Malachi151

What are some of the known mistakes that Tacitus makes in his works, especially Annals?

Ben C Smith

Sir R. Syme has an appendix (G-61) in volume 2 of his work Tacitus (or via: amazon.co.uk) entitled Mistakes in the Annales. I would start there (page 746). Both volumes are fairly easy to get via interlibrary loan.

Ben.

John Kesler

You may be interested in some of the unflattering things he says about Jews. And of course there is the following famous account from Histories, 4.81:

Gamera

Agricola is a carefully crafted encomium to Tacitus' father-in-law, written to propagate "traditional" Roman values, glorify his own family, and make an argument for Imperial rule. Given its tendentious purpose and lack of much supporting evidence outside the text, all of it should be taken with a grain of salt.


http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~otherw/writs/sobak.html

By the way, I'm not saying Tacitus was a bad historian. For his time, he appears quite good, or at least well read. But his apparently dispassionate rhetoric clearly masks a personal political agenda that has seduced many modern scholars into thinking he had some scholarly purpose. He was as biased, if not more so, as any author in antiquity. I mean, if Luke admitted he was Paul's cousin, and he worked for a local church, consider the outcry that would bring from the skeptics.

fta

For an alternative view see J.W. Ross's 19th century Tacitus and Bracciolini: The Annals Forged in the Fifteenth Century ... but bear in the mind that the author's thesis is that the Annals are a medieval forgery and all the "historical errors" are due to the forger rather than Tacitus himself

Roger Pearse

The thesis is that the works of Tacitus were forged by the renaissance book hunter Poggio Bracciolini, to whose labours in the early 15th century we owe so much of ancient literature.

The only manuscript of the second portion of the Annals was certainly written in the 11th century at Monte Cassino. Ross knew this, and resorts to conspiracy theory to evade so damning a piece of evidence.

The ms. remained at Monte Cassino until the renaissance, when it was 'acquired' by Boccacio. The latter bequeathed it with the rest of his books, but it was 'acquired' by Niccolo Niccoli, and was among those he lent from time to time to Poggio. From Niccolo it passed into the library of San Marco, and then to the Mediceo-Laurentian library today.

The secretive side of all this reflects the fact that researchers tend to have problems with manuscript libraries. The latter are fantastically uncooperative, and always have been. When Cardinal Bessarion bequeathed a great treasure of Greek manuscripts to the city of Venice in the 15th century, so that scholars could use them, they were promptly locked up "to keep them safe" and remained unavailable to anyone but the curator for 50 years.

In the 17th century Dom Bernard Montfaucon journeyed through Italy recording holdings, and his Diarum Italicum records this venerable and learned monk getting thrown out of libraries along the length and breadth of Italy.

In the 19th century Franz Oehler had to pay people to allow him to make collations from manuscripts, and thank them profusely in his prefaces.

The same obscurantism and greed obtains today. The British Library will not photograph or put its mss online -- indeed they tried to charge me $16,000, plus $1,000 a year for the rest of my life in respect of 3 mss, and fought successfully against pressure from an MP to keep them unphotographed and unrecorded. At the same time I have reason to believe that the staff award themselves special rates and probably photograph at will.

Frequently we find that those who run these libraries do so purely for their own convenience. This often combines with neglect, and with greed. In the renaissance, therefore, it was sometimes necessary to bribe the ignorant and careless holders in order to get access; and so to be somewhat cautious about saying openly how they had done so. So we should not attribute necessary tactics to publish books to dishonesty. After my own experiences, I fully understand.

Here are some notes on the manuscripts of Tacitus, with excerpts from Poggio's letters:

http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/tacitus/index.htm

All the best,

Roger Pearse

fta

Setting aside the dubious forgery thesis, are Ross's lists of historical errors in the Annals accurate? (Whether Tacitus wrote the work or not! )

S.C.Carlson

That much is true, but it is also the case that many of those MSS that ended up in the hands of printers were unbound and recycled as scrap for pasteboards by the printers after they were done with them. Scandalous.

Stephen

Roger Pearse

Too true! The destruction was huge. But then, who needed a tatty old hand-written copy of a book, of uncertain date, when you could have a nice new copy? (so, no doubt, many reasoned)

The same could sometimes apply to manuscripts that remained in the monasteries. The Hersfeld ms of Ammianus Marcellinus was chopped up for use on abbey farms in the late 16th century.

A local lord spent ages extracting the Speyer Notitia Dignitatum from the cathedral; but after he died it suffered a similar fate, and illustrations from it ended up as decorations on the walls of Norfolk cottages.

The editio princeps of Tertullian was made from two mss, the Payerne copy, which Beatus Rhenanus disbound and marked up and used as a printer's copy; and a ms that he borrowed from the Abbot of Hirsau, who imposed very strict controls and made sure he got it back. But Hirsau was destroyed in the 30 years war, while the Payerne ms survives today, among Rhenanus' papers today, in the little town of Selestat where he died (although a fat lot of good that is when the library people won't even consider allowing anyone to photograph it).

The sole ms of Velleius Paterculus was discovered in 1519 by Rhenanus at Murbach. The editio princeps was published by him at the Froben press in 1520. The ms then disappeared, and no-one today knows where it is. But it was not chopped up, for a letter has emerged between two German noblemen, in the 18th century, mentioning it being sold at auction, and disclosing the invaluable detail that it was an 8th century ms (information that Rhenanus had no means to ascertain, but since then paleography had been invented). So we don't always know what the printers did with these things. (Although, normally, they were just useless parchment afterwards.)

The key message is MAKE COPIES OF THESE THINGS. The only certain way to lose things is not to copy them. We've lost a LOT of mss in the last 100 years. Among them was the only ms of Theodore of Mopsuestia, De incarnatione -- a text that was never published and so was lost to mankind, not in some remote period, but as late as 1915, when the library at Seert was burned by Turkish troops during a campaign of atrocities, and the scholar-Archbishop of Seert, Addai Scher, was murdered by them. A copy of Eusebius' lost work against Porphyry existed in a library at Rodosto (=Tekirdag) in Turkey until the 18th century, when the library was destroyed by fire. In the bombing of Dresden in 1945, mss were lost, unrecorded, a century after photography was invented. Mss are at risk in Iraq today, notably the oldest survivor of the works of Thomas of Edessa (the one from which it was copied perished in 1915 too).

Everyone: MAKE COPIES OF THESE THINGS! All that is necessary to destroy knowledge is to prevent people making copies.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

fta

Copying manuscripts yes, copying books no?