Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/29

Rh and the bazaars. The mosque, which he ascribes to Sháh Abbas, is that of the Turcoman Jahan Sháh (1410–1468). Abbas Mirza converted the citadel into an arsenal. Among the ruins of old Tauris the sepulchre of the Mogul sultan, Ghazan Khán, is no longer to be distinguished, except as part of a huge tumulus. It is situated about 2 miles south-west from the modern town, but far within the original boundaries. The "spacious arches of stone and other vestiges of departed majesty with which Porter found it surrounded in 1818 were possibly remains of the college (madrasa) and monastery (záwίya) where Ibn Batuta found shelter during his visit to the locality. In spite of the cholera visitation of 1822 and other occasional ravages of sickness, and the severe cold of winter, the climate of Tabriz is proverbially healthy. Its orchards and fruit gardens have a high reputation, and its running streams make amends for ill-paved and narrow streets and sorely defective municipal arrangements. General Schindler estimated the population in 1886 at about 170,000,—a number agreeing with the latest local census. The same authority states that the city contains 8 tombs of imámzádehs, 318 mosques, 100 public baths, 166 caravanserais, 3922 shops, 28 guard-houses, and 5 Christian (Armenian) churches; but this account must comprise in some of its items more buildings than are actually in use. There are said to be nearly 3000 Armenians in the place.

 TACITUS. The famous Roman historian Tacitus, who ranks beyond dispute in the highest place among men of letters of all ages, lived in the latter half of the first and in the early part of the 2d century of our era, through the reigns of the emperors Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, Trajan. All we know of his personal history is from allusions to himself in his own works, and from eleven letters addressed to him by his very intimate friend the younger Pliny. The exact year of his birth is a matter of inference, but it may be approximately fixed near the close of the reign of Claudius, from 82 to 54 Pliny indeed speaks of Tacitus and himself as being "much of an age" (propemodum æquales) though himself born in 61 or 62, but he must have been some years junior to his friend, who began, he tells us, his official life with a quæstorship under Vespasian in 78 or 79, at which time he must have been twenty-five years of age at least. Of his family and birthplace we know nothing certain; we can infer nothing from his name Cornelius, which was then very widely extended; but the fact of his early promotion seems to point to respectable antecedents, and it may be that his father was one Cornelius Tacitus, who had been a procurator in one of the divisions of Gaul, to whom allusion is made by the elder Pliny in his Natural History (vii. 76). But it is all matter of pure conjecture, as it also is whether his "prænomen" was Publius or Caius. He has come down to us simply as Cornelius Tacitus. The most facts about him to us are that he was an eminent pleader at the Roman bar, that he was an eye-witness of the "reign of terror" during the last three years of Domitian, and that he was the son-in-law of the great and good Julius Agricola, the humane and enlightened governor of Britain. This honourable connexion, which testifies to his high moral character, may very possibly have accelerated his promotion, which he says was begun by Vespasian, augmented by Titus, and still further advanced by Domitian, under whom we find him presiding as prætor at the celebration of the secular games in 88, and a member of one of the old priestly colleges, to which good family was an almost indispensable passport. Next year, it seems, he left Rome, and was absent till 93 on some provincial business, and it is possible that in these four years he may have made the acquaintance of Germany and its peoples. His father-in-law died the year of his return to Rome. In the concluding passage of his Life of Agricola he tells us plainly that he witnessed the judicial murders of many of Rome’s best citizens from 93 to 96, and that being himself a senator he felt almost a guilty complicity in them. "Our hands," he says, "dragged Helvidius to prison; we were steeped in Senecio's innocent blood," With the emperor Nerva’s accession his life became bright and prosperous, and so it continued through the reign of Nerva’s successor, Trajan, he himself, in the opening passage of his Agricola, describing this as a "singularly blessed time" (beatissimum seculum); but the hideous reign of terror had stamped itself ineffaceably on his soul, and when he sat down to write his History he could see little but the darkest side of imperialism. To his friend the younger Pliny we are indebted for all we know (and this is but trifling) about his later life. He was advanced to the consulship in 97, in succession to a highly distinguished man, Virginius Rufus, on whom he delivered in the senate a funeral eulogy. "The good fortune of Virginius," says Pliny, "was crowned by having the most eloquent of panegyrists." In 99 he was associated with Pliny in the prosecution of a great political offender, Marius Priscus, under whom the provincials of Africa had suffered grievous wrongs. The prosecution was successful, and we have Pliny’s testimony that Tacitus spoke with his characteristic dignity. Both received a special vote of thanks from the senate for their conduct of the case. Of his remaining years we know nothing, and we may presume that he devoted them exclusively to literary work. It would seem that he lived to the close of Trajan’s reign, as he seems to hint at that emperor’s extension of the empire by his successful Eastern campaigns from 115 to 117. Whether he outlived Trajan is matter of conjecture. It is worth noticing that the emperor Tacitus in the 3d century claimed descent from him, and directed that ten copies of his works should he made every year and deposited in the public libraries. He also had a tomb built to his memory, which was destroyed by order of Pope Pius V. in the latter part of the 16th century. Tacitus, as we gather from one of Pliny’s letters, 