No More Learning

Tacitus was peculiarly well qualified to write the
history of this period. He had been the eye-witness of some of the
most terrible scenes: he was acquainted with all the distinguished
survivors: his political experience gave him a statesman's point of
view, and his rhetorical training a style which mirrored both the
terror of the times and his own emotion. More than any other Roman
historian he desired to tell the truth and was not fatally biassed by
prejudice. It is wrong to regard Tacitus as an 'embittered
rhetorician', an 'enemy of the Empire', a 'détracteur de
l'humanité'. [1] He was none of these. As a member of a noble, though
not an ancient, family, and as one who had completed the republican
_cursus honorum_, his sympathies were naturally senatorial. He
regretted that the days were passed when oratory was a real power and
the consuls were the twin towers of the world. But he never hoped to
see such days again. He realized that monarchy was essential to peace,
and that the price of freedom was violence and disorder. He had no
illusions about the senate. Fault and misfortune had reduced them to
nerveless servility, a luxury of self-abasement. Their meekness would
never inherit the earth. Tacitus pours scorn on the philosophic
opponents of the Principate, who while refusing to serve the emperor
and pretending to hope for the restoration of the republic, could
contribute nothing more useful than an ostentatious suicide. His own
career, and still more the career of his father-in-law Agricola,
showed that even under bad emperors a man could be great without
dishonour. Tacitus was no republican in any sense of the word, but
rather a monarchist _malgré lui_.
There was nothing for it but to pray
for good emperors and put up with bad ones.

Those who decry Tacitus for prejudice against the Empire forget that
he is describing emperors who were indubitably bad. We have lost his
account of Vespasian's reign. His praise of Augustus and of Trajan was
never written. The emperors whom he depicts for us were all either
tyrannical or contemptible, or both: no floods of modern biography can
wash them white. They seemed to him to have degraded Roman life and
left no room for _virtus_ in the world. The verdict of Rome had gone
against them. So he devotes to their portraiture the venom which the
fifteen years of Domitian's reign of terror had engendered in his
heart. He was inevitably a pessimist; his ideals lay in the past; yet
he clearly shows that he had some hope of the future. Without sharing
Pliny's faith that the millennium had dawned, he admits that Nerva and
Trajan have inaugurated 'happier times' and combined monarchy with
some degree of personal freedom.

There are other reasons for the 'dark shadows' in Tacitus' work.
History to a Roman was _opus oratorium,_ a work of literary art. Truth
is a great but not a sufficient merit. The historian must be not only
_narrator_ but _ornator rerum_. He must carefully select and arrange
the incidents, compose them into an effective group, and by the power
of language make them memorable and alive. In these books Tacitus has
little but horrors to describe: his art makes them unforgettably
horrible.