historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

Chapter 3. Biography
himself entirely familiar with Tacitus – ‘in succum et sanguinem’ – and often
used Tacitean words and phrases to express himself. 191 Boxhorn’s works show
that he indeed tried to imitate Tacitus’s difficult variated style and that he was
prepared to take great stylistic risks in order to achieve, for example, Tacitus’s
brevity (brevitas). One example will suffice to illustrate where Boxhorn’s
attempt to imitate Tacitus’s brevity could lead to. The example is a fragment
from a lecture Boxhorn held on Tacitus after he had been given the task to give
public lectures on history in 1648.
Alios plerosque praeterita tradentes qui legunt, in foro quasi tantum,
& compitis aut trivio, & apud vulgus, quod eventa fere tantum notat
& intelligit[, versari sibi videntur]; qui [legunt] vero hunc, in ipso Senatu,
in Sacrario ipsorum Caesarum, inter consilia ipsa, quantumvis
abdita aut abstrusa, versari, atque adeo ipsa regnatricis domus, &
principis, & imperii, & dominationis, ut passim ipse loquitur, arcana
penitus introspicere sibi videntur. 192
However, despite his efforts to imitate the style of Tacitus, Boxhorn’s style is
less ‘Tacitean’ than that of his patron Heinsius. 193
Boxhorn admired both Tacitus’s style and the didactic value of the Roman
historian’s work. 194 Yet despite his admiration of Tacitus and his use of examples
from the Greek and Roman past in his works, Boxhorn also looked beyond
the horizon of antiquity. In the inaugural oration with which he started his new
Cicero vocatus) disserebat, & argumenta objecta, non distinctionibus philosophicis, quas, ut dixi, ob
barbariem odio habebat, praescindebat, ut ille nodum Gordium, sed libero discursu labefactabat, solvebat
& plane evertebat.’ For a discussion of Boxhorn’s funeral oration on the death of William II, see
chapter 5.
191 Baselius, “Historia vitae & obitus ”, ix. ‘Haec ergo frequentia habebat, tum numero tum auditoribus,
maximam partem in Cornelium Tacitum, quem delicias suas vocare solebat, & sic sibi familiarem
reddiderat, ut in succum & sanguinem, quod dicunt eundem versum habens ejus verbis & phrasibus
saepe loqueretur, saepius item scriberet.’
192 Marcus Zuerius Boxhorn, “Oratio, cum Cornelii Taciti Interpretationem aggrederetur”, in idem,
Orationes, Varii Argumenti. Series singularum & argumentum statim in ipso aditu leguntur (Johannes Janssonius;
Amsterdam, 1651), XIII, pp. 385-86 [391-92]. The diagonal words between the brackets are left
out by Boxhorn. The translation reads: ‘If you read most other auhors who have written about the past,
it seems that you are in the forum, and among the people who hang around on street corners or on the
street, and among the common people, who generally notice and observe only the news facts. However,
if you read Tacitus, it seems that you are in the Senate itself, in the most private rooms of the Caesars
themselves; it seems that you are present at their actual deliberations, however secluded and concealed
they are. And that indeed you get a close look at the secrets of the imperial house, of the emperor, of the
realm, and of the despotic use of power, as Tacitus himself says at several places.’ I would like to thank
Jan Waszink for helping me with this text.
193 I owe this observation to Adrie van der Laan. Heinsius tried to imitate Tacitus’s style in his history
of the siege of ’s-Hertogenbosch. Ter Horst, Daniel Heinsius (1580-1655), p. 105.
194 The latter will become clear further on in this thesis, especially in chapter 7.
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