Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. Dill Samuel
to street, the horror consists in the mixture of cruelty and licence. The baths and brothels and taverns are crowded at the very hour when the neighbouring ways are piled with corpses and running with blood; the rush of indulgence paused not for a moment; men seemed to revel in the public disasters. There was bloodshed enough in the days of Cinna and Sulla, but the world was at least spared such a carnival of lust.132 Even in reporting or imagining the speech of Galgacus to his warriors on the Grampians,133 even in the pictures of the German tribes,134 the ethical interest is always foremost. The cruel terror of the prince, the effeminacy and abandoned adulation of the nobles, the grossness and fierceness of the masses, contrasted with the loyalty, chastity, and hardihood of the German clans, seem to have dimly foreshadowed to Tacitus [pg 26]a danger from which all true Romans averted their eyes till the end.135
The key to the interpretation of Tacitus is to regard him as a moralist rather than a politician. And he is a moralist with a sad, clinging pessimism.136 He is doomed to be the chronicler of an evil time, although he will save from oblivion the traces and relics of ancient virtue.137 He has Seneca’s pessimist theory of evolution. The early equality and peace and temperance have been lost through a steady growth of greed and egotistic ambition.138 It is in the past we must seek our ideals; it is from the past we derive our strength. With the same gloomy view of his contemporaries as M. Aurelius had,139 he holds vaguely a similar view of cycles in human affairs.140 And probably the fairest hope which ever visited the mind of Tacitus was that of a return to the simplicity of a long gone age. He hailed the accession of Vespasian and of Trajan as a happy change to purer manners and to freedom of speech.141 But the reign of Vespasian had been followed by the gloomy suspicious despotism of Domitian. Who could be sure about the successors of Trajan? Tacitus hardly shared the enthusiasm and exuberant hopes expressed by his friend Pliny in his Panegyric. It was a natural outbreak of joy at escaping from the dungeon, and the personal character of Trajan succeeded in partially veiling the overwhelming force of the emperor under the figment of the freely accepted rule of the first citizen. Tacitus no doubt felt as great satisfaction as his friend at the suppression of the informers, the restored freedom of speech, the recovered dignity of the Senate, the prince’s respect for old republican forms and etiquette.142 He felt probably even keener pleasure that virtue and talent had no longer to hide themselves from a jealous eye, and that the whole tone of society was being raised by the temperate example of the emperor. But he did not share Pliny’s illusions as to the prince’s altered position under the new régime. The old Republic was gone for ever.143 It was still the rule of one man, on whose character [pg 27]everything depended. He would never have joined Plutarch and Dion in exalting the emperor to the rank of vicegerent of God. With his experience and psychologic skill, he was bound to regard all solitary power as a terrible danger both to its holder and his subjects.144 “Capax imperii, nisi imperasset” condenses a whole disquisition on imperialism. In truth, Tacitus, like many thoughtful students of politics, had little faith in mere political forms and names.145 They are often the merest imposture: they depend greatly on the spirit and social tone which lie behind them. In the abstract, perhaps, Tacitus would have given a preference to aristocracy. But he saw how easily it might pass into a selfish despotism.146 He had no faith in the people or in popular government, with its unstable excitability. He admitted that the conquests of Rome, egotistic ambition, and the long anarchy of the Civil Wars had made the rule of one inevitable. But monarchy easily glides into tyranny, and he accepts the Empire only as a perilous necessity which may be justified by the advent of a good prince. The hereditary succession, which had been grafted on the principate of Augustus, had inflicted on the world a succession of fools or monsters. The only hope lay in elevating the standard of virtue, and in the choice of a worthy successor by the forms of adoption.147 The one had in his own time given the world a Domitian, and was destined within three generations to give it a Commodus. The other secured to it the peace and order of the age of which Tacitus saw the dawn.148
The motive of Tacitus was essentially ethical, and his moral standard was in many respects lofty. Yet his standard was sometimes limited by the prejudices of his class. He cherished the old Roman ideal of “virtus” rather than the Stoic gospel of a cosmopolitan brotherhood of man.149 Like Pliny, he felt little horror at gladiatorial combats,150 although he may have had a certain contempt for the rage for them. He had probably far less humane feelings than Pliny on the subject of slavery.151 [pg 28]While he admired many of the rude virtues of the Germans, he prayed Heaven that their tribal blood-feuds might last for ever.152 He has all the faith of Theognis in the moral value of blood and breeding. He feels a proud satisfaction in recording the virtues of the scion of a noble race, and degeneracy from great traditions moves his indignant pity.153 He sometimes throws a veil over the degenerates.154 The great economic revolution which was raising the freedman, the petty trader, the obscure provincial, to the top, he probably regarded with something of Juvenal’s suspicion and dislike. The new man would have needed a fine character, or a great record of service, to commend him to Tacitus.155 But, with all these defects of hard and narrow prejudice, Tacitus maintains a lofty ideal of character, a severe enthusiasm for the great virtues which are the salt of every society.
Of the early nurture of Tacitus nothing is directly known. But we may be permitted to imagine him tenderly yet strictly guarded from the taint of slave nurses156 by a mother who was as unspotted as Julia Procilla, the mother of his hero Agricola.157 What importance he attached to this jealous care of a good woman, what a horror he had of the incitements to cruelty and lust which surrounded the young Roman from his cradle, are to be traced in many a passage coming from the heart. His ideal of youthful chastity and of the pure harmony of a single wedded union, reveals to us another world from the scene of heartless, vagrant intrigue, on which Ovid wasted his brilliant gifts. His taste, if not his principles, revolted against the coarse seductions of the spectacles and the wasteful grossness of the banquets of his time.158 He envies the Germans their freedom from these great corrupters of Roman character, from the lust for gold, and the calculating sterility which cut itself from nature’s purest pleasure, to be surrounded on the deathbed by a crowd of hungry, shameless sycophants. While Tacitus had a burning contempt for the nerveless cowardice and sluggishness which degraded so many of his order,159 he may have valued [pg 29]even to excess, although it is hardly possible to do so, the virtues of the strenuous soldier. Proud submission to authority, proud, cold endurance in the face of cruel hardship and enormous odds, readiness to sacrifice even life at the call of the State, must always tower over the safe aspirations of an untried virtue. The soldier, though he never knows it, is the noblest of idealists. The ideal of Tacitus, although he sees his faults of temper,160 was probably the character of his father-in-law, Agricola, grave, earnest and severe, yet with a mingled clemency, free from all vulgar avarice or ostentation of rank, from all poisonous jealousy, an eager ambitious warrior, yet one knowing well how to temper audacious energy with prudence.161 Tacitus would probably have sought his ideal among those grey war-worn soldiers on a dangerous frontier, half warrior and half statesman, just and clement, stern in discipline, yet possessing the secret of the Roman soldier’s love, the men who were guarding the Solway, the Rhine, and the Danube, while their brethren in the Senate were purchasing their lives or their ease by adulation and treachery. Yet, after all, Tacitus was too great for such a limited ideal. He could admire faith and courage and constancy in any rank.162 With profound admiration and subdued pathos, he tells how the freedwoman Epicharis, racked and fainting in every limb with the extremity of torture, refused to tell the secret of the Pisonian conspiracy, and by a voluntary death shamed the knights and nobles who were ready to betray their nearest kin.163 The slave girls of the empress, who defiantly upheld her fair fame, under the last cruel ordeal, are honoured by a like memorial.164
The deepest feeling of Tacitus about the early Empire seems to have been that it was fatal to character both in prince and subject. This conviction he has expressed with the burning intensity of the artist. He could never have penned one of those laborious paragraphs of Suetonius which seem transcribed from a carefully kept note-book, with a lifeless catalogue of the vices, the virtues, and the eccentricities of the subject. For Tacitus, history is a living and real thing, not a matter of mere antiquarian interest. He has seen a single [pg 30]lawless will, unchecked by constitutional restraints or ordinary human feeling, making sport of the lives and fortunes of men. He has seen the sons of the proudest houses selling their ancestral honour for their lives, betraying their nearest and dearest, and kissing the hand which was reeking with innocent blood.165 When