If you want to make men
better you must uncover and scarify their sins.
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.
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