The writings of Machiavelli reveal a mind based on the same deeps as Khoëleth, brooding on the same world-wide things. Like him, he looks out into the black and eyeless storm, the ceaseless drift of atoms; like him, he surveys the States and Empires of the past, and sees in their history, their revolutions, their rise and decline, but the history of the wind which, in the Hebrew phrase, goes circling in its circles, _sov[)a]v sov[=e]v_, and returneth to the place whence it came, and universal darkness awaits the world, and oblivion universal the tedious story of man. In work after work of Machiavelli, letters, tales, dramas, historical and political treatises, this conception recurs. It is the central and informing thought of his life as a philosophical thinker. But unlike Vico, Machiavelli avoids becoming the slave of a theory. He shadows forth this system of some dim cycle in human affairs as a conception in which his own mind finds quiescence if not rest. Its precise character he nowhere describes.
Amongst philosophical historians Tacitus occupies a unique position. He rivals Dante in the cumulative effect of sombre detail and in the gloomy energy which hate supplies. In depth and variety of creative insight he approaches Balzac,[6] whilst in his peculiar province, the psychology of death, he stands alone. His is the most profoundly imaginative nature that Rome produced. Three centuries before the fall of Rome he appears to apprehend or to forbode that event, and he turns to a consideration of the customs of the Teutonic race as if already in the first century he discerned the very manner of the cataclysm of the fourth. Both his great works, the _Histories_ and the _Annals_, read at moments like variations and developments of the same tragic theme, the "wrath of the gods against Rome," the _deûm ira in rem Romanam_ of the _Annals_; whilst in the _Histories_ the theory of retribution appears in the reflection, _non esse curae deis securitatem nostrum, esse ultionem_, with which he closes his preliminary survey of the havoc and civil fury of the times of Galba--"Not our preservation, but their own vengeance, do the gods desire." It is as if, transported in imagination far into the future, Tacitus looked back and pronounced the judgment of Rome in a spirit not dissimilar from that of Saint Augustine. Yet the Rome of Trajan and of the Antonines, of Severus and of Aurelian, was to come, and, as if distrusting his rancour and the wounded pride of an oligarch, Tacitus betrays in other passages habits of thought and speculation of a widely different bearing. His sympathies with the Stoic sect were instinctive, but in his reserve and deep reticence he resembles, not Seneca, but Machiavelli or Thucydides.