TACITISM. - This name can sum up, if not actually the whole literature of "reason of state," as it flourished after the third decade of the sixteenth century, certainly that part of it which depends most on Machiavelli and on the anti-Machiavellian polemic.
Its genesis is this. Humanism established its civic ideal in the almost sanctified heroes of the Roman Republic, and was therefore enraptured with their historian Livy, on whom the republicans of the Renaissance fed to the last; and Jacopo Nardi ended his life in exile in Venice translating and commenting on him between 1530 and 1540. But times and ideals were changing. The now monarchical age sought its paradigms in the empire, wholly to the advantage of its historian, Cornelius Tacitus, whose first six books of the Annals Angelo Arcimboldo had discovered in Westphalia in 1513, and Filippo Beroaldo had printed in Rome in 1515 by order of Leo X. Even the manner of reading histories was rapidly changing. It was now no longer a matter of imitating the sublime deeds of the great in the mirror of Aristotelian Ethics, but of probing their backstage by the sieve of a psychological experience refined as far as possible in the practice of affairs; of feeling anew in the action of the political man the great drama between what ought to be and what is. For this study, pages more fitting than the terribly pessimistic ones of Cornelius Tacitus could not have been desired. But from whom does this tacitism take its start? From Machiavelli, who is not himself a Tacitist; and it may even be that at the time of The Prince he did not yet know the first six books of the Annals. Not for this does the parallelism between the Valentino and the other almost new Prince, Tiberius, fail to emerge as true and disconcerting from The Prince, when, in order to found the State ("Quomodo fides a principibus sit servanda"), they come to terms with morality in almost the same manner. Nor is the never-before-seen way of reading histories initiated by Machiavelli in the Discourses on the First Decade any less Tacitean. For the simplism with which he had believed he could resolve the ethical problem of reason of state, Machiavelli was promptly placed on the Index; but the curiosity and interest that he had nonetheless aroused and continued to arouse were transferred to the pages of Tacitus, who pointed to the same problems, but with an almost religious torment. One would say that of the two the Christian is Tacitus, the pagan Machiavelli. Thus it was that, despite the clear interferences with the latter, the whole literature of reason of state was virtually Tacitist. The Church itself felt deeply the fascination of the Latin writer, precisely because of his implicit polemic against the cynical levity of Machiavelli. A Tacitist, Annibale Scoti, relates precisely: "The esteem and reputation [of Tacitus] then grew so greatly in the time of Clement VIII, who began to put Tacitus's maxims fruitfully into practice, that in our age he already passes, in every quality of his, into the first class of the most illustrious writers." Legion were the Tacitists: famous among them Justus Lipsius and Traiano Boccalini. There were some of every tendency. When Alberico Gentili had begun to interpret Machiavelli not as the theorist but as the satirist of absolutism, Tacitus too underwent the same transformation. In the times of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution it seemed that in Tiberius he had wished to unveil the infamy of monarchies. "A Tacitus will come..." are Foscolo's words to Napoleon in the famous letter.