Tacitus (Donne)/Chapter 1
The birth-year of Tacitus can only be conjectured—indeed the little that is known of him personally is mostly derived from the letters of his friend, the younger Pliny, the date of whose birth helps us towards at least surmising that of the historian. Pliny was born in 61 or 62 A.D., since he was in his eighteenth year when the famous eruption of Vesuvius took place, A.D. 79. Now, in a letter from him to Tacitus, he writes: "When I was a very young man, and you were at the height of your fame and reputation, I earnestly desired to imitate you." The historian himself affords us a few glimpses at his public life. "My elevation," he says, "was begun by Vespasian." Again, we know on his own authority that he was prætor in 88 A.D., and on that of Pliny that he was consul in 97. Comparing these statements with each other, it is perhaps not rash to infer that Tacitus was by several years Pliny's senior. We are therefore inclined to fix 51 instead of 54 A.D.—the date usually assigned—as the year in which he was born.
His birthplace is unknown, nor can anything certain be told about his family, Some circumstances make it likely that the members of it were well to do in the world, if not highly distinguished, at least until he made the name of Tacitus memorable for all times. He rose rapidly in his public career; and that is hard for obscure and needy men to do. He married into a family of some rank; and in his writings he displays no token of the poverty that made his contemporaries, Martial and Juvenal, the one a flatterer of the great, the other a satirist of the wealthy and well-born. His abode, in early years at least, and possibly until he had passed middle life, was apparently either in Rome or its immediate neighbourhood. For not only would his practice at the bar, and the public offices held by him, make it necessary to have a house in the capital, but there are some indications of his being in it even at the time of Galba's death. The 'History' bears several traces of his presence in Rome during that disastrous year in which four emperors contended for the purple, and, all but one, found the reward of their ambition in a violent or a voluntary death.
The public life of Tacitus dates from the later years of Vespasian's reign. His second patron was Titus Flavius, who, happily for himself, did not live long enough to forfeit his title of "Delight of Mankind." Not until we come to the fourteenth year of Domitian do we stand on firm ground as to his preferments. It is not easy to understand his relations to the third of the Flavian Cæsars. "I deny not," he says, "that my elevation was begun by Vespasian, continued by Titus, and still farther advanced by Domitian." So far, then, all the Flavian Cæsars and Tacitus were on good terms. Yet if the character he draws of Domitian in the 'Agricola,' or where there is occasion to mention him in the 'History,' be a portrait and not a caricature, it is hard to conceive how he managed to serve such a master without flattering him as Martial, Statius, and other poets of the age did; or, if he did not fatter him, how he contrived to keep his head on his shoulders. There is no doubt that in the year 88 he was Prætor, and assisted as one of the fifteen officials (quindecemviri) at the celebration of the secular games in that year.
Eleven years earlier, in 77, Tacitus was betrothed to the daughter of Julius Agricola, and in the next year they were married, just before his father-in-law left Rome to govern Britain. It is pleasant to infer from his writings that his marriage was a happy one; or that at least he had no cause for repenting of it. Speaking of his betrothed he says of her that she was "even then a maiden of noble promise." Both Agricola and his son-in-law were, to all appearance, fortunate in their partners for life. Not many of his friends and acquaintance were perhaps so lucky, since it was an age when to divorce a wife or a husband was nearly as common as to take one, if there be any truth in the verse of Martial or Juvenal, or in the anecdotes of Suetonius. A son who died in his infancy was the only fruit of Tacitus's marriage. The emperor of that name is reported to have claimed to be a descendant of the historian; and Sidonius Apollinaris, a writer in the fifth century of our era, addresses a letter to Polemius in which he reminds him of his illustrious ancestor, Tacitus. On grounds equally slender a father has been found for the historian, one Cornelius Tacitus, a Roman knight and procurator in Belgic Gaul, mentioned by the elder Pliny. Yet it is strange that the younger Pliny never alludes to the procurator, who from his position can hardly have been a person quite obscure. In fact, Tacitus was not an unprecedented name, and Cornelius was a very common one in Italy.
On the expiration of his prætorship he would seem to have left Rome, and not to have returned to it until after Agricola's death, A.D. 95—an absence of at least four years. If he followed the ordinary course, he would be appointed on the expiration of his office to some provincial government. But whither he went, or how he employed himself during his absence from the capital, is not on record.
Credible testimony there is, conveyed by himself, that he was at Rome during the later and the worse period of Domitian's reign. "Our hands" (those of the senators), he writes in his 'Life of Agricola,' dragged Helvidius to prison; we witnessed the fate of Mauricus and Rusticus; we were steeped in Senecio's innocent blood." Now and then the description of signal and stirring events is so vivid in Tacitus's pages that it is difficult not to believe them to have been traced by the hand of an eyewitness. The passage of the 'Agricola' just cited bears the marks of his presence in the senate when Domitian's victims were dragged away to die.
And yet, in spite of the doubt and darkness that hang over his personal history, Tacitus was a "celebrity" in Italy at least, and in the literary circles of Rome. That he was so is plain from the often repeated story of the recognition of his name by a stranger to his person. The stranger and himself happened to sit beside each other among the spectators of the games of the Circus, and for some time relieved the tediousness of familiar and brutal exhibitions by discussing literary subjects. The stranger, a Roman knight, at length asked his neighbour on the bench whether he were a Roman or a provincial? Tacitus replied, "You are acquainted with me and by my pursuits." "Are you, then," was the rejoinder, "Tacitus or Pliny?" But such notoriety was probably due to his reputation as an orator, not as an historian. His 'Agricola' and 'Germany' alone were not likely to have carried his name so widely abroad as this anecdote implies, and the 'Annals' and 'History' were never ranked among the popular literature of either the capital or the provinces.
With Domitian expired, and for a long series of years, the worst effects of Cæsarianism; and the Roman world, for the first time since the death of Augustus, enjoyed the advantages of a strong and just though still irresponsible government. The senate was once again treated with respect, was relieved from anxiety about the lives or property of its members, was intrusted with a large share in the administration of public affairs, and found in the emperor a president, and not a master or an assassin. "Now, at last," writes Tacitus, exulting in his relief from personal fears for his friends or himself, "our spring is returning. We enjoy the rare happiness of times when we may think what we please, and express what we think." The cloud of apprehension, indeed, is not quite lifted. Nerva was an old invalid, Trajan was a warrior, and the chances of war might deprive Rome of his services. "And yet," continues the biographer of the brave and moderate Agricola, "though, at the dawn of a most happy age, Nerva Cæsar blended things once irreconcilable—sovereignty and freedom—though Nerva Trajan is now daily augmenting the prosperity of the time; and though the public safety has not only our hopes and good wishes, but has also the certain pledge of their fulfilment, still, from the necessary condition of human frailty, the remedy works less quickly than the disease." The profound melancholy of these words will be obvious to every reader. He had lived to witness a senate honoured; the prætorians and the legions kept under restraint; the informers (delatores) banished or silenced; the people, if not content, controlled by an effective police; the provinces equitably ruled; the Cæsar, in semblance at least, only the first citizen; thoughts no longer manacled; books no longer burnt in the forum, or used as evidence of treason against their authors. Yet he could not hide from himself the precarious tenure of these blessings. The happy age that had dawned rested on a foundation of sand. Among the senators might lie hid, in case of another revolution—and Tacitus had witnessed the untimely ends of four Cæsars—another voluptuous Nero, another timid and sanguinary Domitian. The freedom which depends on the character of the reigning sovereign is ever uncertain. Even Caligula and Nero for a while ruled well. The conduct of Trajan made vain the apprehensions of Tacitus. But the experience of his earlier days affected all his later ones, and he never quite reconciled himself to a Cæsar in the place of elective consuls, or to a privy council in that of a senate.
In the second year of Trajan's principate, Tacitus was one of the consuls. The office indeed was only the shadow of a once mighty name, and the duties of it were merely nominal. Yet it was still an honourable distinction and a permanent advance in social rank. The only recorded act of Tacitus in his consulship was his delivery of the funeral oration over the body of Virginius Rufus, one of "the noblest Romans of them all" in that degenerate age. "Ever benign to this octogenarian hero,"—who, besides the usual perils of his calling, had thrice escaped from the fury of mutinous legionaries,—"Fortune," says Pliny, "reserved her last favour to him, that of being commemorated by the greatest of living orators."
In 99 A.D., Tacitus, now proconsul, was joined with Pliny, then consul-elect, in managing the impeachment of Marius Priseus for high crimes and misdemeanours committed by him while governor of the province of Africa. In spite of powerful advocacy and interest, the culprit was condemned. The prosecutors—the injured Africans—gained their suit, but apparently little else; for Marius, after paying heavy law expenses, and doubtless also as heavy bribes to some of the jury, lived very comfortably in exile upon the residue of his ill-got gains. He was infamous enough to be specially mentioned by the contemporary satirist:—
(For who, that holds the plunder, heeds the pain?)
Marius to wine devotes his morning hours,
And laughs in exile at the offended powers;
While, sighing o'er the victory she has won,
The province finds herself the more undone."
—Juvenal, Sat. I. [Gifford.]
Pliny, in his description of the trial, says that Tacitus answered Salvius Liberalis, the counsel for the defendant, "most eloquently, and with that dignity which belongs in a remarkable degree to his oratory." The two illustrious pleaders received a vote of thanks from the senate for their exertions in the cause. From this moment Tacitus departs from sight. There is indeed a slight trace of him in one of Pliny's letters, from which it appears that he was not at the time resident in Rome, nor very well supplied with news from it. And as we are unable to do more than surmise the date of his birth, so we must leave to conjecture that of his death. He lived long enough to complete, with one exception, the works he projected. He is the chronicler of the Cæsars from the death of Augustus to the accession of Nerva. "I have reserved," he tells us, "as an employment for my old age, should my life be long enough, a subject at once more fruitful and less anxious in the reign of the divine Nerya and the empire of Trajan." He may have rested from his labours before he began this work; or he may never have seriously meant to write it. Even of good Cæsars it might not always be prudent to speak the truth, and Tacitus may have thought himself living too near the time of his proposed narrative to write with impartiality about even a Trajan.
In the failure of materials for his life, we may endeavour to learn something of Tacitus from himself. If it be true that every great portrait-painter introduces upon his canvas something of his own nature, it is also true that every great historical writer infuses into his narrative something of his own feelings. It cannot escape any attentive reader of the 'Annals,' in which the writer's proclivities are far more patent than in the 'History,' that he was an aristocrat, in the sense that the proud Appian, Fabian, and Claudian houses were of old. Although firmly convinced that the vast body of the empire could be effectively governed by one hand alone, he accepted a Cæsar as a necessity of the time. But to be resigned to a system of rule is one thing; to regard it with an eye of favour is another. Many who loved Cromwell little, served him well. It was no small recommendation of Trajan to Tacitus that, departing from the solemn injunction of Augustus not to extend the borders of the empire, he added to it provinces north of the Theiss and east of the Euphrates. At last there was a Cæsar treading in the steps of the Scipios and Paulus Æmilius. And yet, notwithstanding his military virtues and the temperate character of his civil administration, if was not Trajan, but the consuls and senate of the past who had the historian's real allegiance. His contempt for the nobles among whom he sat in the great council-chamber at Rome only increased his admiration for the Conscript Fathers whom the Epirot envoy likened to a conclave of gods; and who bated not a "jot of hope or heart" when Pyrrhus was within a few miles of Rome or Hannibal at her gates. The mongrel populace of the capital, with its greed for bread and the games, he contrasted with the people that once supplied the pith of the legions, and who, although often turbulent and factious, were proud of their nobles and jealous of the honour of the Commonwealth. The Gracchi he viewed with dislike, since it was owing to their measures that the way was prepared for Caius Marius and the first Cæsar. The brother tribunes were the beginners of that evil end which Tacitus so deplored. By them and their mischievous laws the free Republic was turned into an absolute and irresponsible despotism, and the weal of millions intrusted to the discretion of one man. The reputation of Tacitus appears in his own time to have rested entirely on his powers as an orator. A few intimate friends indeed were forming high expectations of the history he had in hand; and Pliny, we know, supplied some materials for a work which he correctly judged would be immortal, but which he less correctly anticipated would be immediately popular. It is strange that of an orator so renowned as he seems to have been not a line of his speeches remains, although there exist fragments of these of the Gracchi and Cato and Marius. Of the character of Tacitus's oratory we have only one hint. "Dignity" was its most remarkable feature; and "dignity" seems to have struck Sidonius Apollinaris as the leading characteristic of the historian, since, when giving a list of the most eminent Roman authors in prose or verse, he mentions the stately match (pompa) of the style of Tacitus—"a name," he adds, "never to be uttered without a tribute of applause." The speeches assigned by the historian to some of the persons in his narratives may have been cast in the mould of his own eloquence; and if so, then we may easily understand why "dignity" is ascribed to his public pleadings.
If we infer the disposition of Tacitus from the report of his oratory, or the study of his works, we shall regard him as a grave and sarcastic personage; and yet the inference might be wrong. The admiration, the affection of Pliny for his friend, the deep feeling with which Tacitus narrates the life and death of Agricola, the evident pleasure exhibited by him when delineating characters eminent for virtue, forbid us to imagine him austere or morose. But there are people, amiable and calm in disposition, who, when they take a pen into their hand, display a stern and acrid temper, more especially if they have a grievance or a theory to expound. Lack of preferment cannot have been among the causes for the gravity or despondency of Tacitus, for he had held the highest office of the State next to "great Cæsar's," and bore ever after the rank and title of a Consular.
There are men who live in the past—not merely students whose world is their library, but such as have taken a share in the business of the present time, and, nevertheless, yearn for days that cannot return. Was Tacitus of this class of men? More than once in his 'Annals' he appears to have been so. The chronicler of Tiberius, he says, has fallen on an evil time. "I am aware"—glancing, perhaps, at the more fortunate Livy, who could be a Pompeian without giving offence to Augustus—"that most of the transactions which I have related, or shall hereafter relate, may perhaps appear unimportant, and too trivial to be recorded. But none must compare these my Annals with the writings of those who compiled the history of the ancient Roman people. They had for their subjects mighty wars, cities sacked, kings routed and taken captive; or if they turned from these to treat of domestic affairs, they had before them an unlimited field for digression in the dissensions between the consuls and the tribunes, the agrarian laws, the corn-laws, and the contests between the commons and the patricians. The matter on which I am occupied is circumscribed and unproductive of renown to the author—a state of undisturbed peace, or only interrupted in a limited degree, the sad condition of affairs in the city, and a prince indifferent about extending the bounds of the empire."[1] He sighed for the brave days when some province almost yearly was annexed to the commonwealth. The manly virtues of a past age blinded him to its faults, and in his aversion to a single rule he forgot the vices of a divided one.
The names of some of his friends have been preserved—that of Justus Fabius, to whom he addressed the 'Dialogue on the Orators,' and that of Asinius Rufus, both friends also of Pliny. From Pliny we derive the best part of our slight knowledge of the historian, to whom he addresses eleven of his letters. Between him and Tacitus the strictest intimacy existed. Each of them submitted his writings to the other's inspection, and Pliny is never weary of applauding the harmony, frankness, and good faith which pervaded their intercourse from first to last. Pliny ever prophesied great things of the historical works on which Tacitus was engaged, and furnished him with materials, as, for example, two letters on the eruption of Vesuvius. Of the two we know not which was the survivor, but we are able to say that no cloud ever dimmed the brightness of their friendship. So well known, indeed, was their affection for each other, that they were jointly remembered in people's wills, and for equal legacies, unless the testator chanced to be especially a friend to either. Pliny, indeed, intimates (Epist. vii. 20) that "there lacked not those who were preferred to one or both of them," but, as for himself, he uniformly assigned the precedence in all things to his beloved friend.
- ↑ Annals, iv. 32.