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 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 he 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.
Visit
D.W. Buffa's website.
Buffa's previous third reading essays:
The Great Gatsby;
Brave New World;
Lord Jim;
Death in the Afternoon;
Parade's End;
The Idiot;
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire;
The Scarlet Letter;
Justine;
Patriotic Gore;
Anna Karenina;
The Charterhouse of Parma;
Emile;
War and Peace;
The Sorrows of Young Werther;
Bread and Wine;
“The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities;
Eugene Onegin;
The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay;
The Europeans;
The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction;
Doctor Faustus;
the reading list of John F. Kennedy;
Jorge Luis Borges;
History of the Peloponnesian War;
Mansfield Park;
To Each His Own;
A Passage To India;
Seven Pillars of Wisdom;
The Letters of T.E. Lawrence;
All The King’s Men;
The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus;
Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt;
Main Street;
Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I;
Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II;
Thus Spoke Zarathustra;
Fiction's Failure;
Hermann Hesse's Demian;
Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July;
Caesar’s Ghost;
The American Constitution;
A Tale of Two Cities;
The Leopard;
Madame Bovary;
The Sheltering Sky;
Tocqueville’s America and Ours;
American Statesmen;
Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered;
Père Goriot;
The Remarkable Edmund Burke;
The Novels of W.H. Hudson;
America Revised;
The City And Man;
"The Use And Abuse Of History";
I, Claudius;
The Closing of The American Mind;
History of Rome; Before The Deluge;
Herodotus's Histories;
The Education of Henry Adams;
Talleyrand;
The Golden Bowl;
The Life of George Washington.
--Marshal Zeringue
Laura Creedle is the author of The Deep Well, which Kirkus Reviews called “a fresh take on horror,” and The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily. When they’re not writing, Creedle can usually be found playing pinball or watching indie horror. They live in Austin, Texas, with their husband and a feral cat named Hellman who was found with her head stuck in a mayonnaise jar.
called This Wretched Valley, about a lost climbing expedition in the wilds of Kentucky. I’m a sucker for the idea of a lost expedition, Dyatlov Pass style, so it instantly piqued my interest. The author is a rock climber and it shows and all the details. There are paranormal aspects to the book but since I’m afraid of heights, I found the climbing scenes particularly nerve-wracking.
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