Page:Tacitus; (IA tacituswilliam00donnrich).pdf/20

8

Pliny, in his description of the trial, says that Tacitus answered Salvius Liberalis, the counsel for the defendant, "most eloquently, and with that dignity which belongs in a remarkable degree to his oratory." The two illustrious pleaders received a vote of thanks from the senate for their exertions in the cause. From this moment Tacitus departs from sight. There is indeed a slight trace of him in one of Pliny's letters, from which it appears that he was not at the time resident in Rome, nor very well supplied with news from it. And as we are unable to do more than surmise the date of his birth, so we must leave to conjecture that of his death. He lived long enough to complete, with one exception, the works he projected. He is the chronicler of the Cæsars from the death of Augustus to the accession of Nerva. "I have reserved," he tells us, "as an employment for my old age, should my life be long enough, a subject at once more fruitful and less anxious in the reign of the divine Nerya and the empire of Trajan." He may have rested from his labours before he began this work; or he may never have seriously meant to write it. Even of good Cæsars it might not always be prudent to speak the truth, and Tacitus may have thought himself living too near the time of his proposed narrative to write with impartiality about even a Trajan.

In the failure of materials for his life, we may endeavour to learn something of Tacitus from himself. If it be true that every great portrait-painter intro-