William Smith

“ Tacitus employed this power in the history of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. Suetonius tells us of a man's vices simply and barely; Tacitus discovers what a man tries to conceal. His Annals are filled with dramatic scenes and striking catastrophes. He laboured to produce effect by the exhibition of great personages on the stage; but this is not the business of an historian. The real matter of history is a whole people; and their activity or suffering, mainly as affected by systems of government, is that which the historian has to contemplate. ”

“ It is too evidently a work of art, the straining after effect is too manifest, solidity is too often sacrificed to show, melody too often substituted for rough strength; the orator, passing into a rhetorician, seles rather to please the fancy than to convince the understanding; the declaimer usurps the place of the practical man of business.
If the skill of Cicero in composition is surpassing, not less remarkable was his tact and judgment. No one ever knew human nature better, or saw more clearly into the recesses of the heart. ”

“ Lepidus, therefore, felt himself strong enough to assume a threatening position, and accordingly, on the arrival of Octavian, claimed Sicily for himself, and an equal share as triumvir in the government of the state. A civil war seemed inevitable. But Lepidus did not possess the confidence of his soldiers; Octavian found means to seduce them from their allegiance, and at length, feeling sure of support from a numerous body of them, adopted one day the bold resolution of riding into the very camp of Lepidus, and calling upon his troops to save their country from a civil war. ”

“ In the Annals Tacitus is generally brief and rapid in his sketches; but he is sometimes minute, and almost tedious, when he comes to work out a dramatic scene. Nor does he altogether neglect his rhetorical art when he has an opportunity for displaying it : a Roman historian could never forget that a Roman was an orator. The condensed style of Tacitus sometimes makes him obscure, but it is a kind of obscurity that is dispelled by careful reading. Yet a man must read carefully and often, in order to understand him; and we cannot suppose that Tacitus was ever a popular writer. ”

“ The moral dignity of Tacitus is impressed upon his works; the consciousness of a love of truth, of the integrity of his purpose. His great power is in the knowledge of the human mind, his insight into the motives of human conduct; and he found materials for this study in the history of the emperors, and particularly Tiberius, the arch-hypocrite, and perhaps half madman. We know men's intellectual powers, because they seek to display them : their moral character is veiled under silence and reserve, which are sometimes diffidence, but more frequently dissimulation. ”

“ Just as the dissertation upon old age was placed in the mouth of Cato because he had been distinguished for energy of mind and body preserved entire to the very close of a long life, so the steadfast attachment which existed between Scipio and Laelius pointed out the latter as a person peculiarly fitted to enlarge upon the advantages of friendship and the mode in which it might best be cultivated. To no one could Cicero dedicate such a treatise with more propriety than to Atticus, the only individual among his contemporaries to whom he gave his whole heart. ”

“ From the moment that Cicero laid down his consulship he began to lose ground with all parties. The senate were disgusted by the arrogant assumption of superiority in an upstart stranger ; the equites were displeased because he would not cordially assent to their most unreasonable and unjust demands; the people, whom he had never attempted to flatter or cajole, were by degrees lashed into fury against one who was unceasingly held up before their eyes as the violator of their most sacred privileges. ”

“ To penetrate such a cloud of deception, we must attend even to the most insignificant external signs; for a man's nature will show itself, be he ever so cautious and cunning. In detecting these slight indications of character lies the great power of Tacitus : he penetrates to the hidden thoughts through the smallest avenue. But the possession of such a power implies something of a suspicious temper, and also cherishes it; and thus Tacitus sometimes discovers a hidden cause, where an open one seems to offer a sufficient explanation. ”

“ Cleomenes had not yet taken any open steps against the Ephors, though he could not but be an object of suspicion to them; they were however in a difficult position. The spirit of Agis still lived in the Spartan youth; and Cleomenes, at the head of his victorious army, was too strong to be crushed like Agis. Secret assassination might have been employed - and when was a Spartan ephor heard of who would have scrupled to use it ? - but then they would have lost the only man capable of carrying on the war, and Sparta must have fallen into the position of a subordinate member of the Achaean league. ”

“ We cannot suppose that the author of the Ad Herennium copied from the De Inventione, since the former embraces a much wider compass than the latter; still less can we believe that Cicero would be guilty of a shameless plagiarism, which must have been open to such easy detection. Both parties cannot have derived their matter from a common Greek original, for not only is it incredible that two persons translating independently of each other should have rendered so many phrases in words almost identical, but the illustrations from Roman writers common to both at once destroy such an explanation. ”

“ Clodius felt no compassion for his fallen foe. The instant that the departure of Cicero became known, a law was presented to and accepted by the tribes, formally pronouncing the banishment of the fugitive, forbidding any one to entertain or harbour him, and denouncing as a public enemy whosoever should take any steps towards procuring his recall. His magnificent mansion on the Palatine, and his elaborately decorated villas at Tusculum and Formiae were at the same time given over to plunder and destruction. ”

“ Moreover, in consequence of the civil wars in which the Romans had been engaged, and the absence of any fleet to preserve order upon the sea, piracy had reached an alarming height. The pirates possessed fleets in all parts of the Mediterranean, were in the habit of plundering the most wealthy cities on the coasts, not only of Greece and of the islands, but even of Italy itself, and had at length carried their audacity so far as to make descents upon the Appian road, and carry off Roman magistrates, with all their attendants and lictors. ”

“ We are put in possession of a prodigious mass of most curious and interesting information bearing upon the history of philosophy, conveyed in the richest and most winning language. Antiquity produced no works which could rival these as manuals of instruction ; as such they were employed until the downfal of the Roman empire; they stood their ground and kept alive a taste for literature during the middle ages; they were still zealously studied for a long period after the revival of learning ”

“ In the Annals of Tacitus we have all characters; but the hypocritical prevails in a despotic government and a state of loose positive morality. There may be great immorality and also great shamelessness, but then society is near its dissolution. Under the empire there was fear, for the government was despotic; but there was not universal shamelessness, at least under Tiberius : there was an outward respect paid to virtue. The reign of Tiberius was the reign of hypocrisy in all its forms, and the emperor himself was the great adept in the science ”

“ The groundwork and foundation of the whole is true wisdom, but true wisdom can be gained only by the union of all the highest natural endowments with a knowledge of philosophy and all the chief departments of literature and science; and thus Cicero brings us round to the conclusion, which is in fact the pervading idea of this and the two preceding works, that he who would be a perfect orator must be a perfect man. ”

“ The jurists of Rome under the empire never forgot the bright example of the Scaevolae of the republic : strange, though true, the great lawyers of Rome were among the best men and the best citizens that she produced. As to the mass of the people we learn little from Tacitus : they have only become matter for history in recent days. The superficial suppose, that when rulers are vicious the people are so too; but the mass of the people in all ages are the most virtuous, if not for other reasons, they are so because labour is the condition of their existence. ”

“ The punishment inflicted by order of the senate upon Lentulus, Cethegus, and their associates, although perhaps morally justified by the emergency, was a palpable violation of the fundamental principles of the Roman constitution, which solemnly declared, that no citizen could be put to death until sentenced by the whole body of the people assembled in their comitia; and for this act Cicero, as the presiding magistrate, was held responsible. ”

“ He was therefore distinct from the son of Apollodorus, but probably his son; for the name of Cleomenes is so very rare at Athens, that we can hardly suppose another Cleomenes to have been his father; and nothing was more common with ancient artists than that the son followed the father's profession. But it is quite improbable that an Athenian sculptor should have made the statue of a Roman in the form of a god before the wars against Macedonia had brought the Roman armies into Greece. ”

“ The splendour of these games charmed the people for the moment, but were not sufficient to regain him his lost popularity. Of this he had a striking proof almost immediately afterwards ; for the people began to express their discontent when he levied troops in Italy and Cisalpine Gaul and sent them into Spain under the command of his legates, L. Afranius and M. Petreius, while he himself remained in the neighbourhood of the city. Pompey's object now was to obtain the dictatorship, and to make himself the undisputed master of the Roman world. ”

“ He was a youth of an unamiable disposition, in which cunning and ferocity were mingled. His elder brother Nero was higher in the favour of Agrippina, and stood between him and the hope of succession to the empire. This produced a deep hatred of Nero in the envious and ambitious mind of Drusus. Sejanus, too, was anxious to succeed Tiberius, and sought to remove out of the way all who from their parentage would be likely to oppose his schemes. ”

“ The history of the empire presents the spectacle of a state without any political organisation, by which the tyranny of a ruler could be checked when it became insupportable. The only means were assassination; and the only power that either the emperor could use to maintain himself, or a conspirator could employ to seize the power or secure it for another, was the soldiery. ”

“ He had united himself to a party which was intent on its own aggrandizement and the ruin of its opponents; and there is abundant evidence to prove, that had that party gained the mastery, a proscription far more terrible than Sulla's would have taken place, the lives of every distinguished man on the other side would have been sacrificed, their property confiscated, and Italy and the provinces divided as booty among a few profligate and unprincipled nobles. From such horrors the victory of Caesar saved the Roman world.
Pompey was married several times. ”

“ At the same time, we must confess, that there is throughout a want of that life and reality which lends such a charm to the dialogues of Plato. We feel that most of the colloquies reported by the Athenian might actually have been held; but there is a stiffness and formality about the actors of Cicero, and a tendency to lecture rather than to converse, which materially injures the dramatic effect, and in fact in some degree neutralizes the benefit to be derived from this method of imparting knowledge. ”

“ Meanwhile, Cicero could boast of having accomplished an exploit for which no precedent could be found in the history of Rome. Of ignoble birth, of small fortune, without family or connexions, without military renown, by the force of his intellectual powers alone, he had struggled upwards, had been chosen to fill in succession all the high offices of the state, as soon as the laws permitted him to become a candidate, without once sustaining a repulse ”