CORNELII TACITI HISTORIARUM LIBRI QUI SUPERSUNT THE HISTORIES OF TACITUS WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES, AND AN INDEX BY THE REV. W. A. SPOONER, M.A. FELLOW AND TUTOR OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD i MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1891 All rights reserved PREFACE THERE are, curiously enough, but few English editions of the Histories of Tacitus. The translations of this work are numerous, and several of them excellent; but almost the only complete English commentary on the Histories is that of Mr. A. J. Valpy, which, however, scarcely professes to be more than a reproduction of the notes of the French editor Brotier. There seemed, therefore, room for a more complete English edition of this masterpiece of Tacitus than any which had yet appeared. Had I, when I commenced the work, known that an edition by Mr. Furneaux might ultimately be looked for, I should not have ventured to undertake it, feeling how unequal to his are my qualifications for the task. Now, I have only to express the great obligations I am under to his careful and scholarly edition of the earlier books of the Annals, and the admiration I entertain for it. Since this work was in the Press there has appeared the second part of a school edition of the Histories, by Mr. A. D. Godley, based mainly on the German edition of Heraeus, the notes of which are a model of terseness and clearness. At the outset of my labours I had hoped to have had the assistance in them of my friend and quondam colleague, the Rev. W. F. Short, who would have brought to the task a taste and scholarship to which I cannot lay claim; circumstances have, however, rendered it impossible for him to give me his assistance, and so I have had to labour on alone. In the notes of previous foreign editors from Lipsius downwards I have found abundant help, and my task has often been more that of selection and arrangement than of original work. In every case, however, I have tried to exercise to the best of my ability an independent judgment. To the editors whose works I have chiefly consulted I have expressed my obligation in the chapter on previous editions of the Histories. I would only repeat here what I have said there, that the present work could never have been undertaken but for the help given by Ruperti and Ritter, Orelli and Dr. Karl Heraeus. The text I have followed has been that of Orelli (in the two earlier books his text as revised by Meiser, in the three latter books the unrevised text of the edition of 1848), and I have only ventured to depart from it in a very few instances. Besides these works of the commentators I have also consulted with advantage on several points the admirable Lexicon Taciteum of A. Gerber and A. Greef. Of works not directly bearing on the Histories I have found most help in the introductions to Mr. Furneaux's edition of the Annals, which I have consulted on many points, Madvig's Latin Grammar, Mommsen's The Provinces of the Roman Empire (to which I am mainly indebted for one of my introductory chapters), Dean Merivale's History of the Romans under the Empire, and Professor Teuffel's History of Roman Literature. Those whose wants I have had principally in mind in the construction of the Commentary have been students at the universities and boys in the higher forms of our public schools. For the latter the Commentary may be thought somewhat fuller and lengthier than is needed. But I cannot but feel that scholarship in England is suffering from the prevalence and general use of what are called school editions of classical authors, the object of which seems to be to boil down into the notes all the information which is considered necessary to enable the boy to understand the text of his author, and not a word more. No doubt the use of such manuals will enable a student to produce the most satisfactory examination-papers on the subject, but it does nothing to stimulate curiosity, to excite interest, to encour |