before the fire of Rome, [37] he could derive only from reading and
conversation the knowledge of an event which happened during his
infancy. Before he gave himself to the public, he calmly waited till his
genius had attained its full maturity, and he was more than forty years
of age, when a grateful regard for the memory of the virtuous Agricola
extorted from him the most early of those historical compositions which
will delight and instruct the most distant posterity. After making a
trial of his strength in the life of Agricola and the description of
Germany, he conceived, and at length executed, a more arduous work; the
history of Rome, in thirty books, from the fall of Nero to the accession
of Nerva. The administration of Nerva introduced an age of justice and
propriety, which Tacitus had destined for the occupation of his old age;
[38] but when he took a nearer view of his subject, judging, perhaps,
that it was a more honorable or a less invidious office to record the
vices of past tyrants, than to celebrate the virtues of a reigning
monarch, he chose rather to relate, under the form of annals, the
actions of the four immediate successors of Augustus. To collect, to
dispose, and to adorn a series of fourscore years, in an immortal work,
every sentence of which is pregnant with the deepest observations and
the most lively images, was an undertaking sufficient to exercise the
genius of Tacitus himself during the greatest part of his life. In
the last years of the reign of Trajan, whilst the victorious monarch
extended the power of Rome beyond its ancient limits, the historian was
describing, in the second and fourth books of his annals, the tyranny
of Tiberius; [39] and the emperor Hadrian must have succeeded to the
throne, before Tacitus, in the regular prosecution of his work, could
relate the fire of the capital, and the cruelty of Nero towards the
unfortunate Christians. At the distance of sixty years, it was the duty
of the annalist to adopt the narratives of contemporaries; but it was
natural for the philosopher to indulge himself in the description of
the origin, the progress, and the character of the new sect, not so
much according to the knowledge or prejudices of the age of Nero, as
according to those of the time of Hadrian. 3 Tacitus very frequently
trusts to the curiosity or reflection of his readers to supply those
intermediate circumstances and ideas, which, in his extreme conciseness,
he has thought pr