The annals of Tacitus

INTRODUCTION xv
III. 'TIBERIUS THE TYRANT'
There is a very striking passage iu Dio Cassius (liii 19) '.
As he approaches the history of the Empire, this writer
regards himself as passing from light into darkness. Though
he has before him Tacitns, Suetonius, and other authorities,
yet he writes:— 'From henceforth state affairs were managed
privily. If anything was divulged, it was not sufficiently
attested to gain implicit belief. Almost every incident is
distorted from the truth. Then there is the vast extent of
the Empire Events took place in Rome, in the Provinces,
on the frontiers, of which none but the actors themselves
could ascertain the exact truth ; and people generally knew
not that they had occurred at all.' Truth being so hard to
ascertain, Tacitus loved to indulge other literary excellences.
He is a stylist rather than a historian. Moreover, he has a
wonderfully subtle power of psychological analysis, of which we
shall see good examples in Book iv, especially in his portrait
of Tiberius. He is often carried away by this faculty to the
detriment of truth. He has not the historical excellences
of a Thucydides,—no critical faculty, no anxious search for
facts. Neither is he an imaginative historian like Livy.
Rather he is a stern moralist of the old republican type.
Thus in his elaborate monograph, Tibenus the Tyrant
(p. 357), Tarver writes :— 'Tacitus interested himself only in
recording events which seemed to him striking illustrations
of good or bad behaviour,—history being to him merely a
primer of morals and a collection of examples.' Compare
especially Annals iii Qb, praecipMum munus annalium reor ne
uirtutes sileantur, ntque prauis dictis factisque ex posteritate et
infamia metiis sit.
In the book referred to, Tarver makes a valuable attempt
' See Furneaux, vol. i, p. 17.
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