As in so many other cases, this memorable work has only escaped total loss by the slenderest of chances. As it is, only about one-half of the whole work is extant, consisting of four large fragments. The first of these, which begins at the beginning, breaks off abruptly in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius. A gap of two years follows, and the second fragment carries on the history to Tiberius' death. The story of the reign of Caligula is wholly lost; the third fragment begins in the seventh year of Claudius, and goes on as far as the thirteenth of Nero. The fourth, consisting of the first four and part of the fifth book of the earlier part of the work, contains the events of little more than a year, but that the terrible "year of Emperors" which followed the overthrow of Nero and shook the Roman world to its foundations. A single manuscript has preserved the last two of these four fragments; to the hand of one nameless Italian monk of the eleventh century we owe our knowledge of one of the greatest masterpieces of the ancient world. Not the least interesting point in the study of the writings of Tacitus is the way in which we can see his unique style gradually forming and changing from his earlier to his later manner. The dialogue _De Oratoribus_ is his earliest extant work. Its scene is laid in or about the year 75. But Tacitus was then little if at all over twenty, and it may have been written some five or six years later. In this book the influence of Quintilian and the Ciceronian school is strongly marked; there is so much of Ciceronianism in the style that many scholars have been inclined to assign it to some other author, or have even identified it with the lost treatise of Quintilian himself, on the _Causes of the Decay of Eloquence_. But its style, while it bears the general colour of the Silver Age, has also large traces of that compressed and allusive manner which Tacitus later carried to such an extreme degree of perfection. Full as it is of the _ardor iuvenilis,_ page after page recalling that Ciceronian manner with which we are familiar in the _Brutus_ or the _De Oratore_ by the balance of the periods, by the elaborate similes, and by a certain fluid and florid evolution of what is really commonplace thought, a touch here and there, like _contemnebat potius literas quam nesciebat_, or _vitio malignitatis humanae vetera semper in laude, praesentia in fastidio esse_, or the criticism on the poetry of Caesar and Brutus, _non melius quam Cicero, sed felicius, quia illos fecisse pauciores sciunt_, anticipates the author of the _Annals,_ with his mastery of biting phrase and his unequalled power of innuendo. The defence and attack of the older oratory are both dramatic, and to a certain extent unreal; it is probable that the dialogue does in fact represent the matter of actual discussions between the two principal interlocutors, celebrated orators of the Flavian period, to which as a