Writers Read: D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area. After graduation from Michigan State University, he studied under Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey and Hans J.

Morgenthau at the University of Chicago where he earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science. He received his J.D. degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Buffa was a criminal defense attorney for 10 years and his seven Joseph Antonelli novels strive to reflect, from his own experience, what a courtroom lawyer does, the way he (or she) thinks, and the way he feels about what he does.

In Buffa's new novel, Immunity, the President of the United States has ordered the murder of his political opponents—and the Constitution seems powerless to stop him.

Here is Buffa's take on Tacitus and the dangers of history:

When Thucydides wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War, he insisted it was a “possession for all time.” This did not mean simply that it was a book that would always be available to anyone who might have an interest in what happened in the war between the Spartans and the Athenians. It meant that future generations would be able to learn what always happens in political life, that what happened in his time and place is the very essence of what happens in every time and place. Thucydides was what was once called a political historian. As one of his most perceptive readers explained, a political historian “must be more than a citizen or even a statesman: he must be a wise man.” Thucydides, a wise man, wrote about what happened when Athens became an empire. Cornelius Tacitus, another wise man, wrote about what happened when the Roman republic became the Roman empire; when the ambition for power lost all restraint, when the power to dominate everyone and everything became the only power worth having.

Born in the middle of the first century A.D., Tacitus witnessed the reign of terror during the last three years of the emperor Domitian, and the judicial murders of many of Rome’s best citizens. He learned early the virtues of discretion, and when he decided to write history chose his subjects with care, and was even more careful in the way he wrote. His two principal histories, The Annals and The Histories, were probably written together in A.D.115 or 116, when he was in his early sixties, The Annals provides a history of the Roman emperors of the Julian line from Tiberius to Nero, during the years A.D.14-68. The Histories continues the story, but only for the year, A.D.69, a year in which, incredible as it may sound, there were three civil wars and four murdered emperors. Tacitus writes nothing about Julius Caesar, and nothing about the half century in which Augustus completed the destruction of the republic and made Rome, for all intents and purposes, a monarchy. Tacitus is a great historian, and a great writer, a writer, who understood that the truth, to be written, has often to be disguised.

With a marvelous capacity for misdirection, Tacitus gives the reason, or hints at the reason, why he only wrote what he did. In “A Dialogue On Orators,” he takes up the question why former ages were “prolific of great orators, men of genius and renown,” but that now, “on our generation a signal blight has fallen.” He takes up the question, but not in his own name. Instead of putting forward “my own views,” he reports a conversation he claims he heard years earlier, “when quite a youth.” According to those engaged in this conversation, all of them long since dead, the decline in eloquence was the result of the decline of freedom. So long as the Roman republic was the theme of historians, they wrote with “eloquence of style and independence of outlook.” But after Actium, when power became became concentrated in the hands of one man alone, “the great line of classical historians came to an end.”

In The Annals, writing in his own name, Tacitus appears to diminish the importance, which also means the threat, of what he writes by insisting that it does not measure up to what has been done before. There is no parallel between “these chronicles of mine and the work of the men who composed the ancient history of the Roman people.” No parallel, because, “I present a series of savage mandates, of perpetual assassination, of traitorous friendships, of ruined innocents, of various causes and identical results - everywhere monotony of subject, of satiety.” What has Tacitus to fear? Cremutius Corus, author of a history of Augustus, was prosecuted under Tiberius for publishing a history “eulogizing Brutus and styling Cassius the last of the Romans.” Condemned to death, Corus committed suicide, and all his books were burned, though some escaped the flames and were published later. By noting this, Tacitus reminds us that what is written may, despite persecution, last beyond the life of an author. Carus wrote about Augustus while Tiberius, his immediate successor, was in power; the emperors Tacitus writes about had all been dead more than forty years. There still remain, however, many descendants of those who “underwent either the legal penalty or a form of degradation in the principate of Tiberius.” Even assuming “the ancient families to be now extinct, you will soon find those who, from the likeness of character, add the evil deeds of others as an innuendo against themselves. Even glory and virtue create their enemies - they arraign their opposites by too close a contrast.” The enemies of Tacitus are readers who are themselves corrupted by the times in which they live, readers who might resent the comparisons he draws between what Rome once was and what Rome had become, the fall from greatness that has taken place.

Despite his caution, despite his understanding that the truth, to be written at all, has often to be disguised. he writes quite openly about what he believes led to Rome’s decline:
From time immemorial, man has had an instinctive love of power. With the growth of empire, this instinct has become a dominant and ineradicable force. It was easy to maintain equality when Rome was weak. World-wide conquest and the destruction of all rival communities or potentates opened the way to the secure enjoyment of wealth and an overriding appetite for it. This was how the mouldering rivalry between senate and people was first fanned into a blaze. Unruly tribunes alternated with powerful consuls. Rome and the Roman forum had a foretaste of what civil war means. Then Gaius Marius, whose origin was of the humblest, and Lucius Sulla, who outdid his fellow nobles in ruthlessness, destroyed the republican constitution by force of arms. In its place they put despotism. After them came Gnaeus Pompey, who, though more secretive, was no better, and from then on the one and only aim was autocracy.
The autocracy Augustus created was intensified, and perverted, by Tiberius, his chosen successor. Fearful, suspicious, resentful and vindictive, Tiberius became the willing prisoner of his own most sordid desires. For eleven years in lived in self-exile on the island of Capri where he “polluted with his lecheries the children of well-born parents.” Slaves “plied the willing with gratuities, the reluctant with threats,” and, when necessary, force and even abduction were employed. Tiberius trusted only one man, and for a while Sejanus had the “greatest power to help or to injure.” Everyone lived in a state of fear. Rewards were offered to anyone who reported, or invented, not only disloyalty, but even disagreement with anything the emperor had said or done. It went further still. To “speak of any subject was to be accused.” Children were abused, men were tortured and murdered. Women were not exempt from peril. One woman was put to death because she had “wept at the killing of her son.”

Power has no limit. Whoever has it always wants more. Sejanus had everything Tiberius had, or rather, all the power Tiberius gave him to use. Ruling an empire in everything but name, Sejanus wanted what he did not have, what he could only have if Tiberius died. Sejanus took his chance and, failing, took with him to death everyone, whether innocent or not, charged with complicity in the conspiracy against the emperor’s life. When, finally, Tiberius died in turn, it seemed a mark of how corrupt Rome had become that he recovered, started breathing, and had to be smothered to death before he could start to stand. What Rome thought liberation, Caligula, his successor, thought opportunity for new forms of oppression. A Roman senator who had observed the way Caligula had always affected agreement with whatever Tiberius said or wanted, and who lived to see what Caligula did in power, summed it up in a single sentence: “The world never knew a better slave, nor a worse master.”

The “decay of the old-fashioned virtue,” the virtue, it should be remembered, that had not only characterized the Roman republic, but had given Rome the strength to become an empire, is perhaps nowhere better revealed than in what Tacitus wrote about one of the most remarkable women, and one of the worst human beings, who ever lived. Agrippina did something never done before, and never done again. The sister of one emperor, the wife of another, she was the mother of a third. “Impatient of equality and athirst for power,” the sister of Caligula was the niece of Claudius, and when Claudius became emperor, wanted to become his wife. The senate, no longer willing, and if willing, no longer able, to exercise independent judgement, removed what would have been an obstacle to the marriage by issuing an edict allowing the union of uncles with the daughters of their brothers. Claudius expressed his gratitude and quickly discovered his mistake. Agrippina did not want to share his bed; she wanted to share his power. She wanted, and was determined to have, even more than that.

When Caractus, the leader of the British tribes that had fought against the Roman legions - an action he justified by the remark, “For if you would rule the world, does it follow that the world must welcome servitude?” - was brought captive to Rome, the crowd did not pay homage to Claudius alone. Homage was also paid to Agrippina, a “companion figure on another tribunal not far away - in the same terms of praise and gratitude which they had employed to the emperor.” This was “without precedent as ancient custom, that a woman should sit in state before Roman standards; it was the advertisement of her claim to partnership in the empire which her ancestors had created.”

A partnership was only half of what she wanted, and what she could not have with her husband, she thought she could have with her son. Claudius, weak, vacillating, despised by nearly everyone as an idiot or a fool, was persuaded to adopt her child and in that way place him next in the order of succession. Poisoning Claudius, she made Nero emperor; the difficulty of dealing with a husband replaced, she thought, with the loyalty of a son. She had taken what seemed all the right precautions. Seneca, known for his “learning in eloquence and his self- respecting courtliness,” had been put in charge of his education, and, for a while, had kept the young Nero within the “bounds of permissible indulgence.” But all that meant was that, for a time, Nero held back his tendency toward murder. Nero’s main deficiency, what made him uniquely unqualified to rule, will come as a surprise to those used to politicians who can barely read, much less write, the speeches they give. Nero, Tacitus informs us, was “the first master of the empire to stand in need of borrowed eloquence.” Nero was too ignorant, too undisciplined, to know what should be said, or how to say it. Tacitus does not leave it at a simple assertion; he compares Nero to his predecessors in power. Caesar “had rivaled the greatest orators; and Augustus had a ready and fluent diction appropriate to a monarch.” Tiberius was “a master of the art of weighing words,” and even “Caligula’s troubled brain did not affect his power of speech….” Seneca wrote Nero’s speeches.

No one seemed to notice. Rome was too busy with its own “peculiar and characteristic vices,” vices which bear a striking similarity to the prevalent obsessions of other, later, empires, including, perhaps, even our own: the “passion for play actors, and the mania for gladiatorial shows and horse-racing.” With his clear sense of how far Rome had fallen from the civic virtue of the republic, Tacitus asks: When “the mind is engrossed in such occupations, what room is left over for higher pursuits?” There was obviously no room in the mind of the emperor. His mother had murdered her husband, which, while it proved that she was “capable of presenting her son with an empire,” did not settle the question whether she could make herself content with “tolerating him as emperor.” Nero now had the power she wanted, but Nero could not see any reason why he should let anyone, especially a woman willing to kill her own husband, limit what he, the ruler of the world, could, or could not, do. Taught by his mother’s example, Nero had his mother killed.

Nero murdered his mother but, despite what, based on single line, everyone believe, he did not “fiddle while Rome burned.” He did everything he could to stop the six day fire that destroyed much of Rome, and then rebuilt it, better, safer, than it had been before. But he was Nero, and the rumor spread that he had started the fire so he could become Rome’s new founder. Tacitus states, without any apparent regret, that “to stop the rumor, Nero substituted as culprits and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians.” In the historian’s considered judgment, Christianity was a “pernicious superstition,” and the Christians were, accordingly, convicted “not so much on the count of arson as for hatred of the human race.”

Two hundred fifty years later, an emperor also named Tacitus claimed direct descent from the famous historian and ordered that ten copies of Tacitus’s works should be made every year and deposited in the public libraries. He also ordered the construction of a tomb to honor his memory. Most, though not all, of what Tacitus wrote has survived. Nothing remains of the tomb. Proving what Tacitus had written about the dangers of writing the truth about those in power, it was destroyed in the latter part of the 16th century by the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Pius V no doubt remembered what Tacitus had written about the unfortunate followers of a “pernicious superstition” and its “hatred of the human race.” Power always remembers, and power never forgives.