it considers unaccountable. He, therefore, set about the task of
convincing the world that Tacitus did this. Acting up to his own
maxim, that "the way to get out of disgraceful acts that are
evident is by audaciousness": "flagitiis manifestis subsidium ab
audacia petendum" (An. XI. 26), he resorted to audacity in a
trick, which has been hitherto eminently successful,--making the
world believe from a single remark which he introduced into his
narrative as the double of Tacitus, that that noble Roman was
really guilty of this twofold inconsistency, so that
changeableness, unsteadiness of purpose and self-contradiction
should seem to be his leading characteristics. Without ever
intending to write the history of Augustus,--or he never would
have begun the Annals with an introduction in which he epitomizes
principal events in the Roman State from its very foundation,
otherwise what had he left to himself in a subsequent historical
composition of a prior date for an appropriate exordium,--he says
in his third book that he would make the memorable events in the
reign of Augustus the subject of a new history, should his health
and life continue:--"cetera illius aetatis memorabo, si plures ad
curas vitam produxero" (An. III. 24)--evidently only because
Tacitus had said at the commencement of his History, that he had
reserved as the employment of his old age, should his life be long
enough, the reigns of Nerva and Trajan:--"quod si vita suppeditet,
principatum Divi Nervae et imperium Trajani ... senectuti seposui"
(Hist. I. 1). There was then one and the same man saying in one
place:--"I am going to write the History of Augustus when I am an
old man;"--(and this being said in the Annals, the author of that
book must have wanted the world to presume that the writer would
have chosen the form of biography for it):--and in another place:
"I am going to write the history of Nerva and Trajan when I am an