bookworm14

Lots of websites and letters to the editor in newspapers (viz. a recent letter by Ralph Nader in the NYT) make use of this quote, with attribution to Tacitus: "The worst crimes were dared by a few, wished for by many, and tolerated by all.". One citation credited Annals iii, 60; another credited the Histories. But I cannot find it in on-line texts in either the Annals or the Histories. It may be badly translated. Is anyone familiar enough with Tacitus to recognize this quote and know where in his works it may be found?
bookworm14

Toto

It is usually reported as “The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more, and tolerated by all.”

Those words are not in Annales 3 60, but the sense of them is. Perhaps someone is being quoted who is summarizing that chapter?

You might find an answer if this is moved to BCH.

Emil

Moved to BC&H.

Ben C Smith

I think it must come from Histories 1.28 (translation by Church and Brodribb):

Such was the temper of men's minds, that, while there were few to venture on so atrocious a treason, many wished it done, and all were ready to acquiesce.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Here is the Latin:

Isque habitus animorum fuit ut pessimum facinus auderent pauci, plures vellent, omnes paterentur.

Quick translation of my own:

This was the habit of the minds [of men], that few men dared the very bad deed, more men wished for it, all men were open to it.

Ben.

bookworm14

Thanks a million for your replies to my query. Everywhere I have seen this Tacitus quote it has been without a citation of its source, and in a somewhat different form.
bookworm14

Ben C Smith

I hate that.

More often than not it means that nobody is checking the source to see (A) whether or not it is really there and (B) what its immediate context is (or is not).

Ben.

Toto

There are people on the internet who just collect and pass quotes around, and the preference is for good, pithy bits of wisdom attributed to famours people. The odds of them being accurate, or accurately attributed are not very good.

Roger Pearse

The same process happens in joke books, of course, where sayings tend to get rephrased when the collector thinks it will make it funnier, attributed to Churchill or some other famous person for the same reason or whatever.

What is interesting is that there is a genre in ancient literature where precisely the same thing occurs. I refer to ancient collections of "sayings of the philosophers". These are known to scholars by the dreadful term "gnomologia", presumably to try to put people off. Most of the literature seems to be in German, but a large late antique collection has just been published under the title "Corpus Parisinum" by Denis Searby. The genre seems to originate in Greek, but material in Syriac and Arabic exists, containing translations and elaborations. The form was very congenial to the orientals of the "Arabian nights" period, as may be imagined.

These collections are sometimes mined for fragments supposedly of lost works. I suspect they're all dubious.

It's a form of popular literature, in short, and we have to see it as such.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

bookworm14

I first came across this Tacitus quote (see above) in the letters to the editor section of the New York Times a few weeks ago, where Ralph Nader and another man whose name I have forgotten used it in reference to president Bush. I wanted to know the context. Without a citation of the source, I could not look it up. Now that I have found the answer on this board, I was able to read the context, where Tacitus is writing about the assasination of the emperor Otho. It seems that the "crimes" of which Tacitus writes were not Otho's, but those of his assasins. Thus the use of the quote against Bush seems a bit off the mark.
Cheers,
bookworm14