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HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
and psychologically unconvincing. No doubt he was influenced in so doing
by later events and his own experience of Domitian, but this is no adequate
excuse. Struggling to reconcile his preconceived view of Tiberius with the
facts available to him, he had to resort to many illegitimate and reprehensible
devices to make those facts seem other than they were or to explain them away.
Thus, to suggest that Tiberius' conduct is not to be explained straightforwardly,
he constantly reiterates the ideas of hypocrisy, dissimulation, and
hidden malice. And he presents the Tiberian treason-trials in an unjustifiably
horrific and lurid way. But he does not suppress or pervert evidence, and
indeed he supplies us with the means to refute his own contentions. Ann. 1-6
show a sad lack of judgement and historical perspective, but not dishonesty.
And, we may fairly add, the world's literature would be much poorer without
Tacitus' Tiberius, a haunting and tragic figure.
Tacitus' historical style is a masterful and strange creation, difficult to
characterize. It appears abnormal, but was any general norm recognized at this
period? If there was a standard prose, we may find it in Quintilian, and, for
history, Curtius may be typical. But, in spite of the strong influence of tradition,
fashion was very fluid and individuality acceptable. Tacitus tried, as
others did, to be colourful, original, and arresting. He also cultivated a
hauteur in expression and attitude unlike anything else in Latin literature.
Some adjudge him tortuous and artificial, and certainly his writing is anything
but facile. Close analysis reveals innumerable changes of preference: for a time
Tacitus favours particular words and phrases, then suddenly drops and supersedes
them. No constant development is evident, but he is ever striving to be
different, reacting against his own earlier experiments as well as against other
styles. He is also, however, acutely conscious of a need for overall consistency
of texture.
Tacitus adopted many prominent features of Sallust's style: choice and
unusual vocabulary, asyndeton, avoidance of balanced phrases and rounded
periods, and, above all, brevity. But in almost every respect in which he imitates
Sallust he also diverges, usually showing more taste and restraint than his
model. Thus he does not accept all Sallust's vocabulary: some of it was too
outlandish and archaic. Again he does not employ asyndeton as frequently
or as extravagantly. And, though he surpasses Sallust in brevity, he does not
affect the same abruptness. Rejecting the Ciceronian period, Sallust devised
a broken, staccato sentence-structure. Tacitus can write like this occasionally,
but elsewhere, to replace the period, he uses a lop-sided and overloaded form
of sentence, in which important thoughts are appended one to another, often
by the use of ablatives absolute, and where what is formally the main clause
may in fact be of little weight. In one way only does he go further than Sallust,
in his inordinate love of variation, a feature which pervades his historical
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