This view of early modern ‘Tacitism’,
while convenient, is a highly selective and
partial one. For the modern heirs of the
Roman imperial moralists were never
simply philosophers of princely subjection.
The most famous and celebrated of them,
the Flemist humanist Justus Lipsius, has
been described as an ‘anti-Ciceronian’, and
his writings presented as an attempt to supplant
a Ciceronian republican politics with a
Tacitean monarchical one. Yet Lipsius
never renounced Cicero as a political or
rhetorical influence, and he cites him liberally
across his political writings.13 The introductions
to the various imprints of Lipsius’
edition of Tacitus are studded with
Ciceronian invocations of the statesman as
pilot (gubernator) of the ship of state, as
well as with conventional Tacitean laments
about lost liberty and the misuse of power
by tyrants ancient and modern (Morford,
1993: 136–40; 1991: 153–4). On the allegorical
frontispiece of Lipsius’ Opera
Omnia the personification of Politics wears
a crown depicting the city (civitas): in each
hand she holds a rudder (gubernaculum), the
symbol of civil governance, and the spear of
military imperium, rather than the sword and
sceptre of Hobbes’ Leviathan