Robert Roberts
Reading Tacitus
After Auschwitz etc. Tacitus
Is, as never for Trollope, one of us:
Policed by private funk and public lies
We read of Seneca without surprise.
For him no cyanide pill, no revolver and
Stiff whisky, just a hinted palace command -
Stiff-lipped enough: nonchalant performance
Makes the more sublime a slave’s slitting his veins.
No doubt with napkins, bowls of fruit, friends
There was high-table talk of ultimate ends,
The Phaedo, what the soul is, Socrates,
The vanity of authorship, life’s ironies,
Posterity’s being left with schoolboy quotes from
The Moral Letters, the richest man in Rome
Commending honest poverty, all that carnage
In the Thyestes (mirroring the age?),
The old Republic, new tyranny the price
Of order, justice, trade, a Roman peace,
The murky pool in which realists, set
On actually doing good, must swim about,
The trickiest stroke of all - striking a balance
Between integrity and influence ....
For hasn’t civilisation always been
Dining with friends, sipping rather good wine?
Victorian gentlemen reading Tacitus
Were liberal, not one of them, nor one of us.
Page(s) 56-57
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