of excited terror for the reappearance
of the vanished Antichrist. Even the Flavian house was surrounded by much
of the same supernatural atmosphere. The accession of Vespasian was
signalised by his performing public miracles in Egypt; Domitian, when he
directed that he should be formally addressed as _Our Lord God_ by all
who approached him, was merely settling rules for an established practice
of court etiquette. In this thunderous unnatural air legends of all sorts
sprung up right and left; foremost, and including nearly all the rest,
the legend of the Empire itself, which (like that of the French
Revolution) we are only now beginning to unravel. The modern school of
historians find in authentic documents, written and unwritten, the story
of a continuous and able administration of the Empire through all those
years by the permanent officials, and traces of a continuous personal
policy of the Emperors themselves sustaining that administration against
the reactionary tendencies of the Senate. Even the massacres of Nero and
Domitian are held to have been probably dictated by imperious public
necessity. The confidential advisers of the Emperors acted as a sort of
Committee of Public Safety, silent and active, while the credit or
obloquy was all heaped on a single person. It took three generations to
carry the imperial system finally out of danger; but when this end was at
last attained, the era of the Good Emperors succeeded as a matter of
course; much as in France, the success of the Revolution once fairly
secured, the moderate government of the Directory and Consulate quietly
succeeded to the Terror and the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Such is one view now taken of the early Roman Empire. Its weakness is
that it explains too much. How or why, if the matter was really as simple
as this, did the traditional legend of the Empire grow up and extinguish
the real facts? Is it possible that the malignant genius of a single
historian should outweigh, not only perishable facts, but the large body
of imperialist literature which extends from the great Augustans down to
Statius and Quintilian? Even if we set aside Juvenal and Suetonius as a
rhetorician and a gossipmonger, that only makes the weight Tacitus has to
sustain more overwhelming. It is hardly possible to overrate the effect
of a single work of great genius; but the more we study works of great
genius the more certain does it appear that they are all founded on real,
though it may be transcendental, truth. Systems, like persons, are to be
known by their fruits. The Empire produced, as the flower of its culture
and in the inner circle of its hierarchy, the type of men of whom Tacitus
is the most eminent example; and the indignant hatred it kindled in its
children leaves it condemned before the judgment of history.
The surviving fragments of the _Annals_ and _Histories_ leave three great
pictures impressed upon the reader's mind: the personality of Tiberius,
the court of Nero, and the whole fabric and machinery of empire in the
year of the four Emperors. The lost history of the reigns of Caligula and
Domitian would no doubt have added two other pictures as memorable and as
dramatic, but could hardly make any serious change in the main structure
of the imperial legend as it is successively presented in these three
imposing scenes.
The character and statesmanship of Tiberius is one of the most vexed
problems in Roman history; and it is significant to observe how, in all
the discussions about it, the question perpetually reverts to another--
the view to be taken of the personality of the historian who wrote nearly
a century after Tiberius' accession, and was not born till long after his
death. In no part of his work does Tacitus use his great weapon,
insinuation of motive, with such terrible effect. All the speeches or
letters of the Emperor quoted by him, almost all the actions he records,
are given with this malign sidelight upon them: that, in spite of it, we
lose our respect for neither Emperor nor historian is strong evidence
both of the genius of the latter and the real greatness of the former.
The case of Germanicus Caesar is a cardinal instance. In the whole
account of the relations of Tiberius to his nephew there is nothing in
the mere facts as stated inconsistent with confidence and even with
cordiality. Tiberius pronounces a long and stately eulogy on Germanicus
in the senate for his suppression of the revolt of the German legions. He
recalls him from the German frontier, where the Roman supremacy was now
thoroughly re-established, and where the hot-headed young general was on
the point of entangling himself in fresh and dangerous conquests, in
order to place him in supreme command in the Eastern provinces; but first
he allows him the splendid pageant of a Roman triumph, and gives an
immense donative to the population of the capital in his nephew's name.
Germanicus is sent to the East with _maius imperium_ over the whole of
the transmarine provinces, a position more splendid than any that
Tiberius himself had held during the lifetime of Augustus, and one that
almost raised him to the rank of a colleague in the Empire. Then
Germanicus embroils himself hopelessly with his principal subordinate,
the imperial legate of Syria, and his illness and death at Antioch put an
end to a situation which is rapidly becoming impossible. His remains are
solemnly brought back to Rome, and honoured with a magnificent funeral;
the proclamation of Tiberius fixing the termination of the public
mourning is in its gravity and good sense one of the most striking
documents in Roman history. But in Tacitus every word and action of
Tiberius has its malignant interpretation or comment. He recalls
Germanicus from the Rhine out of mingled jealousy and fear; he makes him
viceroy of the East in order to carry out a diabolically elaborate scheme
for bringing about his destruction. The vague rumours of poison or magic
that ran during his last illness among the excitable and grossly
superstitious populace of Antioch are gravely recorded as ground for the
worst suspicions. That dreadful woman, the elder Agrippina, had, even in
her husband's lifetime, made herself intolerable by her pride and
jealousy after her husband's death she seems to have become quite insane,
and the recklessness of her tongue knew no bounds. To Tacitus all her
ravings, collected from hearsay or preserved in the memoirs of her
equally appalling daughter, the mother of Nero, represent serious
historical documents; and the portrait of Tiberius is from first to last
deeply influenced by, and indeed largely founded on, the testimony of a
madwoman.
The three books and a half of the _Annals_ which contain the principate
of Nero are not occupied with the portraiture of a single great
personality, nor are they full, like the earlier books, of scathing
phrases and poisonous insinuations. The reign of Nero was, indeed, one
which required little rhetorical artifice to present as something
portentous. The external history of the Empire, till towards its close,
was without remarkable incident. The wars on the Armenian frontier hardly
affected the general quiet of the Empire; the revolt of Britain was an
isolated occurrence, and soon put down. The German tribes, engaged in
fierce internal conflicts, left the legions on the Rhine almost
undisturbed. The provinces, though suffering under heavy taxation, were
on the whole well ruled. Public interest was concentrated on the capital;
and the startling events which took place there gave the fullest scope to
the dramatic genius of the historian. The court of Nero lives before us
in his masterly delineation. Nero himself, Seneca and Tigellinus, the
Empress-mother, the conspirators of the year 65, form a portrait-gallery
of sombre magnificence, which surpasses in vivid power the more elaborate
and artificial picture of the reign of Tiberius. With all his immense
ability and his deep psychological insight, Tacitus is not a profound
political thinker; as he approaches the times which fell within his own
personal knowledge he disentangles himself more and more from the
preconceptions of narrow theory, and gives his dramatic gift fuller play.
It is for this reason that the _Histories_, dealing with a period which
was wholly within his own lifetime, and many of the main actors in which
he knew personally and intimately, are a greater historical work than
even the _Annals_. He moves with a more certain step in an ampler field.
The events of the year 69, which occupy almost the whole of the extant
part of the _Histories_, offer the largest and most crowded canvas ever
presented to a Roman historian. And Tacitus rises fully to the amplitude
of his subject. It is in these books that the material greatness of the
Empire has found its largest expression. In the _Annals_ Rome is the core
of the world, and the provinces stretch dimly away from it, shaken from
time to time by wars or military revolts that hardly touch the great
central life of the capital. Here, though the action opens indeed in the
capital in that wet stormy January, the main interest is soon transferred
to distant fields; the life of the Empire still converges on Rome as a
centre, but no longer issues from it as from a common heart and brain.
The provinces had been the spoil of Rome; Rome herself is now becoming
the spoil of the provinces. The most splendid piece of narration in the
_Histories,_ and one of the finest in the work of any historian, is the
story of the second battle of Bedriacum, and the storm and sack of
Cremona by the Moesian and Pannonian legions. This is the central thought
which makes it so tragical. The little vivid touches in which Tacitus
excels are used towards this purpose with extraordinary effect; as in the
incident of the third legion saluting the rising sun--_ita in Suria mos
est_--which marks the new and fatal character of the great provincial
armies, or the casual words of the Flavian general, _The bath will soon
be heated,_ which were said to have given the signal for the burning of
Cremona. In these scenes the whole tragedy of the Empire rises before us.
The armies of the Danube and Rhine left the frontiers defenceless while
they met in the shock of battle on Italian soil, still soaking with Roman
blood and littered with unburied Roman corpses; behind them the whole
armed strength of the Empire--_immensa belli moles_--was gathering out of
Gaul, Spain, Syria, and Hungary; and before the year was out, the Roman
Capitol itself, in a trifling struggle between small bodies of the
opposing forces, went up in flame at the hands of the German troops of
Vitellius.
This great pageant of history is presented by Tacitus in a style which,
in its sombre yet gorgeous colouring, is unique in literature. In mere
grammatical mechanism it bears close affinity to the other Latin writing
of the period, but in all its more intimate qualities it is peculiar to
Tacitus alone; he founded his own style, and did not transmit it to any
successor. The influence of Virgil over prose reaches in him its most
marked degree. Direct transferences of phrase are not infrequent; and
throughout, as one reads the _Histories,_ one is reminded of the
_Aeneid,_ not only by particular phrases, but by a more indefinable
quality permeating the style. The narrative of the siege and firing of
the Capitol, to take one striking instance, is plainly from the hand of a
writer saturated with the movement and language of Virgil's _Sack of
Troy_. A modern historian might have quoted Virgil in a note; with
Tacitus the Virgilian reminiscences are interwoven with the whole
structure of his narrative. The whole of the three fine chapters will
repay minute comparison; but some of the more striking resemblances are
worth noting as a study in language. _Erigunt aciem_, says the historian,
_usque ad primas Capitolinae arcis fores ... in tectum egressi saxis
tegulisque Vitellianos obruebant ... ni revolsas undique statuas, decora
maiorum, in ipso aditu obiecissent ... vis propior atque acrior ingruebat
... quam non Porsena dedita urbe neque Galli temerare potuissent ...
inrumpunt Vitelliani et cuncta sanguine ferro flammisque miscent_. We
seem to be present once more at that terrible night in Troy--
_Vestibulum ante ipsum primoque in limine Pyrrhus ...
Evado ad summi fastigia culminis ...
... turres ac tecta domorum Culmina convellunt ...
... veterum decora alia parentum
Devolvunt ... nec saxa, nec ullum Telorum interea cessat genus ...
... armorumque ingruit horror ...
... et iam per moenia clarior ignis
Auditur, propiusque aestus incendia volvunt ...
Quos neque Tydides, nec Larissaeus Achilles,
Non anni domuere decem, non mille carinae ...
Fit via vi; rumpunt aditus primosque trucidant
Inmissi Danai, et late loca milite complent._
These quotations indicate strikingly enough the way in which Tacitus is
steeped in the Virgilian manner and diction. The whole passage must be
read continuously to realise the immense skill with which he uses it, and
the tragic height it adds to the narrative.
Nor is the deep gloom of his history, though adorned with the utmost
brilliance of rhetoric, lightened by any belief in Providence or any
distinct hope for the future. The artificial optimism of the Stoics is
alien from his whole temper; and his practical acquiescence in the
existing system under the reign of Domitian only added bitterness to his
inward revolt from it. The phrases of religion are merely used by him to
darken the shades of his narrative; _Deum ira in rem Romanam,_ one of the
most striking of them, might almost be taken as a second title for his
history. On the very last page of the _Annals_ he concludes a brief
notice of the ruin and exile of Cassius Asclepiodotus, whose crime was
that he had not deserted an unfortunate friend, with the striking words,
"Such is the even-handedness of Heaven towards good and evil conduct."
Even his praises of the government of Trajan are half-hearted and
incredulous; "the rare happiness of a time when men may think what they
will, and say what they think," is to his mind a mere interlude, a brief
lightening of the darkness before it once more descends on a world where
the ambiguous power of fate or chance is the only permanent ruler, and
where the gods intervene, not to protect, but only to avenge.
IV.
JUVENAL, THE YOUNGER PLINY, SUETONIUS: DECAY OF CLASSICAL LATIN.
From the name of Tacitus that of Juvenal is inseparable. The pictures
drawn of the Empire by the historian and the satirist are in such
striking accordance that they create a greater plausibility for the
common view they hold than could be given by any single representation;
and while Juvenal lends additional weight and colour to the Tacitean
presentment of the imperial legend, he acquires from it in return an
importance which could hardly otherwise have been sustained by his
exaggerated and glaring rhetoric.
As regards the life and personality of the last great Roman satirist we
are in all but total ignorance. Several lives of him exist which are
confused and contradictory in detail. He was born at Aquinum, probably in
the reign of Nero; an inscription on a little temple of Ceres, dedicated
by him there, indicates that he had served in the army as commander of a
Dalmatian cohort, and was superintendent (as one of the chief men of the
town) of the civic worship paid to Vespasian after his deification. The
circumstance of his banishment for offence given to an actor who was high
in favour with the reigning Emperor is well authenticated; but neither
its place nor its time can be fixed. It appears from the _Satires_
themselves that they were written late in life; we are informed that he
reached his eightieth year, and lived into the reign of Antoninus Pius.
Martial, by whom he is repeatedly mentioned, alludes to him only as a
rhetorician, not as a satirist. The sixteen satires (of which the last
is, perhaps, not genuine) were published at intervals under Trajan and
Hadrian. They fall into two groups; the first nine, which are at once the
most powerful and the least agreeable, being separated by a considerable
interval of years from the others, in which a certain softening of tone
and a tendency to dwell on the praise of virtue more than on the ignoble
details of vice is united with a failing power that marks the approach of
senility.
Juvenal is the most savage--one might almost say the most brutal--of all
the Roman satirists. Lucilius, when he "scourged the town," did so in the
high spirits and voluble diction of a comparatively simple age. Horace
soon learned to drop the bitterness which appears in his earlier satires,
and to make them the vehicle for his gentle wisdom and urbane humour. The
writing of Persius was that of a student who gathered the types he
satirised from books rather than from life. Juvenal brought to his task
not only a wide knowledge of the world--or, at least, of the world of the
capital--but a singular power of mordant phrase, and a mastery over crude
and vivid effect that keeps the reader suspended between disgust and
admiration. In the commonplaces of morality, though often elevated and
occasionally noble, he does not show any exceptional power or insight;
but his graphic realism, combined (as realism often is) with a total
absence of all but the grimmest forms of humour, makes his verses cut
like a knife. _Facit indignatio versum_, he truly says of his own work;
with far less flexibility, he has all the remorselessness of Swift. That
singular product of the last days of paganism, the epigrammatist Palladas
of Alexandria, is the only ancient author who shows the same spirit. Of
his earlier work the second and ninth satires, and a great part of the
sixth, have a cold prurience and disgustingness of detail, that even
Swift only approaches at his worst moments. Yet the sixth satire, at all
events, is an undeniable masterpiece; however raw the colour, however
exaggerated the drawing, his pictures of Roman life have a force that
stamps them permanently on the imagination; his _Legend of Bad Women,_ as
this satire might be called, has gone far to make history.