   #copyright

Tacitean studies

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Historians, chroniclers
and history books

   Justus Lipsius's 1598 edition of the complete works of Tacitus.
   Enlarge
   Justus Lipsius's 1598 edition of the complete works of Tacitus.

   Tacitus is remembered first and foremost on his place as Rome's
   greatest historian, the equal—if not the superior—of Thucydides, the
   ancient Greeks' foremost historian. Tacitean studies, however, extend
   far beyond the field of history. His work has been read for its moral
   instruction, its gripping and dramatic narrative, and its inimitable
   prose style; he has been (and still is) most influential as a political
   theorist, outside the field of history.^ The political lessons taken
   from his work fall roughly into two camps (as identified by Giuseppe
   Toffanin): the "red Tacitists", who used him to support republican
   ideals, and the "black Tacitists", those who read his accounts as a
   lesson in Machiavellian realpolitik.^

   Though his work is the most reliable source for the history of his era,
   its factual accuracy is occasionally questioned: the Annals are based
   in part on secondary sources of unknown reliability, and there are some
   obvious minor mistakes (for instance confusing the two daughters of
   Mark Antony and Octavia Minor, both named Antonia). The Histories,
   written from primary documents and intimate knowledge of the Flavian
   period, is thought to be more accurate, though Tacitus' hatred of
   Domitian seemingly colored its tone and interpretations.

Antiquity and Middle Ages

   Tacitus's contemporaries were well-acquainted with his work; Pliny the
   Younger, one of his first admirers, congratulated him for his
   better-than-usual precision and predicted, correctly, that his
   histories would be immortal. His books are clearly among the sources of
   2nd century classical works such as Cassius Dio's report on Agricola's
   exploration of Britain, and Hegesippus may have borrowed from his
   account of the Great Jewish Revolt.^ His difficult historical methods
   and literary style, however, went unimitated except by Ammianus
   Marcellinus, who consciously set out to write a continuation of his
   works.^ His popularity waned with time: his unfavorable portrayals of
   the early emperors could not have earned him favour with Rome's
   increasingly autocratic rulers, and his obvious contempt for Judaism
   and Christianity (both troublesome foreign cults in the eyes of a
   first-century Roman aristocrat) made him unpopular among the early
   Church Fathers.^ The 3rd century writer Tertullian, for example, blames
   him (incorrectly—see history of anti-Semitism) for originating the
   story that the Jews worshipped a donkey's head in the Holy of Holies
   and calls him "ille mendaciorum loquacissimus", 'the most loquacious of
   liars'.^
   Monks like Einhard were the only readers of Tacitus for most of the
   Middle Ages.
   Enlarge
   Monks like Einhard were the only readers of Tacitus for most of the
   Middle Ages.

   In the 4th century there are scattered references to his life and work.
   Flavius Vopiscus, one of the supposed Scriptores Historiae Augustae,
   mentions him twice ( Aurelian 2, Probus 2) and names him among the
   disertissimos viros, the most eloquent men. Ammianus Marcellinus, as
   mentioned, started his history where Tacitus had finished. Jerome knew
   of him, and Sulpicius Severus used him as a source for passages on
   Nero.^ By the 5th century only a few authors seem aware of him:
   Sidonius Apollinaris, who admires him, and Orosius, who alternately
   derides him as a fool and borrows passages (including many that are
   otherwise lost) from his works.^ Cassiodorus and his disciple Jordanes
   (middle of the 6th century) make the last known antique references;
   Cassiodorus draws on parts of the Germania and Jordanes cites the
   Agricola, but both know the author only as Cornelius.^

   After Jordanes, Tacitus disappeared from literature for the better part
   of two centuries, and only four certain references appear until 1360.
   Two come from Frankish monks of the Carolingian Renaissance: the
   Annales Fuldenses from the monastery of Fulda used Tacitus's Annals,
   and Rudolf of Fulda borrowed from the Germania for his Translatio
   Sancti Alexandri.^ Some of Tacitus's works were known at Monte Cassino
   by 1100, where the other two certain references appear: Peter the
   Deacon's Vita Sancti Severi used the Agricola, and Paulinus Venetus,
   Bishop of Pozzuoli, plagiarized passages from the Annals in his mappa
   mundi.^ Hints and reminiscences of Tacitus appear in French and English
   literature, as well as German and Italian, from the 12th to the 14th
   century, but none of them are at all certain.^ It was not until
   Giovanni Boccaccio brought the manuscript of the Annals 11-16 and the
   Histories out of Monte Cassino to Florence, in the 1360s or 1370s, that
   Tacitus began to regain some of his old literary importance.

Italian Renaissance

   Leonardo Bruni was the first to use Tacitus as a source for political
   philosophy.
   Enlarge
   Leonardo Bruni was the first to use Tacitus as a source for political
   philosophy.

   Boccaccio's efforts brought the works of Tacitus back into public
   circulation—where they were largely passed over by the Humanists of the
   14th and 15th centuries, who preferred the smooth style of Cicero and
   the patriotic history of Livy, who was by far their favorite
   historian.^The first to read his works—they were four: Boccacio,
   Benvenuto Rambaldi, Domenico Bandini, and Coluccio Salutati—read them
   solely for their historical information and their literary style. On
   the merits of these they were divided.^ Bandini called him "[a] most
   eloquent orator and historian"^ , while Salutati commented:

          For what shall I say about Cornelius Tacitus? Although a very
          learned man, he wasn't able to equal those closest [to Cicero].
          But he was even way behind Livy—whom he proposed to follow—not
          only in historical series but in imitation of eloquence.^

   The use of Tacitus as a source for political philosophy, however, began
   in this era, triggered by the Florentine Republic's struggle against
   the imperial ambitions of Giangaleazzo Visconti. Visconti's death from
   an illness did more than lift his siege of Florence; it sparked
   Leonardo Bruni to write his Panegyric to the City of Florence (c.
   1403), in which he quoted Tacitus (Histories, 1.1) to buttress his
   republican theory that monarchy was inimical to virtue, nobility, and
   (especially) genius.^ The inspiration was novel—Bruni had probably
   learned of Tacitus from Salutati. The thesis likewise: Tacitus himself
   had acknowledged that the good emperors Nerva and Trajan posed no
   threat to his endeavors.^

   Tacitus, and the theory which Bruni based on him, played a vital role
   in the spirited debate between the republicans of Florence and the
   proponents of monarchy and aristocracy elsewhere. Guarino da Verona, in
   1435, used the literary flowering of Augustus's era—which included
   Livy, Horace, Virgil, and Seneca the Elder—to argue against Bruni's
   contention; Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini countered with the
   argument that all the authors had been born during the waning years of
   the Roman Republic. Pier Candido Decembrio, a Milanese courtier,
   addressed the same argument to Bruni in the following year, which Bruni
   did not bother to rebut, the best counterargument having been made
   already.^ The rule of Cosimo de Medici, however, saw the end of these
   political readings of Tacitus, though his works were now readily
   available in the public library of Florence. Instead, scholars such as
   Leone Battista Alberti and Flavio Biondo used him in academic works on
   the history and architecture of 1st-century Rome. His laconic style and
   bleak outlook remained unpopular. ^
   Niccolò Machiavelli occasionally resembles Tacitus in his pessimistic
   realism, but he himself preferred Livy.
   Enlarge
   Niccolò Machiavelli occasionally resembles Tacitus in his pessimistic
   realism, but he himself preferred Livy.

   At the beginning of the 15th century, following the expulsion of the
   Medici from Florence, their return, and the foreign invasions of Italy,
   Tacitus returned to prominence among the theorists of classical
   republicanism. Niccolò Machiavelli was the first to revive him, but not
   (at first) in the republican model which Bruni and others had followed.
   One quotation from the Annals ( 13.19) appears in The Prince (ch. 13),
   advising the ruler that "it has always been the opinion and judgment of
   wise men that nothing can be so uncertain or unstable as fame or power
   not founded on its own strength".^ The idealized Prince bears some
   resemblance to Tacitus's Tiberius; a few (most notably Giuseppe
   Toffanin) have argued that Machiavelli had made more use of Tacitus
   than he let on. In fact, though, Machiavelli had probably not read the
   first books of the Annals at that time—they were published after The
   Prince.^

   In his overtly republican Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy,
   Machiavelli returned to Bruni's republican perspective on Tacitus. Four
   overt references appear in the work. Chapter 1.10 follows Tacitus
   (Histories 1.1), and Bruni, on the chilling effects of monarchy.
   Chapter 1.29 quotes the Histories ( 4.3) on the burden of gratitude and
   the pleasure of revenge. Chapter 3.6 quotes Tacitus: "men have to
   honour things past but obey the present, and ought to desire good
   Princes, but tolerate the ones they have". 3.19 twists a line from
   Tacitus ( 3.55) into something very similar to Machiavelli's famous
   maxim that it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. (The
   original made a very different point: that respect for the Emperor and
   a desire to conform, not fear and punishment, kept certain senators in
   line.) Many covert references appear: Machiavelli generally follows
   Tacitus's decidedly negative slant on the history of Rome under the
   Emperors. ^

   Machiavelli had read Tacitus for instruction on forms of government,
   republican as well as autocratic, but after his books were placed on
   the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, writers on political philosophy (the
   so-called "black Tacitists"—see above) frequently used the Roman as a
   stand-in for the Florentine (that is the Machiavellian part of the
   Florentine), and the Emperor Tiberius as a mask for the ideal Prince.
   So, writers like Francesco Guicciardini considered Tacitus' work to be
   an instruction on how to build a despotic state. Following that line of
   thought (Catholics in appearance reading Tacitus instead of
   Machiavelli's still forbidden Prince), the thinkers of the
   Counter-Reformation and the age of absolute monarchies used his works
   as a set of rules and principles for political action.

Enlightenment and Revolutions

   Early theoreticians of raison d'état used Tacitus to defend an ideal of
   Imperial rule. Other readers used him to construct a method for living
   under a despotic state, avoiding both servility and useless opposition.
   Diderot, for example, used Tacitus' works, in his apology for Seneca,
   to justify the collaboration of philosophers with the sovereign.

   During the Enlightenment Tacitus was mostly admired for his opposition
   to despotism. In literature, some great tragedians such as Corneille,
   Jean Racine and Alfieri, took inspirations from Tacitus for their
   dramatic characters.

   Edward Gibbon was strongly influenced by Tacitus' historical style in
   his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,

   The French Revolutionaries, for whom Tacitus had been a central part of
   their early education, made much use of his criticisms of tyranny and
   love of the republic—he is one of the authors most often quoted (behind
   Cicero, Horace, and Plutarch) by the members of the National and
   Legislative Assemblies and by revolutionary authors such as Jacques
   Pierre Brissot. Later, during the Reign of Terror, Camille Desmoulins
   and the writers of the Actes des apôtres used him to denounce the
   excesses of the Jacobins.^

   Napoleon, on the other hand, attacked his works furiously, both for
   style and contents. This would-be founder of an Imperial dynasty,
   praised by amongst others Goethe for his insight in literature, knew
   the danger that Tacitus's histories might pose to one who wished to go
   around grabbing for power. François de Chateaubriand, for one, had
   already compared the new Emperor of the French to the worst emperors of
   Rome, warning that a new Tacitus would someday do for Napoleon what
   Tacitus had done for Nero. The Emperor's reaction was vicious: to
   Goethe and Wieland he complained that "[Tacitus] finds criminal
   intention in the simplest acts; he makes complete scoundrels out of all
   the emperors to make us admire his genius in exposing them". To others
   he swore that Tacitus, ce pamphlétaire, had "slandered the emperors"
   whom, he averred, the Roman people had loved. ^

20th century

   By the 20th century authenticity of the remaining texts ascribed to
   Tacitus was generally acknowledged, apart from some difference of
   opinion about the Dialogus. Tacitus became a stock part of any
   education in classical literature - usually, however, only after the
   study of Caesar, Livy, Cicero, etc while Tacitus' style requires a
   greater understanding of the Latin language, and is perceived as less
   "classical" than the authors of the Augustan age.

   A remarkable feat was accomplished by Robert Graves: the major gap of
   text that had gone lost of the Annals regarded parts of the end of
   Tiberius' reign, the whole of Caligula's reign, and the major part of
   Claudius' reign (the remaining part of Tacitus' manuscript only took up
   again at this Emperor's death, for the transition to the reign of
   Nero). Robert Graves' 1934 I, Claudius, and the ensuing Claudius the
   God (1935) filled the gap perfectly: all the missing parts of the
   Annals, up to the latter part of the reign of Claudius himself, were
   covered by a coherent story. Of course part of it can be considered
   "mockumentary" in the Augustan History tradition (for example how
   Claudius really felt about republicanism, heavily elaborated by Graves
   sometimes based on "reconstructed" historical documents, will probably
   never be really established). Anyhow Graves borrowed much from Tacitus'
   style: apart from the "directness" of an Emperor pictured to write down
   his memoires for private use (linked to the "lost testament of
   Claudius" mentioned in Tacitus' Annals), the treatment is also on a
   year-by-year basis, with digressions not unlike Tacitus' "moralising"
   digressions, so that in the introduction of the second of these two
   volumes Graves saw fit to defend himself as follows:

     Some reviewers of I, Claudius, the prefatory volume to Claudius the
     God, suggested that in writing it I had merely consulted Tacitus's
     Annals and Suetonius's Twelve Caesars, run them together, and
     expanded the result with my own "vigorous fancy." This was not so;
     nor is it the case here. Among the Classical writers who have been
     borrowed from in the composition of Claudius the God are Tacitus,
     Cassius Dio, Suetonius, Pliny, Varro, Valerius Maximus, Orosius,
     Frontinus, Strabo, Caesar, Columella, Plutarch, Josephus, Diodorus
     Siculus, Photius, Xiphilinus, Zonaras, Seneca, Petronius, Juvenal,
     Philo, Celsus, the authors of the Acts of the Apostles and of the
     pseudo-gospels of Nicodemus and St. James, and Claudius himself in
     his surviving letters and speeches.

   ...no doubt, Tacitus remains the first author mentioned in this list.

   Graves' work reflected back on the perception of Tacitus' work: Graves
   curbed the "slandering of Emperors" by portraying Claudius as a
   good-humoured emperor, at heart a republican (...probably stretching
   some of Claudius' naivity to accomplish that effect) - resulting in the
   perception that if the "Claudius" part of Tacitus' annals had survived
   it probably wouldn't have been all slander towards the emperors of the
   first century^ . The more explicit defence of republicanism in Graves'
   work (that is: much more explicit than in Tacitus' work) also made any
   further direct defense of black Tacitism quite impossible (as far as
   Napoleon, by not advocating a black Tacitism line of thought hadn't
   already made such interpretation obsolete).

   By the end of 20th Century, however, a sort of inverted red tacitism
   (as the new variant of black tacitism could be called) appeared, for
   example in publications like Woodman's Tacitus reviewed: the new
   theories described the emperors of the principate no longer as monarchs
   ruling as autocrats, but as "magistrates" in essence defending a
   "republican" form of government (which might excuse some of their rash
   actions), very much in line with Graves' lenient posture regarding
   crimes committed under the rule of princeps Claudius (for instance the
   putting aside of the elder L. Silanus, showing the emperor's lack of
   conscience according to Tacitus, Ann. XII,3; while Graves' account of
   the same incident appears not to incriminate Claudius).

21st century

   One of Tacitus' polemics against the evils of empire, from his Agricola
   (ch. 30), was often quoted during the United States invasions of
   Afghanistan and Iraq, by those who found its warnings as applicable to
   the modern era as to the ancient (see for example The Guardian). It
   reads, in part:

   Raptores orbis, postquam cuncta vastantibus defuere terrae, iam mare
   scrutantur: si locuples hostis est, avari, si pauper, ambitiosi, quos
   non Oriens, non Occidens satiaverit [...]
   Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi
   solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.   Brigands of the world, after
   the earth has failed their all-devastating hands, they probe even the
   sea; if their enemy be wealthy, they are greedy; if he be poor, they
   are ambitious; neither the East nor the West has glutted them [...]
   They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name
   Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.

   (Punctuation follows the Loeb Classical Library edition)

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitean_studies"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
