Khoeleth, brooding on the same world-wide things. Like him, he looks
out into the black and eyeless storm, the ceaseless drift of atoms;
like him, he surveys the States and Empires of the past, and sees in
their history, their revolutions, their rise and decline, but the
history of the wind which, in the Hebrew phrase, goes circling in its
circles, _sov[)a]v sov[=e]v_, and returneth to the place whence it
came, and universal darkness awaits the world, and oblivion universal
the tedious story of man. In work after work of Machiavelli, letters,
tales, dramas, historical and political treatises, this conception
recurs. It is the central and informing thought of his life as a
philosophical thinker. But unlike Vico, Machiavelli avoids becoming
the slave of a theory. He shadows forth this system of some dim cycle
in human affairs as a conception in which his own mind finds quiescence
if not rest. Its precise character he nowhere describes.

Amongst philosophical historians Tacitus occupies a unique position.
He rivals Dante in the cumulative effect of sombre detail and in the
gloomy energy which hate supplies. In depth and variety of creative
insight he approaches Balzac,[6] whilst in his peculiar province, the
psychology of death, he stands alone. His is the most profoundly
imaginative nature that Rome produced. Three centuries before the fall
of Rome he appears to apprehend or to forbode that event, and he turns
to a consideration of the customs of the Teutonic race as if already in
the first century he discerned the very manner of the cataclysm of the
fourth. Both his great works, the _Histories_ and the _Annals_, read
at moments like variations and developments of the same tragic theme,
the "wrath of the gods against Rome," the _deum ira in rem Romanam_ of
the _Annals_; whilst in the _Histories_ the theory of retribution
appears in the reflection, _non esse curae deis securitatem nostrum,
esse ultionem_, with which he closes his preliminary survey of the
havoc and civil fury of the times of Galba--"Not our preservation, but
their own vengeance, do the gods desire." It is as if, transported in
imagination far into the future, Tacitus looked back and pronounced the
judgment of Rome in a spirit not dissimilar from that of Saint
Augustine. Yet the Rome of Trajan and of the Antonines, of Severus and
of Aurelian, was to come, and, as if distrusting his rancour and the
wounded pride of an oligarch, Tacitus betrays in