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For if we consider the difficulty of the Original, and the Age wherein the Translation lived, it is both for the exactness of the version, and the chastity of the Language, one of the most accurate and perfect translations that ever were made into English." There is a rendering by Murphy, diffuse and poor; a dilution of Gordon, worthy neither of Tacitus nor of the English tongue.
Accepting as true the affirmation of Tacitus, in itself likely, we can very well explain the behaviour and acts of Tiberius in these years. The misdoing of Julia offended not only the man and husband, but placed also the statesman, the representative of the traditionalist party, in the gravest perplexity.
Evidently Sallust lies, as governmental writers in Spain lie today when they speak of Lerroux or Ferrer, or as the republican supporters of Thiers lied in 1871, characterizing the Paris Commune. Tacitus Tacitus is another great Roman historian who is theatrical, melodramatic, solemn, full of grand gestures. He also creates an atmosphere of suspicion, of falsehood.
Tacitus, born just about one hundred years after the death of Caesar, and who had access to the lost works of Pliny, was a moralist historian and a warm friend of the Germans. Over their shoulders he rapped the manners and morals of his own countrymen.
Mean individuals are magnified and inconsiderable nations exalted; their wars and deeds are related with pompous particularity; battles are fought not worth recording, and enterprizes undertaken not worth reading; Tacitus would have deemed such incidents unworthy of mention; for he takes no more notice of the Hermundurians, than to speak of them as a German tribe faithful to the Romans, and living in friendly relations with them: but in the Annals they are put forward for the admiration of posterity as waging a war with the Callians, and fighting a severe battle with those little creatures.
Soon after his arrival in England he produced a large painting on a subject from Tacitus, "Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus." It was a decided success. George the Third was deeply impressed with it, and congratulated West warmly upon its merits.
Tacitus was educated for the bar, and continued to plead causes, occasionally at least, and with not a little success, even after he had entered upon the great business of his life, as a writer of history. We find references to his first, and perhaps his last appearance, as an advocate, in the Letters of Pliny, which are highly complimentary.
The consequence of this is that no remark is so common as to hear people, especially young persons, say of Tacitus, "How difficult his Latin is!" Even Messrs. Church and Brodripp say so in the Preface to their translation of the "History."
Tacitus, indeed, was born before the science of history; but would M. Comte have seen any more clearly? Nor is the case much better if we are less hard upon our philosophy; if we content ourselves with the past, and require only a scientific explanation of that. First, for the facts themselves.
Soror tua haud meretrix est, ye brute! He burst out laughing, after a doubtful and ululant fashion, I dare say; but he went home, took up his auld wife, and played 'Tullochgorum' some fifty times over, with extemporized variations. The next day he had to translate a passage from Tacitus; after executing which somewhat heartlessly, he did not open a Latin book for a whole week.
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