MISTAKES THAT PROVE FORGERY.

I. The Gift for the recovery of Livia.—II. Julius Caesar and the Pomoerium.—III.—Julia, the wife of Tiberius.—IV. The statement about her proved false by a coin.—V. Value of coins in detecting historical errors.—VI. Another coin shows an error about Cornutus.—VII. Suspicion of spuriousness from mention of the Quinquennale Ludicrum.—VIII. Account of cities destroyed by earthquake contradicted by a monument.—IX. Bracciolini\'s hand shown by reference to the Plague.—X. Fawning of Roman senators more like conduct of Italians in the fifteenth century.—XI. Same exaggeration with respect to Pomponia Graecina and the Romans.— XII. Wrong statement of the images borne at the funeral of Drusus.—XIII. Similar kind of error committed by Bracciolini in his "De Varietate Fortunae".—XIV. Errors about the Red Sea.— XV. About the Caspian Sea.—XVI. Accounted for.—XVII. A passage clearly written by Bracciolini.

It is now, however, time to pass on to other matters more interesting and important, and, it may be, more convincing.

I. Famianus Strada is very much surprised in his Prolusions (I. 2 Histor.) that it should be stated in the third book of the Annals (71), that when a gift for the recovery of Livia was to be presented to Fortune the Equestrian, it had to be made at Antium, where, it is stated, there was a temple which had that title, there being none in Rome that was so named. Here are the words of Bracciolini, in his own style, too, and his own history, neither of which is, nor could be that of Tacitus: "A debate then came on about a matter of religion, as to the temple in which the offering was to be placed, which the Knights of Rome had promised to present to Fortune the Equestrian for the health of the Imperial Princess" (a phrase which no Roman would have used); "for though there were many shrines of that Goddess in Rome, yet there was none with that name: it was resolved:—\'that there be a temple at Antium which has such an appellation, and that all religious rites in towns in Italy, and temples and statues of Gods and Goddesses, be under Roman law and rule\': consequently, the offering was set up at Antium": "Incessit dein religio, quonam in templo locandum erat donum, quod pro valetudine Augustae equites Romani voverant Equestri Fortunae: nam etsi delubra ejus deae multa in urbe, nullum tamen tali cognomento erat; repertum est, \'aedem esse apud Antium quae sic nuncuparetur, cunctasque caerimonias Italicis in oppidis, templaque et numinum effigies, juris atque imperii Romani esse\': ita donum apud Antium statuitur" (An. III. 71). This, however, was not the case; for Famianus Strada says that there was a temple in Rome which had been dedicated to Fortune the Equestrian for more than 200 years by Quintus Fulvius after the war with the Celtiberians, when he was Praetor; and, afterwards when he was Censor, he erected a magnificent edifice in honour of the goddess: the gift and the temple are both mentioned by Livy (XL. 42), also by Vitruvius, Julius Obsequens, Valerius Maximus, Publius Victor, and other historians and antiquaries. One cannot then well understand how a fact like this could have been unknown to Tacitus, who must have been acquainted with all the public buildings in Rome, especially the Temples; though it is quite easy to conceive how the slip could have been made by a writer of the fifteenth century: indeed, it would be odd if Bracciolini had not, now and then, fallen into such errors, which, though trivial in themselves, become mistakes of mighty magnitude in an inquiry of this description.

II. A writer who could be so ignorant about the temples in Rome is just the sort of writer who would display ignorance about the public works in that city. Cognate then with this blunder in the first part of the Annals is the blunder in the last part about that ancient right, the enlargement of the pomoerium. We are told that those only who had extended the bounds of the Empire by the annexation of countries which they had brought under subjection were entitled to add also to the City, and that the only two of all the generals who had exercised this privilege before the time of Claudius, were Sylla and Augustus. "Pomoerium urbis auxit Caesar more prisco, quo iis qui protulere imperium, etiam terminos urbis propagare datur. Nec tamen duces Romani, quamquam magnis nationibus subactis, usurpaverant, nisi Lucius Sulla et divus Augustus" (An. XII. 23). Justus Lipsius, at this misstatement, is, strange to say, quite contented by merely remarking in a merry mood: "I am not going to defend you, Cornelius: you are wrong: an enlargement was also made by Julius Caesar, who was \'pitched in\'" ("interjectus") "between these two." "Non defendo te, Corneli: erras: etiani C. Caesar auxit interjectus inter eos duos." Any critic ought not to be facetiously playful, but seriously startled and unaccountably puzzled, that Tacitus, or any Roman of his stamp, should have been ignorant of a fact which must have been known to all his well informed countrymen, from its having been borne testimony to by so many eminent writers;—by Cicero in his Letter to Atticus (I. 13), by Cassius Dio in the 43rd Book of his History, by Aulus Gellius in his "Noctes Atticae" (XIII. 14), and, omitting all the antiquaries such as Fulvius and Onuphrius, Mark Antony in his Funeral Oration over the remains of Caesar, where he bewails the fate of an Emperor, who had been slain in the City, the pomoerium of which he had enlarged: [Greek: en tae polei enedreutheis, ho kai to pomaerion autaes apeuxaesas] (Cas. Dio. XLIV. 49). This fact seems to have been unknown just as well to Shakespeare as to Bracciolini; or our great national poet would have taken cognizance of it somewhere, perhaps in that part of Mark Antony\'s speech, where reference is made to what Caesar did for the Romans:

    "Moreover, he hath left you all his walks,
    His private arbours, and new-planted orchards
    On this side Tiber: he hath left them you,
    And to your heirs for ever; common pleasures,
    To walk abroad and recreate yourselves."
    (Jul. Caesar, Act III. sc. 2)

III. A writer who could entirely overlook such a memorable achievement of Julius Caesar distinctly shows himself in his incorrectness about the career of such a distinguished member of the Augustan family as Julia, the wife of Tiberius: she is spoken of as having died in the first year of the reign of Tiberius, after having been banished by her father for infamous adulteries to the island of Trimetus, where, deserted by her husband, she must have speedily perished, in lieu of languishing in exile for twenty years, had she not been supported by the bounty of "Augusta". "Per idem tempus Julia mortem obiit quam neptem Augustus convictam adulterii damnatus est, projeceratque haud procul Apulis littoribus. Illic viginti annis exilium toleravit, Augustae ope sustentata" (An. IV. 71).

IV. A very small brass coin preserved in the National Collection in Paris informs us that Julia was alive at least three years after that date. So far from having been doomed by her husband to perish through want, Tiberius held her in such uncommon esteem that he ordered a coin to be struck in her honour in the fourth year of his reign for the money bears the inscription, in Greek capitals, [Greek: IOULIA], with the initials, [Greek: LD], signifying in the fourth year of Tiberius after the death of Augustus.

V. Now let the reader bear in mind that when we find in the Annals a statement so contrary to what we gather from an old coin, we must set down that statement as a pure figment of history; for nothing can be so valuable for correct and exact information as coins, which were always struck among the ancient Romans by public authority, by the decrees of the Senate or the Comitia Curiata, or by the edicts of the Decuriones (Councils of the Municipal towns or Colonies), and of the Propraetors or Proconsuls of the Provinces.

VI. A coin of the latter description lays bare another very gross error committed in the first part of the Annals in making Caius Caecilius Cornutus governor of Paphlagonia in the time of Tiberius (An. IV. 28): Cornutus must have been a Proconsul of that province in the time of either Galba or Otho. The coin, which is a large brass one, exhibits, on its obverse side, Cornutus with a helmet on his head, and underneath [Greek: AMISOU], meaning that he was the Governor of Paphlagonia, of which "Amisus" was the capital, while on the reverse side are the words [Greek: EPI GAIOU KAIKILIOU KORNOUTOU]; Rome, sitting upon shields, holds the Roman world in her right hand Victory stretches forth hers to place a crown on the head of Cornutus, and beneath is [Greek: ROMAE], which, during the period of the Empire, was inscribed on coins, but only in the time of Galba and Otho, because Amisus, that is Paphlagonia, was then subject to Rome, that is, the Senate, under Caius Caecilius Cornutus, as Africa was under Caius Clodius Mucrinus.

VII. No one would have been more willing than Bracciolini himself to have acknowledged the ample sufficiency of this argument to prove in the cases of Julia and Cornutus the forgery of the Annals; for he was himself a great collector of the coins and medals of antiquity, from which he gained a great deal of his historical information: he must, for example, have had in his possession, or have seen somewhere one of those medals which antiquaries say were struck in the time of Nero with a table, a garland, a pot, and the inscription: "Certa: Quinq. Rom. Co. Se." meaning "Certamen, Quinquennale Romae constituit"; for in the fourteenth book of the Annals (20) he makes mention of a set of games by the name "Quinquennale Ludricum," and in the sixteenth (4) by the title "Lustrale Certamnen, though no one has been able to decide, or even divine, what games these were on account of their exceeding insignificance: his object, then, in mentioning them, when their chief constituents or principal prizes were a table, a garland, and a pot, was evidently to impress his reader with his most intimate knowledge of ancient Roman customs, and leave his reader to infer with certainty that the Annals must have proceeded from a native Roman; but here it strikes me that he altogether defeated his own purpose; for if the Annals had been written by Tacitus, that grave historian took such high ground that he would have deemed it beneath him to notice any such trivial amusements, just as Hume and Henry, in tracing the history of the people of England, did not descend to make any inquiry into or mention of the precise time when such popular games were instituted, as the Maypole or country fairs, horse-racing or football.

VIII. Monuments as well as coins may be relied upon for correcting errors made by historians. There is a monument at Puteoli erected in the time of Tiberius A.D. 30, containing the names of fourteen cities in Asia Minor that were destroyed by a series of earthquakes that took place during seven years in the course of the reign of Tiberius, the first being Cilicia (Nipp. I. 233), which was destroyed A.D. 23, and the last, and greatest of all, being Ephesus, which was reduced to ruins A.D. 29. A passage in the second book of the Annals (47) describes twelve famous cities of Asia owing their sudden destruction to an earthquake occurring at night. We are told that "the usual means of escape by rushing into the open air was of no avail: the yawning earth swallowed up everybody: huge mountains sank down, level plains rose into hills, and lightning flashed throughout the catastrophe." Substitute "villages" for "famous cities," "hills" for "huge mountains," and we have, perhaps, as good an account as can be found in such few words of one of those dreadful calamities of nature,—though it happened not in the reign of Tiberius but three years before the death of Bracciolini,—the entire destruction of the city of Naples and its surrounding villages in 1456, when all the inhabitants perished, men, women and children, to the number of no fewer than 20,000 souls. "Eodem anno duodecim celebres Asiae urbes conlapsae nocturno motu terrae; quo improvisior graviorque pestis fuit. Neque solitum in tali casu effugium in aperta prorumpendi, quia diductis terris hauriebantur. Sedisse immensos montes, enisa in arduum quae plana fuerint, effulsisse inter ruinam ignis memorant." (II. 47).

IX. It will be here seen that the only thing mentioned as breaking out more suddenly and being more dreadful in its devastation than an earthquake is the "plague": "quo IMPROVISIOR GRAVIORque PESTIS fuit." Bracciolini spoke from personal observation. When he was here in England in 1422, he would not venture abroad nor leave London, on account of the plague which raged in the provinces and extended over almost the whole island (Ep. I. 7.). Details of this pestilence have not come down to us, but we see how terrible must have been its character, when this strong and lasting impression was left on the memory of Bracciolini, that he avails himself of it in this passage of the Annals to serve as a symbol of the worst species of destructiveness, from which we needs must gather that nothing could have broken out so unexpectedly and without apparent cause as the plague in England in 1422, nor have been more frightful and more rapid in its fatality.

X. Another instance in the first part of the Annnals of how Bracciolini modified circumstances from his own period, and then, —knowing that human actions are ever repeating themselves, just as that the human passions remain the same in all ages,—remitted them to the first century, is his account of the fawning of the Roman Senators, when he represents them imploring Tiberius and Sejanus to deign to vouchsafe to the citizens the honour of an audience: the Emperor and the Minister refuse the supplication; their condescension extends no further than to their not crossing over to the island of Caprea, but remaining on the coast of Campania: thither the Senators, the knights, and the vast mass of the commonalty of the City resort to exhibit a disgraceful spirit of sycophancy and servility; they hurry continually to and from Rome, crowd into Campania in such numbers that they are forced to lie in the open fields night and day, some on the bare sands of the seashore, without distinction of rank; and they put up with the insolence of the porters of Sejanus, who deny them ingress to the Minister. "Aram Clementiae............