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666 666 Niehiihr on the Distiiictioii led Vespasian to declare himself. Here therefore is an epic unity : and it was a history devoid perhaps of great men, but in its early part full of mighty events, which made a deep impression on the youthful soul of Tacitus. A young man of his character was assuredly an ardent partisan of Ves- pasian, so long as the object was to extirpate the monsters of the court of Nero, and to remove a wretch like Vitellius ; and in the dreary reality of the government finally established, he no doubt still clearly perceived that there was reason to thank heaven for deliverance from the misery of the preceding period ; for though Domitian at last exercised a like tyranny, still the age was somewhat improved : it had sobered itself from the drunkenness of crime. For this narrative Tacitus needed neither to look to theories for a form, nor to seek long for a name : both presented themselves spontaneously. When his work was completed, he may perhaps have felt a void, and have desired to produce another ; and the people of that polite circle in the great world, which the letters of the younger Pliny place distinctly before our eyes, without inspiring us with any wish for their acquaintance, would never cease to press and intreat the great man who lived among them, not to be idle, and to write another history. As long as Trajan lived he could not wish to relate that which he had reserved for his old age : he decided on that of the half century from the death of Augustus to the beginning of his History. If he had not completed the latter he would perhaps not have separated it any more than Livy from the narrative of the earlier period. But to have united the two, the beginning of the History must have been destroyed or altered ; perhaps also many passages in the body of the work, and this without adequate cause. On the contrary, the form in which chance occasioned them to appear as two distinct works, was the most appropriate. The difficulties which embarrass a historical narrative of times preceding that of the writer, were for those of Tiberius really insurmountable. Tiberius had succeeded, after Ger- manicus had quitted Germany, in reducing the world to a state of torpid stillness, and in overspreading it with the silence of the grave : its history is now confined to himself