Turning to Tacitus.

• Author: Bacchus, James
• Position: Lessons from Tacitus regarding the rule of law and freedom when confronted by terror

Tacitus?

Who was Tacitus?

It was a cold December day in 1967. It was my first final exam in my very first semester as a student at Vanderbilt University. And it was all I could do to keep from shivering in the wintry confines of Neely Auditorium as I stared at the first question I had been asked to answer in the university's effort to confirm my mastery of the mysteries of "Western Civilization" in History 101.

The question seemed to stare back at me from the single page of questions that I held in my shaking hand on that distant day--daring me for an answer. Even now, all these many years later, the question still stares back at me, and it still demands an answer, as I recall what my middle-aged memory remembers reading on that page:

What did Tacitus say about the Germanic tribes, and how did what he said about the Germanic tribes reveal how he viewed the Roman Empire? I may not remember the question word for word. But this, give or take a word or two, was the question I was asked to answer. And I confess that the sheer recollection of this single question still makes me shiver and shake. For the cruel truth of my plight on that cold day was this. I knew who the Germans were. I knew who the Romans were. I knew that, in antiquity, the Germans had tribes and the Romans had an empire.

But I had never heard of Tacitus.

Therefore, I would, I feared, fail my final exam in "Western Civ." I would fail a required course, I would forfeit my scholarship, and I would be flushed, as a result, from the elite gene pool of academe into the teeming cesspool of real life.

In my panic, I did what generations of undergraduates have undoubtedly done in such desperate circumstances. I faked it. I feigned the knowledge I did not possess. I wrote everything I knew about the Germanic tribes. I wrote everything I knew about the Roman Empire. I wrote feverishly. I wrote frantically. I wrote exhaustively on page after page in my "blue book."

And, every few pages or so, in what I hoped was a neutral and innocuous, but, nevertheless, a seemingly knowing and knowledgeable, way, I slowed from the fervor of my panicked pace, and I wrote--as clearly and as confidently as I could--the word "Tacitus."

Then, the exam over, I fled. I fled out of Neely, across the campus, and all the way to my dorm room--in search of Tacitus. And there I found him. There he was, right where, in my ignorance, I had imagined

he might be, right where I had suspected he might be, hiding in the imposing pages of the hefty textbook that we all simply called "Hexter."

"Hexter" was a bulky, buff-colored tome entitled The Traditions of the Western World. (1) We freshmen at Vanderbilt all called our "Western Civ" textbook "Hexter" because the "General Editor" of the book was someone somewhere named "J. H. Hexter" whose name was emblazoned boldly on the cover of the book. My copy of "Hexter" contained 917 pages of excerpts in small print from the rich intellectual tradition of Western civilization (complete with my compulsive underlining and my cryptic marginal notes). The voluminous array of readings in "Hexter" ranged across the centuries, from Plato and Aristotle, to Shakespeare and Voltaire, to Tocqueville and Lincoln, to Plutarch and Cicero, and, yes, alas, to Tacitus.

Breathless from my flight across the campus, I pulled my volume of "Hexter" down from the bookshelf in my dorm room. There, on page 129, was an excerpt from Germania, an essay on "The Origins, Land, and Peoples of the Germans" written late in the first century A. D. In the caption that preceded the excerpt that began on that page, general editor Hexter and his contributing editorial colleagues asked their undergraduate readers: "What Can Citizens of a Highly Civilized State Learn from the Study of a Primitive People"? (2) The author of Germania was a Roman historian named Tacitus.

Still breathing heavily, my heart still beating rapidly, I noticed that, on the previous page, was a selection from an essay by another ancient Roman, Cicero, which addressed a number of issues "Concerning the Laws." I knew much about Cicero's concerns about the laws. I had read those pages from Cicero in "Hexter" several times. My underlining of the most pertinent passages in those pages was my proof of it. But I had not turned to the next page.

I had not turned to Tacitus.

I soon learned why. I soon discovered that, a few days before, after the last lecture of the semester, and after the last class of my discussion section of "Western Civ," one final reading assignment had been posted for all to see on the bulletin board in Neely Auditorium. That final assignment was to turn to Tacitus. Like countless generations of other hapless freshmen, I had somehow missed the last assignment.

As it turned out, somehow I also missed making a failing grade that semester in "Western Civ." As we used to say, I "pulled a B." Maybe all my artful, arduous faking and feigning paid off. Maybe I had been so clever in filling my "blue book" that the grader of my exam did not realize that I had never heard of Tacitus. Or maybe others in my class missed the last assignment, too, and the final exam was graded on a curve. Maybe. I suppose I will never know.

I do know, though, that, for all my fears, I returned for another semester of "Western Civ." I "pulled an A" that next semester; I became a history major; I earned my degree from Vanderbilt; and, a few years later, I was still pondering the many mysteries of Western civilization while studying for a graduate degree in history at Yale University.

One of my professors there was J. H. Hexter.

I soon realized that the late J. H. "Jack" Hexter was not nearly as thick as his textbook. In fact, he was one of the brightest men I have ever met. His field was Tudor-Stuart English history, and I met him while taking his famed seminar on the emergence of modern Britain under the Tudor and Stuart monarchs during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But Jack Hexter's real field was freedom.

Professor Hexter was a tireless and a fearless advocate for academic, intellectual, and many other kinds of freedom. In his weekly seminar, he taught us about Pym and Hampden, about Milton and Colonel Harrison. He taught us, too, that those and other great heroes of the struggle for freedom in Tudor-Stuart England were the heirs to many others who had preceded them, dating all the way back to the degradations of a dim antiquity.

Until then, I had perhaps been in danger of becoming what professional historians sometimes describe as a "presentist." With a passion--then--for politics, I had been so concerned with the present that I had a hard time seeing the human reality of the past. My studies until then had been largely of the recent past of my own native region in my own native country. The past was very much alive in the stormy present of the U.S. South of my youth.

Professor Hexter was not unconcerned with the present. Indeed, many years later, while he was still with us, and still teaching, and while I was a Member of the Congress of the United States, I was able to help him enact into federal law his idea for the "Troops to Teachers" program--a federal program to encourage former soldiers to become teachers. Jack Hexter simply understood that we cannot do all we should for freedom today if we do not know what others tried to do for freedom yesterday.

With his emphasis on the ancient origins of freedom, and with his stress also on the long and ongoing struggle for freedom, Professor Hexter inspired me to turn finally to the assignment I had missed as a freshmen in "Western Civ" at Vanderbilt. His book of readings was still waiting on my bookshelf. I took it down once more, and I turned to Tacitus.

I read the few pages of excerpts from Germania that Hexter had included in the book. Then I found and read the rest of Germania. Then I read Agricola. And the Annals. And the Histories. And the Dialogue on Orators. I not only read the assignment. I went considerably beyond it. I read all of Tacitus.

In saying that I read all of Tacitus, I am saying that I read all that remains of Tacitus. For only a fraction of what he wrote remains, and that fraction remains fortuitously, almost by historical accident. One historian has put it this way:

Of Tacitus we would know almost nothing if it were not for the ninth-century copyists; and the only manuscript to contain the first six books of his "Annals," the Mediceus prior in the Laurentian Library in Florence, was probably copied at Fulda in the ninth century and sent to Corvey, where it was found towards the end of the fifteenth century. All our manuscripts of his "minor" works, the Dialogue on...