But Trajan’s age was just as great in literature. Tacitus, it is true, stands quite alone; he is one of those mighty minds which are no creatures of any age. Yet even the mightiest souls feel the influence of their age, which still gives them their tone and their impulses, though it does not make them what they are. It is quite useless to ask Who was Tacitus’ teacher?—he was taught by the sorrows of his times. His great soul was deeply wounded by the horrors of Domitian’s reign, the distress of which was followed under Nerva and Trajan by a refreshing period. The first edition of the Agricola was written by him in the latter years of Domitian, as he says in the wretchedly corrupted beginning of the second chapter: (of the correctness of my emendation I have not the least doubt.[48]) He afterwards revised the work. One may see here all the greatness of the man, though it is struggling with the difficulty in finding utterance, which arises from a decided aversion to diffuseness,—from a striving after terseness without any affectation, from a wish to express with the greatest conciseness nothing but the thought itself, nor even to waste a word, notwithstanding a great richness of ideas, This is most displayed in Tacitus’ earlier writings; in the life of Agricola, and in his Germany. He did not want to write large books, but only small treatises; and yet he wished to take in them the complete description of his subject, all the fulness of his thoughts was to be laid before his future reader. The real work of his life, which he began later,—evidently later even than the _Germania_,—are the _Historiæ_, the most finished performance of his that we know of: had we them entire, we should see him passing through all the various styles of history. There he did not condense; but he told his story at full length, and with much detail: there is no reason to doubt that these histories comprised the whole of the thirty books mentioned by St. Jerome. After he had finished this work, he wrote the Annals besides, so as to give a full account of the times of the Cæsars from the completion and establishment of the _principatus_, after the farce of the republican forms had been put an end to. These he wrote concisely, throwing out some particular parts only in bold relief: the nearer he approached the _Historiæ_, the more diffuse he must have become. At the latter end of Nero, he certainly went as much into detail as in the _Historiæ_. Tacitus is not difficult to understand when one has once entered into his way of thinking: it is pitiful to hear people complain of him and Sallust for affectation and mannerism. If we compare the wonderful symmetry in Tacitus and Sallust with Livy, we see that they for their times were far greater masters of style than the latter; for whenever he takes upon himself to be argumentative, as in the preface and in the passage on the triumph of Cornelius Cossus in the fourth book, he becomes infinitely harder than any part of Tacitus.