No More Learning

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. The same art is ready to display the beauty of courage and
self-sacrifice. But these were rarer phenomena than cowardice and
greed. It was not Tacitus, but the age, which showed a preference for
vice. Moreover, the historian's art was not to be used solely for its
own sake. All ancient history was written with a moral object; the
ethical interest predominates almost to the exclusion of all others.
Tacitus is never merely literary.
The [Greek: semnotês] which Pliny
notes as the characteristic of his oratory, never lets him sparkle to
no purpose. All his pictures have a moral object 'to rescue virtue
from oblivion and restrain vice by the terror of posthumous
infamy'. [2] His prime interest is character: and when he has
conducted some skilful piece of moral diagnosis there attaches to his
verdict some of the severity of a sermon. If you want to make men
better you must uncover and scarify their sins.

Few Christian moralists deal much in eulogy, and Tacitus' diatribes
are the more frequent and the more fierce because his was the morality
not of Christ but of Rome. 'The Poor' are as dirt to him: he can stoop
to immortalize some gleam of goodness in low life, but even then his
main object is by scorn of contrast to galvanize the aristocracy into
better ways. Only in them can true _virtus_ grow. Their degradation
seems the death of goodness. Tacitus had little sympathy with the
social revolution that was rapidly completing itself, not so much
because those who rose from the masses lacked 'blood', but because
they had not been trained in the right traditions. In the decay of
Education he finds a prime cause of evil. And being a Roman--wherever
he may have been born--he inevitably feels that the decay of Roman
life must rot the world. His eyes are not really open to the Empire.
He never seems to think that in the spacious provinces to which the
old Roman virtues had taken flight, men were leading happy, useful
lives, because the strong hand of the imperial government had come to
save them from the inefficiency of aristocratic governors. This
narrowness of view accounts for much of Tacitus' pessimism.

Recognition of the atmosphere in which Tacitus wrote and the objects
at which his history aimed helps one to understand why it sometimes
disappoints modern expectations. Particular scenes are seared on our
memories: persons stand before us lit to the soul by a fierce light of
psychological analysis: we learn to loath the characteristic vices of
the time, and to understand the moral causes of Roman decadence.