Tacitus Quotes
The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more and tolerated by all.
Tacitus, Cornelius. The Histories. Translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, Macmillan, 1873.
This quotation is famous for illustrating the kind of prejudicial statements which were then allowed by prosecutors to inflame a jury and the public in general. What this prosecutor was claiming was that these to defendants should be put to death, not only because of the nature of their crime but that they didn’t believe in God, and read the works of a German Philosopher. This was one of the most famous and covered cases in the Nation and the defendants were represented by the great attorney Clarence Darrow. Yet the allegation that Leopold and Loeb were both atheists which was never proved and was irrelevant anyway. Crowe also told the jury and the public that they were followers of Nietzsche a German Philosopher and made that seem somehow evil. He counted on the vestige of anti German prejudice from the First World War which had recently ended. The defendants were highly educated young men who had books of most philosophers. They had killed another youth under very strange psychological circumstances and the entire trial was about whether they should get the death sentence.
Originally it was published in Boston under the name “A Columbian Patriot.”
This type of quotation is what makes Pareto very difficult to classify along the classic political spectrum. Although a law and order type conservative, he twists the classic moral dilemma that the French philosophers made so much of, to put the onus to feed the starving man on society as a whole.
Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus (AD 56 – c. 120) was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars. He lived in what has been called the Silver Age of Latin literature, and has a reputation for the brevity and compactness of his Latin prose, as well as for his penetrating insights into the psychology of power politics.
