Читать книгу Tacitus and Bracciolini. The Annals Forged in the XVth Century - John Wilson Ross - Страница 27

I. The fifteenth century an age of imposture, shown in the invention of printing.—II. The curious discovery of the first six books of the Annals.—III. The blunders it has in common with all forged documents.—IV. The Twelve Tables.—V. The Speech of Claudius in the Eleventh Book of the Annals.—VI. Brutus creating the second class of nobility.—VII. Camillus and his grandson.— VIII. The Marching of Germanicus.—IX. Description of London in the time of Nero.—X. Labeo Antistius and Capito Ateius; the number of people executed for their attachment to Sejanus; and the marriage of Drusus, the brother of Tiberius, to the Elder Antonia.

I. I have now so far cleared the way as to be in a fair position to enter with feasibleness into an investigation of the Annals, with the view of proving that it was not written by Tacitus.

In beginning the investigation, I shall proceed on the assumption that it is a modern forgery of the fifteenth century, having as grounds for this assumption that it was the age when the original MSS. containing the work were discovered; that the existence of those MSS. cannot be traced farther than that century; that (which is of vast consequence in an inquiry of this description) it was an age of imposture; of credulity so immoderate that people were easily imposed upon, believing, as they did, without sufficient evidence, or on slight evidence, or no evidence at all, whatever was foisted upon them; when, too, the love of lucre was such that for money men willingly forewent the reputation that is the accompaniment of the grandest achievements of the intellect. Take, for example, the noble art of printing; for inventing it any man of genius might reasonably be proud. His name, if known, would be emblazoned on the scroll of imperishable fame; be displayed for ever on the highest pyramid of mind; and his country would receive an additional beam of splendor to its previous blaze of renown. But who, for a certainty, knows the inventor of printing? or the country of its origin? Was it Holland in the person of Coster of Haarlem? Or Germany in the person of Mentel, the nobleman, of Strasburg? Or Guttenberg, the goldsmith, of Mayence? Was it neither of these countries? or none of these men? And why this uncertainty? Because a few men possessing the secret, which they kept cautiously to themselves, of printing by means of movable blocks of wood, preferred accumulating enormous sums, equivalent to fair fortunes, by receiving five, six and even between seven and eight hundred gold sequins from a King of France or a Pope of Rome, a Cardinal or an Archbishop, for a bible, which, printed, was passed off as written. We all know how the whole imposture exploded, by the King of France and the Archbishop of Paris comparing the bibles which they had bought of Faust during his stay at the Soleil d'Or in the Rue St. Jacques, Paris. Each thought his bible so superb that the whole world could not produce such another for beauty—the books being fine vellum copies of what are now known as the Mazarin Bible;—and what was their amazement on discovering, after a very close comparison, that everything was exactly alike in the two copies—the flower-pieces in gold, green and blue, with grouped and single birds amid tendrils and leaves, the illuminated letters at the beginning of books with variegated embellishments and brilliant hues of scarlet and azure, the crimson initials to each chapter and sentence, along with astonishing and incomprehensible conformity in letters, words, pagination and lines on every page.

II. The temptation was great to palm off literary forgeries, especially of the chief writers of antiquity, on account of the Popes, in their efforts to revive learning, giving money rewards and indulgences to those who should procure MS. copies of any of the ancient Greek or Roman authors. Manuscripts turned up, as if by magic, in every direction; from libraries of monasteries, obscure as well as famous; from the most out-of-the-way places—the bottom of exhausted wells, besmeared by snails, as the History of Velleius Paterculus; or from garrets, where they had been contending with cobwebs and dust, as the Poems of Catullus. So long as the work had an appearance of high antiquity, it passed muster as an old classic; and no doubt could be entertained of its genuineness, if, in addition to its ancient look, it was brought in a fragmentary form. We have no history of the last six fragmentary books of the Annals—at least, up to this time; though I shall give it towards the end of this inquiry; but we are told all about the discovery of the fragmentary first six books by Meibomius, the Westphalian historian, and Professor of Poetry and History at Helmstädt at the close of the sixteenth century in his Opuscula Historica Rerum Germianicarum, while telling the story of the life of Witikind, the monk of the Abbey of Corvey; by Justus Lipsius in note 34 to the second book of the Annals; by Brotier, and other editors of Tacitus.

John de Medici, that magnificent Pope, had been scarcely elected to the Pontifical chair by the title of Leo X. in the spring of 1513, when he caused it to be publicly made known that he would increase the price of rewards given by his predecessors to persons who procured new MS. copies of ancient Greek and Roman works. More than a year, nearly two years elapsed; then his own "Thesaurum Quaestor Pontificius"—"steward," "receiver," or "collector"—Angelo Arcomboldi, brought to him a new MS. of the works of Tacitus, with a most startling novelty—THE FIRST SIX (or, as then divided, FIVE) BOOKS OF THE ANNALS! Everybody was amazed; and everybody was extremely anxious to know where and how it had been obtained. The story of Arcomboldi was that he had found the stranger among the treasures on the well-stored shelves in the Library of the Benedictine monastery on the banks of the Weser, at Corvey, in Westphalia, long famed for the high culture of its learned inmates. The MS. was given out as being of great antiquity, traceable to, at the very least, the commencement of the ninth century; for it was said to have belonged to one of the most distinguished and accomplished scholars of the abbey, Anschaire, whom Gregory IV. in the year 835 appointed his Legate Apostolic in Denmark and Sweden, and who Christianized the whole northern parts of Europe. The MS. was conned with care: it was musty, discoloured and antique-looking; furthermore, it was of the usual orthodox nature of recovered ancient MSS.—it was fragmentary: the genius of Tacitus was believed to be detected in the newly found books: 500 gold sequins were counted out from the Papal Treasury to the greedy discoverer: at the expense of Leo, the scholastic Philippo Beroaldi the Younger, who was Professor of the learned languages in the University of Rome, and who wrote Latin lyric poetry (in the opinion of Paulus Jovius) with the elegance and correctness of Horace, superintended the text; the celebrated Stephen Guilleret came all the way from Lorraine to print it; and the "Historiarum Libri quinque nuper in Germaniâ inventi" were ushered forth to the world in Rome literis rotundis on the first day of March, 1515. From that day to this the imposture has slumbered; the counterfeit coin has passed current, nobody having noticed the absence of the true ring of the genuine metal.

III. The books of the Annals must not merely be assumed to be forgeries; they must be proved to be so; for, if forgeries, they cannot be as invulnerable as walls of adamant. It is nothing that nobody has suspected they were forged;—nothing that the editors and commentators, who, for the most part possessed of remarkable perspicacity and discernment, have applied their minds to minute revision and close examination of these books, have, after such diligent attention never considered them to be spurious, but belonging to the domain of true history;—nothing that they have stood for close on four hundred years unchallenged, deceiving the wisest and the most learned as well as the best and the most experienced in matters of this description. The cause is obvious: the forger fabricated with the decided determination of defying detection. He did not rely upon his own sagacity alone: he called in the assistance of two of his cleverest friends: three of the astutest men in the most enlightened portion then of Europe—Italy—sat in conclave over the matter for nearly three years, deliberating in every possible way how to avoid suspicious management and faulty performance: consequently, the forgery is anything but plain and palpable; nay, it is wonderfully obscure and monstrously difficult: nevertheless, like all forged documents, it is bungled—ay, in spite of the pains taken to keep free from bad and blundering work, it is, occasionally (as will be seen in the present book, from this point until the close), clumsily, awkwardly, grossly, ridiculously bungled.

In the last generation there was a famous trial for forgery in Edinburgh. A number of documents, thirty-three, were impounded as forged to obtain for the forger the title of a Scotch Earl and domains covering many millions of acres—a larger area of square miles than were included in the whole united territories of the now dethroned Dukes of Tuscany, Parma and Modena, or all the possessions put together of the German Electors, Margraves and Landgraves. In such a number of legal documents executed by one man, and that man, too, a civilian, it was almost next to an impossibility that there should not be a good deal of bungling. One of the blunders was the King of Scotland giving away lands and provinces that never belonged to Scotland, for they were lands and provinces in New England; another was the name of Archbishop Spottiswoode as witness to a document executed by King James I. at Whitehall on the 7th of December, 1639, whereas Archbishop Spottiswoode had been dead eleven days, his monument in Westminster Abbey bearing as the date of his death, the 26th of November in that year. So the author of the Annals, who, as will be hereafter shown, lived in the fifteenth century, could not possibly write many books of ancient Roman History without, every now and then doing or saying something that was attended with dreadful fatality to his fraud; for he could not write them without palpable blunders; and some are so clumsy as to surpass conception what bungling can do.

IV. He makes Tacitus commit an error about the contents of the Twelve Tables, which is really as monstrous as if we could fancy ourselves reading in the pages of a native historian of mark, Hume, Henry, or Lingard, some blunder, into which a schoolboy could not fall, about the contents of Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Rights, or any other well known English law, on which the constitution of the country is primarily founded. In a work given out as written by Tacitus we are told that the Twelve Tables first fixed interest for usury at an "uncia," or twelfth part of an as per hundred asses per month, or one per cent per annum:—"Primo Duodecim Tabulis sanctum 'ne quis unciario foenore amplius exerceret,' cum antea ex libidine locupletium agitaretur" (An. VI. 16). Into this error the Author of the Annals must surely have been seduced by some shocking mediaeval writer of ancient Roman history or antiquities, under whose guidance he again falls into another mistake when ascribing to tribunitian regulations the reduction of the interest to one-half per cent. per annum, or the sixth part of an as per hundred asses a month:—"dein rogatione tribuncia ad semuncias redacta" (L. c.). The truth is that, in the year of Rome 398, a hundred and four years after the Twelve Tables were composed—the Tribunes Duillius and Moenius passed the original law of interest at one per cent: twelve years after—in the year 410—the interest was reduced to one half per cent. under the consulate of Lucius Manlius Torquatus and Caius Plautius;—as may be seen by referring to the seventh book (16, 27) of Livy—or still better, the clear exposition of this error by Montesquieu in the 22nd chapter of the 22nd book of his "Esprit des Loix." The author of the Annals is then only right when stating that originally the interest was one per cent. per annum, and afterwards reduced to half that amount. In everything else he blunders to an extent that is inexplicable in an ancient Roman. Were any staunch upholder of the authenticity of the Annals to be here called upon compulsorily to give a reason, unprepared or premeditated, plausible or probable, why, after this exposure of such an error, he still believed it possible that the blunder could have been made by Tacitus, who achieved a brilliant reputation as an historian writing truthfully of his countrymen, as a lawyer practising successfully among them, as a statesman filling with ability exalted offices, and thus possessed such pledges for being admirably informed and exceedingly cautious, he would be reluctantly forced to take refuge in the quibbling of Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff:—"I would not tell you on compulsion. Give you a reason on compulsion! If reasons were as plenty as blackberries, I would give no man a reason on compulsion, I!"