IX. I have now done; and think that I have said
quite enough for the spuriousness of the Annals never
to be hereafter argued as a moot point, but accepted
as an established fact. I need not go into further
consideration; because further consideration cannot
give more weight to what has been put forward.
I, therefore, pause, assured that with only these
few facts and observations placed before him, the
reader has come to the same conclusion as myself,
that, strange as it may be, yet, nevertheless, there
is truth in the theory now started for the first time,
I dare say, to the amazement of the reader, as to
the amazement of everybody, that Tacitus is, and has
been, for century after century, wrongly accredited
with the authorship of the Annals. It is to dispel
all cavil about this, that I have examined the History
and the Annals from every imaginable point of view,
so as to enable the reader to see the two works as
clearly as they can be seen—not that the
reader has seen them as clearly as objects are seen
under the open sky by the blaze of the noontide sun;
still I hope that he has seen them, as objects in
broad day are seen,—where there must he
some shadows in corners,—in a room, when
all the blinds are drawn up and all the windows are
thrown open.
T H E E N D.
[ENDNOTES]
[Endnote 013] Here we find the most learned Father
of the Church using “volumen” in an unusual
acceptation, not as a whole work, nor a part of a
literary composition rolled into a scroll among the
ancients, or separately bound among ourselves, but
a division of a subject in the same “volume,”
just as Cornelius Nepos, once, and once only,—in
his Life of Atticus (16),—speaks of the
sixteen “books” of Letters which Cicero
addressed to Atticus: “Sexdecim volumina
Epistolarum ... ad Atticum missarum”; yet three
or four “books” must have formed a “volumen,”
when we find Ovid, in his “Tristia” (III.
14, 19) speaking of the “five volumes”
that contained his Metamorphoses:—
“Sunt quoque mutatae
per quinque volumina formae;”
as the Metamorphoses were divided into fifteen books,
three then formed a “volumen.”—I
cannot avoid calling attention to the curiously incorrect
phrase, “voluminibus exaravit.” An
ancient, speaking of the “volumen,” or
scroll, would have used “scribere,” —“exarare,”
possibly, when speaking of the “codicillus,”
or little wooden table made of wax, which he sent
as a note or billet-doux to a friend or sweetheart,
the figurative verb being applicable to the stylus
“ploughing” letters “out” of
the wax. The passage, from this blunder alone,
seems to be an interpolation, where the forger ridiculously
overshoots his mark: he out-Jeromes Jerome; for
he makes the saint write bad Latin from a motive that
never led St. Jerome astray,—a desire to
be poetic. It is strange, too, for the passage
to have come from the most learned of the Latin fathers
