TACITISM. - This term may encompass, if not indeed the whole literature of «reason of State» that flourished after the third decade of the sixteenth century, at least that part of it most dependent upon Machiavelli and upon the anti-Machiavellian polemic.
Its genesis was as follows. Humanism formed its civic ideal around the almost sanctified heroes of the Roman Republic, and thus drew inspiration from their historian Livy, upon whom the republicans of the Renaissance continued to feed until the end; and Jacopo Nardi ended his life in Venetian exile by translating and commenting upon him between 1530 and 1540. But times and ideals were changing. The now monarchical age sought its paradigms in the Empire, greatly to the advantage of its historian, Cornelio Tacito, whose first six books of the Annals Angelo Arcimboldo had discovered in Westphalia in 1513, and which Filippo Beroaldo had printed in Rome in 1515 by order of Leone X. The manner of reading histories was also changing rapidly. It was no longer a matter of imitating the sublime deeds of great men in the mirror of Aristotelian Ethics, but of investigating their hidden background through the test of a psychological experience refined, insofar as possible, by the practice of affairs; of perceiving anew in the action of the statesman the great drama between what ought to be and what is. For such a study, no pages could have been more suitable than those, terribly pessimistic, of Cornelio Tacito. But from whom does this Tacitism take its start? From Machiavelli, who was not himself a Tacitist; and it may even be that, at the time of the Prince, he did not know the first six books of the Annals. Yet the parallel in the Prince between Valentino and the other almost new Prince, Tiberius, is no less true and disconcerting, when, in founding the State (« Quomodo fides a principiibus sit servanda »), they come to terms with morality in almost the same fashion. No less Tacitean is the unprecedented way of reading histories initiated by Machiavelli in the Discorsi sulla prima Deca. Because of the simplicity 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 nevertheless aroused and continued to arouse were transferred to the pages of Tacito, who indicated the same problems, but with an almost religious anguish. One might say that, of the two, Tacito is the Christian and Machiavelli the pagan. Thus it was that, despite its evident connections with the latter, all the literature of reason of State was virtually Tacitist. The Church itself deeply felt the charm of the Latin writer, precisely because of his implicit polemic against Machiavelli’s cynical frivolity. A Tacitist, Annibale Scoti, relates: «The reputation and esteem [of Tacito] then grew so greatly in the time of Clemente VIII, who began profitably to put Tacito’s maxims into practice, that in our age he is already ranked, in every respect, in the foremost class of the most illustrious writers.» The Tacitists were legion: famous among them were Giusto Lipsio and Traiano Boccalini. There were Tacitists of every tendency. When Alberico Gentili had begun to interpret Machiavelli not as the theorist but as the satirist of absolutism, Tacito too underwent the same transformation. In the age of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, it seemed that in Tiberius he had wished to unveil the infamy of monarchies. «A Tacito will come...» are Foscolo’s words to Napoleone in the famous letter.