Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings

...of the state, diligently [omitting] everything that might have diminished their estimation in any part. Conversely, he lacerates Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Caesar, with insults beyond all measure and limit; and if at any time he acknowledges their noble spirit, he nevertheless believes that the "preface of public parricide" should never be omitted 1. I am not unaware that such insults were in use at that time in Rome. Cremutius Cordus objects that the labels of "robbers" and "parricides" were used in designating those men in a speech delivered in the Senate 2, the example of whom itself demonstrates sufficiently how dangerous it was to have praised M. Brutus and to have called C. Cassius the "last of the Romans." What of the fact that not even their images were carried in the funeral procession of the Junian family, as though they were publicly condemned of high treason, lest their honorable memory in some way offend the prince 3? Therefore, one necessarily had to serve the times. But how little this one excuse, which can be offered, avails, if we see that the primary vices of the time were not accepted unthinkingly, but were deliberately, I would almost say eagerly, seized and propagated, from which this depravity now becomes his own and peculiar. This lack of a strong and sincere spirit is felt all the more bitterly because he punished the same vices in others with such inexorability, and because he celebrated the virtues in others so verbosely, of which he preferred to be a praiser and encourager rather than an imitator. However, those flatteries that most dishonor the man—if they demonstrate that he was miserably abject before the powerful and somehow delighted in that very humility—also at times provide this appearance for the Valerian work, which he could have easily avoided without any offense, since the contemplation of his own age was either unnecessary or even alien to the purpose, by which he had proposed in his mind not to convey new things, but to select from things already conveyed by older writers and to compose them for that use which we have mentioned.

By this desire to flatter, he was induced, while he sometimes departed from the truth—especially in portraying the state of the city under the empire of Tiberius, which was decaying more day by day—to corrupt history most often by another vice: ignorance and a truly miraculous levity in transcribing the works of ancient authors whom he chose as his primary guides.

1) I, 5, 7 and 8; I, 6, 13; I, 7, 2; I, 8, 8; IIII, 5, 6; VI, 4, 5; etc.
2) Cf. Tacitus, Annals III, 34.
3) Cf. Tacitus, Annals III, 76.