The Fragments of Tacitus' Histories

O F THE original twelve books of Tacitus' Histories, only the first four and part of the fifth have survived the hazards of textual transmission, and that by the thread of a single manuscript. The continuous text thus breaks off in the course of the year 70 (5. 26). Eight fragments are also printed in the standard modern editions, viz., the Teubner of C. Halm (4th ed., Leipzig, 1912), C. Fisher's Oxford text (Oxford, 1910), and E. Koestermann's Teubner (2d ed., Leipzig, 1969).1 But the editors dispense with an apparatus criticus and conceal the principles according to which these fragmenta "Historiarum" are included. To be sure, Fisher states, "Vide Bernays, de chronicis Sulpicii Severi, p. 53," in annotation on the first two fragments. Yet he (like other editors) prints as Tacitus' own several words and phrases which Bernays expressly denied that Tacitus either wrote or could have written. More surprising still is the editors' treatment of Orosius. They print five passages from his Historiae adversum paganos (frags. 3-7). But other passages too were long ago signaled as deriving from Tacitus' Histories, not only in the standard edition of Orosius (by C. Zangemeister, CSEL, vol. 5 [Vienna, 1882]), but also in a dissertation of 1888, which still appears to be the only systematic treatment of the knowledge of Tacitus in late antiquity.2 The standard "fragments" of the Histories clearly need a reconsideration which proceeds from what is known about the habits and sources of the two historians from whom they are mainly culled: Sulpicius Severus and Orosius. First, however, two allusions to Tacitus may be considered which it is hard to describe as fragments, even on the broadest possible definition of the term.