Few Christian moralists deal much in eulogy, and Tacitus’ diatribes are the more frequent and the more fierce because his was the morality not of Christ but of Rome.  ‘The Poor’ are as dirt to him:  he can stoop to immortalize some gleam of goodness in low life, but even then his main object is by scorn of contrast to galvanize the aristocracy into better ways.  Only in them can true virtus grow.  Their degradation seems the death of goodness.  Tacitus had little sympathy with the social revolution that was rapidly completing itself, not so much because those who rose from the masses lacked ‘blood’, but because they had not been trained in the right traditions.  In the decay of Education he finds a prime cause of evil.  And being a Roman—­wherever he may have been born—­he inevitably feels that the decay of Roman life must rot the world.  His eyes are not really open to the Empire.  He never seems to think that in the spacious provinces to which the old Roman virtues had taken flight, men were leading happy, useful lives, because the strong hand of the imperial government had come to save them from the inefficiency of aristocratic governors.  This narrowness of view accounts for much of Tacitus’ pessimism.

Recognition of the atmosphere in which Tacitus wrote and the objects at which his history aimed helps one to understand why it sometimes disappoints modern expectations.  Particular scenes are seared on our memories:  persons stand before us lit to the soul by a fierce light of psychological analysis:  we learn to loath the characteristic vices of the time, and to understand the moral causes of Roman decadence.  But somehow the dominance of the moral interest and the frequent interruption of the narrative by scenes of senatorial inefficiency serve to obscure the plain sequence of events.  It is difficult after a first reading of the Histories to state clearly what happened in these two years.  And this difficulty is vastly annoying to experts who wish to trace the course of the three campaigns.  Those whose interest is not in Tacitus but in the military history of the period are recommended to study Mr. B.W.  Henderson’s Civil War and Rebellion in the Roman Empire, a delightful book which makes the dark places plain.  But they are not recommended to share his contempt for Tacitus because his accounts of warfare are as bad as, for instance, Shakespeare’s.  Tacitus does not describe in detail the tactics and geography of a campaign, perhaps because he could not do so, certainly because he did not wish to.  He regarded such details as dry bones, which no amount of literary skill could animate.  His interest is in human character.  Plans of campaign throw little light on that:  so they did not interest him, or, if they did, he suppressed his interest because he knew that his public would otherwise behave as Dr. Johnson did when Fox talked to him of Catiline’s conspiracy.  ’He withdrew his attention and thought about Tom Thumb.’