THE CHARACTER OF BRACCIOLINI.

I. The audacity of the forgery accounted for by the mean opinion Bracciolini had of the intelligence of men.—II. The character and tone of the last Six Books of the Annals exemplified by what is said of Sabina Poppaea, Sagitta, Pontia and Messalina.—III. A few errors that must have proceeded from Bracciolini about the Colophonian Oracle of Apollo Clarius, the Household Gods of the Germans, Gotarzes, Bardanes and, above all, Nineveh.—IV. The estimate taken of human nature by the writer of the Annals the same as that taken by Bracciolini.—V. The general depravity of mankind as shown in the Annals insisted upon in Bracciolini\'s Dialogue "De Infelicitate Principum".

I. There is a great difference between the first six books of the Annals and the last six books; the latter portion is more historical, and less biographical than the first portion: there is an obvious attempt to assimilate it as closely as possible to the work of Tacitus; and any material difference in the character of the two productions is not to be detected at a superficial glance. Hence many most intelligent readers are led astray in believing that the Annals and the History of Tacitus proceeded from the same hand, from not sufficiently bearing in mind that whatever a history may be, the general character must always be the same; plots and intrigues being alike, as well as stratagems and revolutions; also persons and passions: the reason is clear: man ever remains the same, affording the same examples of virtues and vices, and carrying on wars in the same way, according to interest and ambition, while the most important events in which he plays a part resemble in having their origin from trivial causes, as rivers, even the mightiest, take their source from insignificant springs.

But while nobody discerns any such material difference in the character of the Annals and the History of Tacitus as to be struck with wonder, everybody is filled with amazement at there being in the two works two such very different conceptions of historical composition. In the History only full light is thrown on important events and leading characters: that this may shine the brighter every common action is thrown into the shade, and every small individual passed over unmentioned. But the pages in the last six books of the Annals are crowded with incidents, great and small, and figures, good, bad and indifferent. Contrary also to Tacitus, who disposes materials in a just order, arranging those together that refer to the same thing at different times, the writer of the Annals speaks of cognate things, that should be associated, separately, as they occur from year to year, thus reducing his narrative from the height of a general history to the level of a mere diary.

The audacity of the forgery is here something absolutely marvellous;—and it never would have been attempted by any one who was not made of the stuff of Bracciolini: it was the stuff that makes a forger: anyone with proper appreciation of men\'s intelligence would not have dared to do this; but, instead of regarding the majority of his kind as sagacious, or even more so than they are, and knowing much, or more than they do,—as is the case with well-disposed people,—Bracciolini, who was far from being of a benevolent nature, fell into the very opposite extreme, of looking upon men as remarkably stupid and ignorant. Nothing is more common than meeting in his works with contemptuous disparagements of his kind; he scoffs at human nature for its deficiency of understanding; he does not hesitate decrying its want of thought, as in his Essay "De Miseria Humanae Conditionis": "we must at times recollect," says he, "that we are men, silly and shallow in our nature":—"aliquando nos esse homines meminerimus, hoc est, imbecillis fragilisque naturae" (p. 130); or, "I admit the silliness of mankind to be great": "fateor—magnam esse humani generis imbecillitatem" (p. 90); or, "Knowledge is cultivated by a few on account of the general stupidity": "quoniam communi stultitia a paucis virtus colitur" (p. 9l): pretty well this for one work. Then opening his "Historia Disceptativa Convivalis," the reader lights on him sneering at the "shallowness and silliness of his age":—"haec fragilis atque imbecilla aetas" (p. 32). As in his elaborate and carefully conned works, so in his Epistles thrown off on the spur of the moment,—as when he is inviting his friend Bartolomeo Fazio to stay with him in Florence, he continues: "Though I have lived in this city now for a great many years, from my youth upwards, yet every day as if a fresh resident I am overcome with amazement at the number of the remarkable objects, and very often am roused to enthusiasm at the sight of those public buildings which fools, from the stupidity of their understandings, speak of as erected by supernatural beings":—"quamvis in ea jam pluribus annis ab ipsa juventute fuerim versatus, tamen quotidie tamquam novus incola tantarum rerum admiratione obstupesco, recreoque persaepe animum visu eorum aedificiorum, quae stulti propter ingenii imbecillitatem a daemonibus facta dicunt" (Ep. IX. Bartol. Facii Epist. p. 79, Flor. Ed. 1745).

II. With such a low notion of men\'s intelligence and the stupidity of his age (though it was a clever one,—at least, so far as Italy was concerned, the country of which he had the closest knowledge and with which he had the most constant intercourse), it is to be expected,—quite natural, in fact, that he should have regarded lightly the difficulties he had to encounter in his endeavours to imitate Tacitus; and though he must have been thoroughly conscious that it was not in his power victoriously to surmount them, yet he cared not, for he did not fear detection, viewing, as he did, with such withering and lordly disdain the want of perspicacity which, in his fancy, characterized his species. He worked on, then, as best he could, with courage and confidence; every now and then doing things that never would have been done by Tacitus: the story, for example, of Sabina Poppaea in the 14th book; Tacitus would have surely passed it over as, though having some relation to the public, coming within the province of biography. Unquestionably, Tacitus would have rejected as strictly unhistorical the dark tale of murder and adultery of the tribune of the people, Sagitta, and the private woman, Pontia, which has no more to do with the historical affairs of the Romans, than a villainous case of adultery in the Divorce Court, or a monstrous murder tried at the Old Bailey is in any way connected with the public transactions of Great Britain. [Endnote 231]

What history, then, we have in the last six books of the Annals does not remind us in its character of the history taken note of by Tacitus.

The tone and treatment, too, are not his.

The Jesuit, Réné Rapin, in his Comparisons of the Great Men of Antiquity (Réflexions sur l\'Histoire, p. 211), may, with a violent seizure of ecstacy, fall, like a genuine Frenchman, into a fit of enthusiasm over the description, as "exquisite in delicacy and elegance" ("tout y est décrit dans une délicatesse et dans une élégance exquise" says he), of the lascivious dancing of Messalina and her wanton crew of Terpsichorean revellers when counterfeiting the passions and actions of the phrenzied women-worshippers of Bacchus celebrating a vintage in the youth of the world, when the age was considered to be as good as gold: the gay touches in the lively picture may be introduced with sufficient warmth to enrapture the chaste Jesuit priest, and judiciously enough to contrast boldly with the dreadful, tragic details of the shortly ensuing death of the Empress; but they are not circumstances that would have ever emanated with their emotional particularities from the solemn soul of Tacitus. The passage is only another powerful proof how absolutely ineffectual was the attempt of Bracciolini to render history after the style of the stern, majestic Roman.

III. Every now and then, too, the most extraordinary errors with respect to facts cannot be explained by the hypothesis that Tacitus wrote the Annals; for there could not have been such deviations from truth on the part of any Roman who lived in the time of the first Caesars: on the other hand, the errors are just of the character which makes it look uncommonly as if they were the unhappy blunders of a mediaeval or Renaissance writer such as Bracciolini. An instance or two will best illustrate what is meant.

In the Twelfth Book Lollia Paulina is made to consult the Colophonian Oracle of Apollo Clarius respecting the nuptials of the Emperor Claudius: "interrogatumque Apollinis Clarii simulacrum super nuptiis Imperatoris" (An. XII. 22). How could this be? when Strabo, who lived in the time of Augustus, tells us that in his day that oracle no longer existed, only the fame of it, for his words are: "the grove of Apollo Clarius, in which there used to be the ancient oracle":—[Greek: "alsos tou Klariou Apollonos, en ho kai manteion aen pote palaion"] (XIV. I. 27). This is quite convincing that Tacitus could not have written those words.

There is another reason against Tacitus having made the statement: he must have been aware from personal knowledge that his countrymen obtained all their oracular responses from water. Bracciolini might have known that this custom prevailed among the Romans during the time of the Caesars, had he consulted Lucian\'s Alexander or Pseudomantis, Melek (better known as Porphyry), and, above all, Jamblicus, who, in his book upon Egyyptian, Chaldaean and Assyrian Mysteries, speaks (III. 11) of the habit among the Romans of "interpreting the divine will by water": [Greek: di hudatos chraematizesthai], and explains the manner how, "for in a subterraneous temple" (by which, I presume, Jamblicus means a "sanctified cave or grotto") there was a fountain, from which the augur drank," [Greek: einai gar paegaen en oiko katageio, kai ap autaes pinein ton prophaetaen.] How can we believe that Tacitus was ignorant of such an ordinary native ceremony, and one, too, that must have come repeatedly within his ken?

Another error is, apparently, very trifling, but it becomes quite startling when we are to suppose that it was made by Tacitus, an accepted authority upon the people in question,—the ancient Germans of the first century of our aera:—that people who (according to Sanson\'s Maps and Geographical Tables) inhabited what was then known as "Germany," namely, the country between the Danube and the Rhine, with Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the western portion of Poland and some part of the kingdom of Hungary,—are represented as having HOUSEHOLD GODS, for we are told that if Italicus had had the spirit of his father (Flavius, brother of Armin), he would have done what his parent did, wage war more rancorously than any man, against his country and his "Household Gods"; "Si paterna Italico mens esset, non alium infensius coutra patriam ac Deos Penates, quam parentes ejus exercuisse" (An. XV. 16). Into this mistake Tacitus could not possibly have fallen, from being thoroughly acquainted with the manners of the Germans, as he has shown in his work on that subject: he knew that that people had only one set of gods whom they worshipped publicly in sacred groves and woods, but none corresponding to the Roman Dei Penetrales, privately worshipped at home.

We have read scarcely more than a page from the commencement of that portion of the Annals where the forgery began,—the Eleventh Book,—before we find that a mistake is made about Gotarzes being the brother of Artabanus: for he is described as having "compounded poison for the particular purpose of killing his \'brother\' Artabanus and his wife and son": "necem fratri Artabano conjugique ac filio ejus praeparaverat" (An. XI. 8). Artabanus was the father, as may be seen in Josephus: "not long after Artabanus died, leaving his kingdom to his son Vardanes: [Greek: "Met\' ou polun de chronon Artabanos telueta, taen Basileian to paidi Ouardanae katalipon"] (Antiq. Jud. XX. 3, 4 in init). Vardanes (according to Josephus), but (according to other writers) Bardanes was the brother of Gotarzes; as was known to Bracciolini who speaks of "Gotarzes revealing to his brother," meaning Bardanes, "a conspiracy of their countrymen which had been disclosed to him": "cognitis popularium insidiis, quas Gotarzes fratri patefecerat" (An. XI. 9). It cannot be said that Bracciolini was unacquainted with Josephus; for he follows him closely in the last six books of the Annals; further he mentions him in his letters, for he says that he has been "a long while waiting for his works," (to make use of them in his forgery): "Jamdiu expectavi Josephi libros," &c. (Ep. III. 28): his memory, notwithstanding, entirely failed him with respect to the passage in question, or else he paid no heed to it.

While he makes this misstatement about Gotarzes and Artabanus he falls into another blunder with respect to Bardanes: he circumscribes the limit of his reign to less than one twelvemonth,—the year when the Secular Games were celebrated which, according to his own account, was the year 800 from the Foundation of Rome, or the year 47 of the Christian Aera ("Ludi Saeculares octingesimo post Romam conditam … spectati sunt." An. XI. 11).

Soon after his accession Bardanes, (according to the narrative we have of him in the Annals), found a rebel in his brother Gotarzes, who waged war against him, defeated him, and, gaining his kingdom, had him assassinated by a body of Parthians, who "killed him in his very earliest youth while he was engaged in hunting and not anticipating any harm:" "incautum venationique intentum interfecere primam intra juventam" (An. XI. 10). All these circumstances are made to occur in such rapid succession to each other that they occupied only one year, if so much; for they are all shown as taking place during the consulship of Valerius Asiaticus and Valerius Messalla.

Now let the reader turn to the Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus. He will there see that the Magician of Cappadocia on his arrival in Babylon was told that Bardanes had been reigning two years and as many months; Apollonius stopped in the palace of the king twenty months; then he started on a tour to India; he travelled about the Asiatic Peninsula for a considerable time; next he went on a visit to the Brahmins with whom he staid four months; after that he returned to Babylon, where he found Bardanes as he had left him, still king and in the enjoyment of excellent health. It is necessary that I should substantiate this by extracts from Philostratus. In a conversation with one of the king\'s courtiers Apollonius asks the question: "What year that was since Bardanes had recovered his kingdom?" and received the reply that it was "the third, two months of which they had already reached": [Greek: "poston de dae touto etos tae anaktaetheisae archae; pritou, ephae, haptometha duo aedae pou maenes"] (I. 28): in another conversation with Damis Apollonius says that he "is off to India"; that he has been staying at the court "already a year and four months"; though "the king will not let him take his departure until the completion of the eighth month": [Greek: age, o Dami, es Indous iomen … eniautos gar haemin aedae, kai tettares … oude anaesei haemas … ho Basilaeus proteron, ae ton ogdoon telesai maena]: the biographer then speaking of the visit to the Brahmins, says that Apollonius spent four months with them": [Greek: maenon tettaron ekei diatripsanti]: and "on his return to Babylon he found Bardanes as he had left him," that is, on the throne and in the enjoyment of h............