have written two pages of the "Annals." The style of the "Annals" is the unique style of the "Histories," with its mannerisms a little exaggerated: it is in no sense a caricature, and no inference can be drawn from the undoubted difference of tone, though this is not quite explained by the difference of subject. The "Annals " are more personal than the "Histories," because an interest in personalities had grown upon the author: this is a part of the reaction from the hopes which Trajan's accession had inspired. The author thinks worse of the world as a whole, and its larger events seem dim and shadowy; they fail to dwarf the details which are still able to sting besides, the matter is in itself more depressing, for instead of the conflict between armies we have the conflict between the emperors and the nobility, and this conflict is made still more depressing by the persistent assumption that the victims were always innocent. This assumption is strained very far in the case of Barea, who had allowed a town in his province to defend its art treasures by force against an imperial agent. According to Tacitus, to put such a governor on his trial for treason was an attack upon virtue itself. Barea may have been, and probably was, virtuous: he can hardly have been loyal; and we cannot trust Tacitus that the charge of treason rested so much as he implies upon the charge of magic, or that the pathetic denials of Barea's daughter were unimpeachably sincere.

But the style does not fall off, at least in the first half of the "Annals," with the author's loss of interest in his subject. It may even be said to gain both in concentration and flexibility: there are still passages in the "Histories" which are almost impersonal, ordinary narrative that any accomplished and reserved writer might have written. There is nothing impersonal in the "Annals;" the accent of personal scorn or suspicion or indignation breaks out everywhere; where nothing else is characteristic there is always the severe repression and the endless variety of phrase. The stately architectural structure of the age of Cicero and Livy has quite disappeared; the clauses are at once fragmentary and elaborate; the sentences would be incoherent if they were not condensed; po

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sition and emphasis are made to do the work of grammatical subordination and conjunctions and auxiliary verbs. The ablative absolute and long compound substantives and adjectives attain their fullest development. It is, perhaps, a sign that the richness of suggestion is passing over into decay that nothing is quite simple; there is a touch of fancy or reflection everywhere, even when nothing is really added, and the author is only reinventing with superfluous ingenuity phrases which had been rubbed threadbare. For instance, he is very fond of marking evening, but he never says simply “at evening," but "as the day waned to evening," or "when the day was turned about to evening." In the same way Tacitus can never say simply a man killed himself, even when he does not know or care to mention the manner of death, he prefers to say "he devised his own death," sibi mortem conscivit. But, after all, the style of the "Annals" is a matchless instrument for expressing and stimulating thought and imagination of a

certain order.

CHAPTER VI.

SUETONIUS.

SUETONIUS TRANQUILLUS was a littérateur of a new kind. He was at once a grammarian and an official; he was employed as secretary to Trajan and to Hadrian; he was dismissed from the latter office for disrespect to the Empress Sabina, with whom, according to some, he had an intrigue. He was not a rich man, and his own marriage was unlucky, so that he had to obtain the rights of a father of three children from Trajan by the intercession of the younger Pliny.

He has none of the pretensions or the prepossessions of the senatorian writers: one may call him unprejudiced or unscrupulous. He does not aim at blackening any emperor in the way that Tacitus aims at blackening Tiberius or Nero; he has still less of the genuine though not unofficial enthusiasm of Velleius; he is a gossip, and speaks evil of every one without an intention of doing harm.

His "Lives of the Cæsars" are his principal work, and they are very tantalizing, as they are to us a substitute for history. They are not orderly biographies, but biographical portraits, and the chronological skeleton which we cannot supply was still accessible when he wrote. He is careless of truth of detail, but all the stories which he gives might have been or ought to have been true. They illustrate a sound view of the character which is under discussion. Very few French or English éloges have the easy mastery we find in Suetonius's "Lives of the Cæsars," or at least in the first six. Whether materials or courage to be frank failed the author, the last six are comparatively meagre. Of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius there was, of course, little to say; their administration was too short to have a well-marked character, and Suetonius's plan

does not lead him to dwell at length on the events of their reigns. Even on his plan more should have been said of Vespasian and Domitian, but the treatment of the events of their reigns is even more meagre in proportion, just because tradition was fresh; and he could take for granted the vague knowledge of events, which was all he ever thought it necessary to communicate as a framework for personal anecdotes.

The life of Julius, if nothing has been lost, begins abruptly, as if the author did not care to give the traditional glories of the Julian house, which must have been hackneyed when he wrote. The first thing we are told is that he lost his father at the age of sixteen, and the year after parted with a rich wife to whom he had been betrothed in his nonage, in order to espouse the daughter of Cinna, the last chief of the Marian party. He makes up for this reticence by a long list of all the conspiracies of which Cæsar was suspected in his early years. He came back to Rome from his stay in Bithynia, about which there was scandal that Suetonius takes care to retail, in order to see if he had a chance with Lepidus; and as he disapproved of Lepidus, and did not believe in his chances, he went to Rhodes to be out of the way and study rhetoric, after which he distinguished himself against Mithridates and the pirates.

After his term of office in Spain he came back before the time to claim full citizenship for the Latin colonies, and to conspire with Crassus to massacre a competent number of senators to secure the consulate to Sylla and Autronius, while Crassus and he were to be dictator and master of the horse. Suetonius does not give a single hint of Cæsar's share in the conspiracy of Catiline, the most formidable of all. The author's reticence appears to be imposed by the pressure of a loyalty which he does not share; for the treatment of the Civil War is, upon the whole, impartial. We are told cynically how Cæsar made a party by bribing all the surroundings of Pompeius and great part of the senate with gifts or easy loans, while everybody of lower rank, who visited him by invitation or otherwise, received splendid presents. He helped everybody in difficulties who was not too far gone to be helped

decently, and hinted that he should be able to help these too if there came a civil war.

Suetonius does not trouble himself to make the negotiations which preceded the Civil War intelligible. He tells us that the tribunes who had fled to Cæsar's camp were only the pretext of the Civil War, and gives a list of the different conjectures as to the real cause. "Pompeius was in the habit of saying that as Cæsar could not finish the works he set afoot out of the means of a private citizen, nor fulfil what he had taught the people to expect of his coming, he decided to confound everything in one medley. Others say he feared to be compelled to give account of all he had done in his first consulship against the laws and auspices and the tribunes, since Marcus Cato had given notice not once or twice, and that with an oath, that he would put him on trial as soon as ever he had let his army go. It was a common forecast that if he came back a private man he would have to plead his cause, after the precedent of Milo, with armed men round about. This has been made more credible by the testimony of Asinius Pollio, who says that in the battle of Pharsalia, looking on his enemies smitten and beaten down before him, he uttered these very words: 'They would have it ; after all my achievements I, Gaius Cæsar, should have been condemned if I had not asked help from the army.' Some think he was caught by the habit of command, and, after weighing his own strength and that of the enemy, took occasion to snatch the mastery which in his first youth he had desired."1

The campaigns are hurried over in two short chapters, in which all the serious risks of the hero are completely disguised one hardly knows why, for there is no approach to adulation; not even a laudatory comment on his clemency, so unknown in civil wars. Something is said of this last in the long enumeration of personal traits which follows the summary of the Civil War; but it is put on a level with his kindness in beheading the pirates who took him prisoner, before he kept his word by crucifying them, and simply putting a confidential slave, who had undertaken to poison him, to 1 Suet. "Jul." xxx. 2 Ib. xxxiv., xxxv.