by Will Durant
The assaults of the central European tribes against the frontier had stopped only for a breathing spell; in this struggle to destroy an Empire and make barbarism free, peace was but an armistice. In 169 the Chatti invaded the Roman regions of the upper Rhine. In 170 the Chauci attacked Belgica, and another force besieged Sarmizegetusa; the Costoboii crossed the Balkans into Greece and plundered the Temple of the Mysteries at Eleusis, fourteen miles from Athens; the Mauri or Moors invaded Spain from Africa, and a new tribe, the Longobardi or Lombards, made its first appearance on the Rhine. Despite a hundred defeats, the fertile barbarians were growing stronger, the barren Romans weaker. Marcus saw that it was now a war to the death, that one side must destroy the other or go under. Only a man schooled in the Roman and Stoic sense of duty could have transformed himself so completely from a mystic philosopher into a competent and successful general. The philosopher remained, hidden under the imperator’s armor; in the very tumult of this Second Marcomannic War (169-75), in his camp facing the Quadi on the river Granna,II Marcus wrote that little book of Meditations by which the world chiefly remembers him. This glimpse of a frail and fallible saint, pondering the problems of morality and destiny while leading a great army in a conflict on which the fate of the Empire turned, is one of the most intimate pictures that time has preserved of its great men. Pursuing the Sarmatians by day he could write with sympathy of them at night: “A spider, when it has caught a fly, thinks it has done a great deed. So does one who has run down a hare ... or who has captured Sarmatians. . . . Are they not all alike robbers?”61
Nevertheless, he fought the Sarmatians, the Marcomanni, the Quadi, the Iazyges, through six hard years, defeated them, and marched his legions as far north as Bohemia. It was apparently his plan to use the Hercynian and Carpathian ranges as a new frontier; if he had succeeded, Roman civilization might have made Germany, like Gaul, Latin in speech and classical in heritage. But at the height of his successes he was shocked to learn that Avidius Cassius, after putting down a revolt in Egypt, had declared himself emperor. Marcus surprised the barbarians with a hasty peace, merely annexing a ten-mile strip on the north bank of the Danube and leaving strong garrisons on the southern side. He summoned his soldiers, told them that he would gladly yield his place to Avidius if Rome wished it, promised to pardon the rebel, and marched into Asia to encounter him. Meanwhile a centurion killed Cassius, and the rebellion collapsed. Marcus passed through Asia Minor and Syria to Alexandria, mourning like Caesar that he had been cheated of a chance for clemency. At Smyrna, Alexandria, and Athens he walked the streets without a guard, wore the mantle of a philosopher, attended the lectures of the leading teachers, and joined with them in discussion, speaking Greek. During his stay at Athens he endowed professorships in each of the great schools of doctrine—Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and Epicurean.
In the fall of 176, after almost seven years of war, Aurelius reached Rome and was accorded a triumph as the savior of the Empire. The Emperor associated Commodus with himself in the victory and now made him, a lad of fifteen, his colleague on the throne. For the first time in nearly a century the principle of adoption was put aside and the hereditary principate was resumed. Marcus knew what perils he was inviting for the Empire; he chose them as a lesser evil than the civil war that Commodus and his friends would wage if he were denied the throne. We must not judge him with hindsight; neither did Rome anticipate the consequences of this love. There the plague had burned itself out, and men were beginning to be happy again. The capital had suffered little from the wars, which had been financed with remarkable economy and little extra taxation; while battle raged on the frontiers trade flourished within, and money jingled everywhere. It was the height of Rome’s tide and of its Emperor’s popularity; all the world acclaimed him as at once a soldier, a sage, and a saint.
But his triumph did not deceive him; he knew that the problem of Germany had not been solved. Convinced that further invasions could be prevented only by an active policy of extending the frontier to the mountains of Bohemia, he set forth with Commodus, in 178, on the Third Marcomannic War. Crossing the Danube, he again defeated the Quadi after a long and arduous campaign. No resistance remained, and he was about to annex the lands of the Quadi, the Marcomanni, and the Sarmatians (roughly Bohemia and Danubian Galicia) as new provinces, when sickness struck him down in his camp at Vindobona (Vienna). Feeling death’s hand, he called Commodus to his side and warned him to carry through the policy which was now so near fulfillment, and realize the dream of Augustus by pushing the boundary of the Empire to the Elbe.III Then he refused all further food or drink. On the sixth day he rose with his last strength and presented Commodus to the army as the new emperor. Returning to his couch he covered his head with the sheet and soon afterward died. When his body reached Rome the people had already begun to worship him as a god who for a while had consented to live on the earth.
* * *
I Its ten Corinthian monolithic columns are among the finest remains in the Forum. The portico is intact, and the cella, though shorn of its marble facing, has survived as the Church of San Lorenzo in Miranda.
II Probably the Gran, a tributary of the Danube.
III “We must not merely acknowledge the resolution and tenacity of the ruler,” says the impartial Mommsen, “but must also admit that he did what right policy enjoined.”62
CHAPTER XX
Life and Thought in the Second Century
A.D. 96-192
I. TACITUS
THE policies of Nerva and Trajan liberated the suppressed mind of Rome, and gave to the literature of their reigns a note of fierce resentment against a despotism that had gone but might come again. Pliny’s Panegyric voiced it in welcoming the first of three great Spaniards to the throne; Juvenal seldom sang any other note; and Tacitus, the most brilliant of historians, became a delator temporis acti, an accuser of times past, and excoriated a century with his pen.
We do not know the date or place of Tacitus’ birth, nor even his given name. Probably he was the son of Cornelius Tacitus, procurator of imperial revenue in Belgic Gaul; through this man’s advancement the family was raised from the equestrian class into the new aristocracy.1 Our first definite fact about the historian is his own statement: “Agricola, during his consulship (78) . . . agreed to a marriage between myself and his daughter, who might certainly have looked for a prouder connection.”2 He had received the usual education, and had learned to the full those oratorical arts which enliven his style, that skill in pros and cons which marks the speeches in his histories. The younger Pliny often heard him in the courts, admired his “stately eloquence,” and acclaimed him as the greatest orator in Rome.3 In 88 Tacitus was praetor; thereafter he sat in the Senate and confesses with shame 4 that he failed to speak out against tyranny, and joined in the Senatorial condemnation of Domitian’s Senatorial victims. Nerva made him consul (97), and Trajan appointed him proconsul of Asia. He was evidently a man of affairs and practical experience; his books were the afterthought of a full life, the product of a leisurely old age, and of a mature and profound mind.
One theme unites them—hatred of autocracy. His Dialogue on Orators (if it is his) attributes the decline of eloquence to the suppression of liberty. His Agricola—the most perfect of those brief monographs to which the ancients confined biography—proudly recounts the achievements of his father-in-law as general and governor, and then bitterly records Domitian’s dismissal and neglect of him. The little essay On the Situation and Origin of the Germans contrasts the virile virtues of a free people with the degeneration and cowardice of Romans under the despots. When Tacitus praises the Germans for considering infanticide an infamy, and giving no advantage to childlessness, he is not describing Germans but denouncing Romans. The philosophical purpose destroys the objectivity of the study, but allows a remarkable breadth of view in a Roman official praising the German power of resisting Rome.5 I
The success of these essays induced Tacitus to illustrate the evils of tyranny
by indicting the record of the despots in ruthless detail. He began with what was freshest in his memory and in the testimony of his older friends—the period from Galba to the death of Domitian; and when these Historiae were acclaimed by a grateful aristocracy as the best historical writing since Livy, he continued his story a fronte by describing, in the Annales, the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. Of the fourteen (some say thirty) “books” of the Histories four and a half remain, all devoted to the years 69 and 70; of the Annals twelve books survive from an original sixteen or eighteen. Even in this mutilated form they are the most powerful works in extant Roman prose; we may vaguely imagine the grandeur and impress of the whole. Tacitus had hoped to chronicle also the reigns of Augustus, Nerva, and Trajan, mitigating the gloom of his published works with some commemoration of constructive statesmanship. But the years were not given him; and posterity has judged him, as he judged the past, from a somber aspect alone.
“The chief duty of the historian,” he thought, “is to judge the actions of men, so that the good may meet with the reward due to virtue, and pernicious citizens may be deterred by the condemnation that awaits evil deeds at the tribunal of posterity.”6 It is a strange conception, which turns history into a Last Judgment and the historian into God. So conceived, history is a sermon—ethics teaching by horrible examples—and falls, as Tacitus assumed, under the rubric of rhetoric. It is easy for indignation to be eloquent but hard for it to be fair; no moralist should write history. Tacitus remembered tyranny too intimately to view tyrants calmly; he saw nothing in Augustus but the destruction of freedom and supposed that all Roman genius had ended with Actium.7 He seems never to have thought of tempering his indictments by recording the excellent administration and growing prosperity of the provinces under the imperial monsters; no one would suspect, from reading him, that Rome was an empire as well as a city. Perhaps the lost “books” viewed the provincial world; those that remain make Tacitus a deceptive guide, who never lies but never reveals the truth. He often cites, and sometimes critically examines, his sources—histories, speeches, letters, Acta Diurna, Acta Senatus, and the traditions of old families; but for the most part he has heard only the stories of the persecuted nobility, and never imagines that the executions of senators and the assassinations of emperors were incidents in a long contest between vicious, cruel, and competent monarchs and a decadent, cruel, and incompetent aristocracy. He is fascinated by striking personalities and events rather than by forces, causes, ideas, and processes; he draws the most brilliant and unjust character portraits in history, but he has no conception of economic influences upon political events, no interest in the life and industry of the people, the stream of trade, the conditions of science, the status of woman, the vicissitudes of belief, the achievements of poetry, philosophy, or art. In Tacitus Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius die, but they do not write; the emperors kill, but they do not build. Perhaps the great historian was limited by his audience; probably he read parts of his work—following the custom of the time—to the aristocratic friends whom Pliny describes as crowding to his receptions; he would have told us that these men and women knew Roman life, industry, literature, and art, and did not have to be reminded of them; what they wanted to hear, again and again, was the exciting story of the evil emperors, the heroic deeds of stoic senators, the long war of their noble class against tyrannical power. We cannot condemn Tacitus for not succeeding in what he did not attempt; we can only regret the narrowness of his great purpose and the limitations of his powerful mind.
He does not pretend to be a philosopher. He praises Agricola’s mother for dissuading her son, who “had acquired a keener zest for philosophy than became a Roman and a senator.”8 His imagination and art, like Shakespeare’s, were too creatively active to let him ponder quietly the meaning and possibilities of life. He is as rich in illuminating comment as in unverified scandal; but it is difficult to find in him any consistent view of God, or man, or the state. He is cautiously ambiguous on matters of faith, and suggests9 that it is wiser to accept one’s native religion than to try to replace it with knowledge. He rejects most astrologers, auguries, portents, and miracles, but accepts some; he is too much of a gentleman to deny the possibility of what so many have affirmed. In general, events seem to prove “the indifference of the gods to good and bad alike,”10 and the existence of some unknown, perhaps capricious, force that drives men and states fatally onward to their destiny11—urgentibus imperii fatis.12 He hopes that Agricola has departed to a happy life, but he obviously doubts it, and contents himself with the last delusion of great minds—an immortality of fame.13
Nor does any Utopian aspiration console him. “Most plans of reformation are at first embraced with ardor; but soon the novelty ceases, and the scheme ends in nothing.”14 Matters are temporarily better in his time, he reluctantly admits; but not even the genius of Trajan will prevent renewed deterioration.15 Rome is rotten literally to the core, in the hearts of men, of a populace whose disorder of soul has made an anarchy of freedom,16 a rabble “fond of innovation and change, and ever ready to shift to the side of the strongest.”17 He mourns the “malignity of the human mind,”18 and scorns like Juvenal the alien stocks in Rome. After blackening the Empire he does not dream of returning to the Republic, but hopes that the adoptive emperors will reconcile the Principate with liberty.19 In the end, he thinks, character is more important than government; what makes a people great is not its laws but its men.
If, despite our surprise in finding a sermon and a drama where we had looked for history, we must nevertheless rank Tacitus among the greatest of historians, it is because the power of his art redeems the limitations of his view. Above all he sees intensely, sometimes deeply, always vividly. The portraits he draws stand out more clearly, stride the stage more livingly, than any others in historical literature. Here, too, however, there are blemishes. Tacitus composes speeches for his varied personages, all in his own fashion and majestic prose; he describes Galba as a simpleton and makes him talk like a sage.20 And he does not rise to the difficult art of making his characters develop in time. Tiberius is the same at the beginning of his reign as at the end; and if he appeared to be human at the outset it was, Tacitus thinks, pure dissimulation.
First and last in Tacitus is the splendor of his style. No other author has ever said so much so compactly. This does not mean that he is brief; on the contrary, he is desultory and diffuse and takes 400 pages of the Histories to chronicle two years of time. Sometimes the condensation is extreme to the point of affectation or obscurity; every second word then requires a sentence to translate it; verbs and conjunctions are disdained as crutches for crippled minds. This is the culmination of Sallust’s concise rapidity, of Seneca’s pithy epigrams, of the balanced clauses taught in the schools of rhetoric. In a long work such a style, unrelieved with passages of a more even tenor, becomes an exhausting excitement to the reader, who nevertheless returns to it with mounting fascination. This martial brusqueness, more economical of words than of men, this scorn of the props of syntax, this passion of feeling and clearness of visualization, this tang of a novel vocabulary and murderous pungency of unhackneyed phrase, give to the writing of Tacitus a swiftness, color, and force which no ancient author has equaled. The color is dark, the mood is gloomy, the sarcasm stings, and the tone of the whole is that of a Dante without tenderness; but the cumulative effect is overwhelming. Along this black river of relentless exposure we are carried, despite our reservations and objections, by a narrative at once dignified and turbulent, stately and impetuous. Character after character rises upon the stage and is struck down; scene after scene rushes on until all Rome seems ruined and all the participants are dead. We can hardly believe, when we emerge from this chamber of horrors, that this period of despotism, cowardice, and immorality flowed into the zenith of monarchy under Hadrian and the Antonines, and the quiet decency of Pliny’s friends.
Tacitus was wrong in scorning philosophy—that is, perspective; all his fa
ults were due to lack of it. If he could have disciplined his pen to the service of an open mind, he would have placed his name first on the list of those who have labored to give form and permanence to the memory and heritage of mankind.
II. JUVENAL
Unfortunately, Juvenal corroborates Tacitus. What the one writes in mordant prose about princes and senators, the other chants in bitter verse about women and men.
Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, son of a rich freedman, was born at Aquinum in Latium (59). He came to Rome for his education and practiced law there “for his own amusement.” His satires betray the shock of rural tastes struck by the loose turmoil of city life; yet he appears to have been friends with Martial, whose epigrams show no prejudice in favor of morality. Shortly before Domitian’s death, says an uncertain tradition, Juvenal composed, and circulated among his friends, a satire on the influence of dancers at court; the pantomime actor Paris, we are told, took offense and had him exiled to Egypt. We cannot say if the story is true, nor when Juvenal returned; in any case he published nothing till after Domitian’s death. The first volume of his sixteen satires appeared in 101, the remainder in four volumes at intervals in a long life. Probably they were unforgiving memories of Domitian’s time; but the indignation that makes them so vivid and unreliable suggests that a few years of “the good emperors” had not cured the evils he denounced. Perhaps, again, he chose the satire as a characteristic Roman form, found models and some material in Lucilius, Horace, and Persius, and molded his fulminations and his wrath on the rhetorical principles that he had learned in the schools. We shall never know how darkly our picture of imperial Rome has been colored by the pleasures of denunciation.
