can be which took place in A.D. 24. The manner' of the august advocate of turpitude, in controlling the division and ensuring the rejection of the motion, may of course be a colouring of senatorial prejudice. The apologists of Tiberius are welcome to that suggestion, if they care to make it. The fact alone is conclusively damnatory. * The second capital blot on his policy was his gathering the Prætorians, at the suggestion of Sejanus, into one strongly fortified camp just outside the Servian agger. Augustus had never allowed more than three cohorts of armed men, besides the ordinary armed vigiles enrolled to keep the peace of the streets, &c., to be quartered in Rome. These household troops were kept in an almost constant idleness, and pampered with pay, donatives, and privileges, until their insolence became boundless, while their position made them the arbiters urbis et orbis. It surely needed far less political sagacity than that of Tiberius to forecast the certain result. That such a force thus concentrated should continue under the direct command of Sejanus, on whom he was then relying for civil administration also, was altogether a minor absurdity. By this arrangement the whole power at the point of contact with any public emergency was vested in one man's hands, who might thus obviously force a coup d'état at any moment. To rescue himself from this imminent peril tasked his astute statecraft to the utmost; and the atrocious massacre and nameless horrors which followed the downfall of Sejanus were really the Emperor's vengeance against that peril in which he had virtually placed himself. But his relations with Sejanus were personal to Tiberius; his general policy was disastrous to the empire. By reducing the Senate to impotence and making its members earn the wages of shame in mutual self-destruction, he overthrew the deliberative branch of government; by concentrating and dignifying the Prætorians, he substituted for this the element of brute force. Can there be a more decisive master-stroke of impolicy than this? His latest stage was that of retirement at Capreæ, where, one may say, he drew the curtains before he went to bed. An erratic impulse led him once to flutter again, like a November fly, around the walls of Rome, or, as Dio relates, the marriage of Caius (Caligula) drew him forth to Antium. But if the Prætorians were his protection, why did he not * Suet.Aug.' 49. keep under their sheltering eagles? If he resolved on seeking safety in that natural island fortress,' what need of the Prætorians? In his absence at Capreæ what else was their camp than a standing menace to the empire and himself? The abject inertness into which the Senate had been cowed, and the leaden weight of terror which lay upon all hearts, are nowhere perhaps so manifest as from this negative fact, that such an opportunity as this offered for years together was never seized. Probably all the bolder spirits had fallen victims already. There was no hand left capable of striking the blow and seizing the helm. 'What 'was going on behind those curtains?' is a question keenly debated between his apologists and his detractors. His own ostensible answer was, that he was cultivating the literæ 'humaniores, with other studies, some elegant, some occult, in the refined society of erudite Greeks.' Plunging into the foullest orgies and direst atrocities that ever revolted 'humanity,' was the answer on the lips of Roman society. Whichever be true, or nearer the truth, he certainly was not employed in governing the Roman state, which alone is our present point. The great machine of empire hung together at its work by that vis inertia which, as it resists the change from rest to motion, no less resists the change from motion to rest. Perhaps he calculated that the momentum would last his time. And here we may quote with entire concurrence Mr. Furneaux, who, after noticing one or two flashes of vigour' in this haze of stagnation, continues: 'In general, however, the administration is described as sinking into neglect and disorder; ambassadors and suitors are unable to get a hearing, even the "album judicum" is no longer filled up; the best men hang back from public service, or are kept for years from going to the province nominally entrusted to them; others are left year after year at their posts with apparent indifference to their merits; whether they were judicious as Poppaus Sabinus, cruel and oppressive as Pontius Pilate, or contumacious and dangerous as Gætulicus. Even the senatorial provinces, as Asia and Africa, seem to feel the effects of the general irregularity; and even the security of the frontier is said to be no longer fully maintained.* (Vol. i. pp. 131-2.) But habitual indecision, thus inducing inertness and falling under the creeping shadow of imbecility, is again *A thorough procrastinator, if ever a king or autocrat was so,' is the estimate of Tiberius expressed by Josephus, and cited on p. 131 (1) from Joseph. 'Antt.' xviii. 6, 5. purely personal to the man. The grave errors which we have been dwelling upon struck deep into the vitals of the Cæsarian supremacy, and left the deepest trace of all in history, until Constantine, three centuries after their rise, finally dissolved the Prætorians. Lastly, Tiberius early in his reign extinguished the Comitia by transferring their functions to the Senate, and only leaving them once in a reign the pro forma plebiscite which conferred on the prince his tribunitial capacity." Augustus had emasculated their power by exercising either a 'commendation' or a 'nomination' of certain candidates, but left them the form-a congé d'élire, in short. Tiberius trod out this last spark, and reduced the commonalty to functionless impotence, retaining only the resource of uproar. Having thus merged its powers in the Senate, reducing the august S.P.Q.R. to the first letter only, he proceeded to destroy the independence of the Senate itself. What then remained ?-L'état c'est moi! The result of this condensation of all institutions into Cæsarism was the extinction of the Cæsars. Dean Merivale tells us how 'with Nero, the adoptive race of the great dictator was extinguished. The first of the Cæsars had married four times, the second thrice, the third twice, the fourth thrice again, the fifth six times, and lastly the sixth thrice also. Of these repeated unions a large number had borne offspring, yet no descendants of them survived. A few had lived to old age, many reached maturity, some were cut off by early sickness, the end of others was premature and mysterious; but of the whole number a large proportion, which it would be tedious to calculate, were victims of domestic jealousy and politic assassination. Such was the price paid by the usurper's family for their splendid inheritance; but the people accepted it in exchange for internal troubles and promiscuous bloodshed.' + Civil war was, in short, extinguished for the rank and file of citizens, but with it Roman citizenship too. Its struggles were transferred from the Forum and the Campus to the steps of the throne; and Furor impius,‡ become a domestic fiend, now tore in pieces the imperial family. Tiberius Furneaux, i. Introd. vi. p. 70. History of the Romans under the Empire, vol. vii. pp. 48, 49, ed. 1865. +6 Claudentur Belli porta; Furor impius intus, Sæva sedens super arma, et centum vinctus ahenis Virg. En.' i. 294-6. began that long proscription-list of princely blood in Agrippa Postumus, of whose murder, whether principal or accessory, he cannot be held guiltless; and regarded his own kindred as 'wolves' to be held by the ears." But, further than this, the worst excesses which ever made absolutism odious, during the three successors of his house and throne, were the direct corollary of the precedents fixed by his reign, and that reign largely shared and wholly inaugurated the most atrocious half-century in the known annals of earthly empire. The evil which he did lived after him;' like Atreus in tragedy, he stamped his sceptre with a curse for his descendants, and that is why we arraign his policy at so much length, and regret, amidst the excellency of the editor's work, the insufficiency of the light thrown upon its main features. But both editors are entitled to our thanks for their annotations, always adequate and often excellent. Perhaps there is a slight hesitation now and then in Mr. Spooner's notes. That on 'armaque palam depositi,' p. 388, n. 9, is an instance; there can be no doubt that 'palam' is, as he doubtfully inclines to view it, equivalent to an adjective, such e.g. as manifesta.' We heartily wish them both an early second edition. We have already touched on the opening sections of Tacitus's early work, the Dialogue on illustrious orators, as containing a friendly rivalry between oratory and poetry considered as pursuits. The assumption which seems to underlie the discussion is a curious one, viz. that a man might at his choice succeed in either. Yet the dictum of Horace must have been well known to Tacitus, which forbids mediocrity in poetry,† while admitting it in oratory and other pursuits into which utility largely entered. The pith of the Dialogue,' however, is found in the further rivalry between the older and the newer style of oratory itself, which occupies three-fourths or more of the whole. Our reason for dwelling briefly upon this prolusion is that it forms a key to the ultimate literary form which the 'Annals' embody. In style Ciceronian, it declares under the persona of M. Aper a revolt against Cicero, founded on the demands of the imperial age, and it leaves the weightier of Aper's arguments unanswered by Vipstanus Messala, on whom Ego lupum auribus teneo.'-Suet. 'Tib.' 25, cf. Ter. 'Phor.' iii. 2, 21. Hor. Ep. ad Pisones,' 368-378. But that earlier rests the defence of the earlier school. school is one of oratory, not of literature as a vehicle of narrative. Yet, by ascribing to the later school which has displaced the old one those identical rhetorical features which distinguish the narrative style of the Annals,' he proves indirectly, but with sufficient clearness, that the genesis of this latter lay in the schools of rhetoric. The grand arena of the Ciceronian age had been the forum itself. Our modern use of the word 'forensic' tends to obscure its own origin. The forum, as understood by the republican age, was not merely the site of the law courts, but the scene of mass meetings, with all the elements of political life concentrated in its area. The rostra formed the real professor's chair for the public speakers' training. Not in the rarefied atmosphere of the Senate or in the specialised surroundings of the law courts, but in the broad open air of the contio and the comitia, they drew their breath of life. But on the Senate, too, the stifling vapours of imperialism had settled for half a century when Tacitus wrote, and no question involving great public issues came before the law courts. To the sensitive impatience of that later day the beatissima ubertas and felicissima facilitas which Quintilian ascribes to Cicero would have seemed a tedious prolixity. Terseness and point, rapid incisiveness, epigrammatic brilliancy, were now the leading requirements. The result of such an ideal, under the teaching of the rhetoricians of the empire, was to sink in petty smartness all the broader and grander aims of the orator of the past. On Tacitus himself its effect was to narrow the lights and deepen the shadows of his narrative style, to accumulate in a single phrase, or even a single word, the force of a whole clause; to make clauses do the work of sentences, and make sentences bear the weight of paragraphs, and often to squeeze, as it were, the thoughts out of shape by the closeness of the packing. But the strain thus put upon the attention is fatal to the enjoyment of the reader. The condensation of the matter overtaxes average powers of mental analysis, as we read. The vehicle of language itself under this treatment, however undeniably full of masculine vigour and nervous sententiousness, becomes often rugged, often obscure. We find the clenched fist, and would prefer the open hand; or, to quote a memorable saying, we find the nodosity of the oak' as well as its toughness,' and long for a smoother fibre and a less corrugated grain. |