and their sacred books. [Endnote 019]

Cassiodorus, the Senator, is the only writer of the sixth century,
who makes any allusion to Tacitus, and that but once, in the fifth
book of his Epistles, to what the Roman says in his Germany of the
origin of amber, about which naturalists are still divided, that
it is a distillation from certain trees. Freculphus (otherwise
written Radulphus), Bishop of Lisieux, who died in the middle of
the ninth century (856), in the second volume of his Chronicles,
--the sixth chapter of the second book,--quotes Tacitus as the
author of the History, the passage being in reference to the
Romans who fell in the Dacian war. We have no proof that the
Annals was in existence in the twelfth century from what John of
Salisbury says in his Polycraticon (viii. 18), that Tacitus is
among the number of those historians, "qui tyrannorum atrocitates
et exitus miseros plenius scribunt;" for in his completed History
Tacitus must have expatiated pretty freely on the "atrocious
tyranny" of Domitian, and the "unfortunate termination of the
lives of tyrants."

From the time of John of Salisbury till shortly before the
publication of the Annals, no further reference is made to Tacitus
by any writer or historian, monkish or otherwise, not even of
erudite Germany, beginning with Abbot Hermannus, who wrote in the
twelfth century the history of his own monastery of St. Martin's
at Dornick, and ending with Caspar Bruschius, who, in the
sixteenth century, wrote an Epitome of the Archbishoprics and
Bishoprics of Germany, and the Centuria Prima (as Daniel Nessel in
the next century wrote the Centuria Secunda) of the German
monasteries. And yet in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,