Page:Tacitus Histories Fyfe (1912) Vol1.djvu/12

8 in the past; yet he clearly shows that he had some hope of the future. Without sharing Pliny's faith that the millennium had dawned, he admits that Nerva and Trajan have inaugurated 'happier times' and combined monarchy with some degree of personal freedom.

There are other reasons for the 'dark shadows' in Tacitus' work. History to a Roman was opus oratorium, a work of literary art. Truth is a great but not a sufficient merit. The historian must be not only narrator but ornator rerum. He must carefully select and arrange the incidents, compose them into an effective group, and by the power of language make them memorable and alive. In these books Tacitus has little but horrors to describe: his art makes them unforgettably horrible. The same art is ready to display the beauty of courage and self-sacrifice. But these were rarer phenomena than cowardice and greed. It was not Tacitus, but the age, which showed a preference for vice. Moreover, the historian's art was not to be used solely for its own sake. All ancient history was written with a moral object; the ethical interest predominates almost to the exclusion of all others. Tacitus is never merely literary. The which Pliny notes as the characteristic of his oratory, never lets him sparkle to no purpose. All his pictures have a moral object 'to rescue virtue from oblivion and restrain vice by the terror of posthumous infamy'. His prime interest is character: and when he has