Vulgar words in Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century (Page 1)
This book at a glance
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~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,587 ~ ~ ~
If an author was to be selected to be bound up with anything done by Bracciolini at this date, and he had been consulted in the matter, there was none more likely for him to have chosen than Apuleius, for his thoughts were now running altogether upon that writer, of whose "Golden Ass" he gave a Latin translation; and the particular part of Apuleius bound up with Tacitus only begins at the 10th chapter, that is, with only what he writes "De Asino Aureo."
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,669 ~ ~ ~
Ejusdem est traductio Diodori Siculi historiographi ad Nicolaum Quintum Pontificem Maximum libri sex" (L. c.) Another translation of his was "The Golden Ass" of Apuleius in ten books; and he edited, (but without notes), the "Astronomicon" of Manilius, --whom, by the way, he misstyles "Manlius."
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,739 ~ ~ ~
But Bracciolini puts before us nothing like this;--only incongruous, unimaginable and un-Romanlike personages,--people who gibber at us, as idiots in their asylums, as that unfortunate simpleton, the Emperor Claudius;--murderous criminals who glower and scowl upon us, as those two monsters of iniquity, Tiberius and Nero;--pimps and parasites beyond number, who so plague us with their perpetual presence, that the revolted soul at length wonders how so many such beings can be acting together, and be so degenerate, when Nature might have designed most, if not all, of them, for greater and more salutary purposes.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 3,449 ~ ~ ~
Tacitus is infinitely more offensive, and, certainly, most untruthful, when he says that the Jews "kept for worship in their holy of holies the image of an ass, as the animal by whose guidance they had slaked their thirst and brought their wanderings to a happy sequel": "effigiem animalis, quo monstrante errorem sitimque depulerant, penetrali sacravere."