Laudator Temporis Acti

Bertrand Russell, "On Being Modern-Minded," Unpopular Essays (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1921), pp. 88-94 (at 88):

We imagine ourselves at the apex of intelligence, and cannot believe that the quaint clothes and cumbrous phrases of former times can have invested people and thoughts that are still worthy of our attention.

Id. (at 89):

The desire to be contemporary is of course new only in degree; it has existed to some extent in all previous periods that believed themselves to be progressive. The Renaissance had a contempt for Gothic centuries that had preceded it; the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries covered priceless mosaics with whitewash; the Romantic movement despised the age of the heroic couplet.

Aristotle, Politics 5.9 (1310 a 34-36; tr. H. Rackham):

For to live in conformity with the constitution ought not to be considered slavery but safety.

οὐ γὰρ δεῖ οἴεσθαι δουλείαν εἶναι τὸ ζῆν πρὸς τὴν πολιτείαν, ἀλλὰ σωτηρίαν.

Paul Shorey, The Assault on Humanism (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Company, 1917), pp. 74-76:

The things which, for lack of better names, we try to suggest by culture, discipline, taste, standards, criticism, and the historic sense, they hate. Or, if you prefer, they are completely insensitive to them and wish to impose their own insensibility upon the coming generation. They are genuinely skeptical of intellectual discriminations which they do not perceive, and aesthetic values which they do not feel. They are fiercely resentful of what they deem the supercilious arrogance of those who possess or strive for some far-off touch or faint tincture of the culture and discipline which they denounce as shibboleths, taboos, and the arbitrary conventions of pedants.

[....]

The purpose, or, at any rate, the tendency of their policies is to stamp out and eradicate these things and inculcate exclusively their own tastes and ideals by controlling American education with the political efficiency of Prussian autocracy and in the fanatical intolerance of the French anticlericalists. Greek and Latin have become mere symbols and pretexts. They are as contemptuous of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Racine, Burke, John Stuart Mill, Tennyson, Alexander Hamilton, or Lowell, as of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, or Horace.

Id., p. 78:

They instinctively distrust that spirit of critical humanism which, from Plato to Pater and Arnold and Lowell and Anatole France, has always refused to take quite seriously the systems and the system-builders of the hour.

Helen MacInnes, Decision at Delphi (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1960), p. 98:

The past and the present aren't so far removed....They are just separate rooms in the same house, and if you unlock the doors they all connect.

Apuleius, Metamorphoses 1.20 (tr. E.J. Kenney):

That was Aristomenes' story. His companion, who from the start had remained stubbornly incredulous and would have no truck with what he told us, broke out: 'Of all the fairytales that were ever invented, of all the lies that were ever told, that takes the biscuit'; and turning to me, 'But you,' he said, 'to judge from your dress and appearance you're an educated man — do you go along with this stuff?'

'Well,' I said, 'my opinion is that nothing is impossible and that we mortals get whatever the Fates have decided for us. You, I, everybody, we all meet with many amazing and unprecedented experiences, which aren't believed when they're told to somebody who lacks first-hand knowledge of them. But I do, I assure you, believe our friend here, and I'm most grateful to him for diverting us with such a charming and delightful story.'

---

haec Aristomenes. at ille comes eius, qui statim initio obstinata incredulitate sermonem eius respuebat: 'nihil', inquit 'hac fabula fabulosius, nihil isto mendacio absurdius' et ad me conversus: 'tu autem', inquit, 'vir ut habitus et habitudo demonstrat ornatus, accedis huic fabulae?'

'ego vero', inquam, 'nihil impossibile arbitror, sed utcumque fata decreverint, ita cuncta mortalibus provenire: nam et mihi et tibi et cunctis hominibus multa usu venire mira et paene infecta, quae tamen ignaro relata fidem perdant. sed ego huic et credo hercules et gratas gratias memini, quod lepidae fabulae festivitate nos avocavit.'

respuebat codd.: respuerat Bluemner
ornatus codd.: cordatus Stewech
accedis codd.: accredis Petsch

Kenney appears to adopt Stewech's conjecture.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.1.40-41:

A pox o' your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog!

Id. 1.1.44-45:

Hang, cur! Hang, you whoreson, insolent noisemaker!

Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, tr. Stuart Woolf (New York: The Orion Press, 1959), pp. 39-40:

It grieves me now that I have forgotten his plain, outspoken words, the words of ex-sergeant Steinlauf of the Austro-Hungarian army, Iron Cross of the '14-'18 war. It grieves me because it means that I have to translate his uncertain Italian and his quiet manner of speaking of a good soldier into my language of an incredulous man. But this was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.

These things Steinlauf, a man of good will, told me; strange things to my unaccustomed ear, understood and accepted only in part, and softened by an easier, more flexible and blander doctrine, which for centuries has found its dwelling place on the other side of the Alps; according to which, among other things, nothing is of greater vanity than to force oneself to swallow whole a moral system elaborated by others, under another sky. No, the wisdom and virtue of Steinlauf, certainly good for him, is not enough for me. In the face of this complicated world my ideas of damnation are confused; is it really necessary to elaborate a system and put it into practice? Or would it not be better to acknowledge one's lack of a system?

---

Ho scordato ormai, e me ne duole, le sue parole diritte e chiare, le parole del già sergente Steinlauf dell'esercito austro-ungarico, croce di ferro della guerra '14-18. Me ne duole, perché dovrò tradurre il suo italiano incerto e il suo discorso piano di buon soldato nel mio linguaggio di uomo incredulo. Ma questo ne era il senso, non dimenticato allora né poi: che appunto perché il Lager è una gran macchina per ridurci a bestie, noi bestie non dobbiamo diventare; che anche in questo luogo si può sopravvivere, e perciò si deve voler sopravvivere, per raccontare, per portare testimonianza; e che per vivere è importante sforzarci di salvare almeno lo scheletro, l'impalcatura, la forma della civiltà. Che siamo schiavi, privi di ogni diritto, esposti a ogni offesa, votati a morte quasi certa, ma che una facoltà ci è rimasta, e dobbiamo difenderla con ogni vigore perché è l'ultima: la facoltà di negare il nostro consenso. Dobbiamo quindi, certamente, lavarci la faccia senza sapone, nell'acqua sporca, e asciugarci nella giacca. Dobbiamo dare il nero alle scarpe, non perché cosi prescrive il regolamento, ma per dignità e per proprietà. Dobbiamo camminare diritti, senza strascicare gli zoccoli, non già in omaggio alla discipiina prussiana, ma per restare vivi, per non cominciare a morire.

Queste cose mi disse Steinlauf, uomo di volontà buona: strane cose al mio orecchio dissueto, intese e accettate solo in parte, e mitigate in una piu facile, duttile e blanda dottrina, quella che da secoli si respira al di qua delle Alpi, e secondo la quale, fra l'altro, non c'è maggior vanità che sforzarsi di inghiottire interi i sistemi morali elaborati da altri, sotto altro cielo. No, la saggezza e la virtù di Steinlauf, buone certamente per lui, a me non bastano. Di fronte a questo complicato mondo infero, le mie idee sono confuse; sarà proprio necessario elaborare un sistema e praticarlo? o non sarà piu salutare prendere coscienza di non avere sistema?

Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence (1953; New York: New York Review Books, 2007), p. 43:

If my first days in the Abbey had been a period of depression, the unwinding process, after I had left, was ten times worse. The Abbey was at first a graveyard; the outer world seemed afterwards, by contrast, an inferno of noise and vulgarity entirely populated by bounders and sluts and crooks. This state of mind, I saw, was, perhaps, as false as my first reactions to monastic life; but the admission did nothing to decrease its unpleasantness.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Reflections on the Revolution in France, in his Works, Vol. IV (London: Francis & John Rivington, 1852), p. 265:

It is a sour, malignant, envious disposition, without taste for the reality, or for any image or representation of virtue, that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in splendour and in honour. I do not like to see any thing destroyed; any void produced in society; any ruin on the face of the land.

Id.:

It is not with much credulity I listen to any, when they speak evil of those whom they are going to plunder. I rather suspect that vices are feigned or exaggerated, when profit is looked for in their punishment. An enemy is a bad witness; a robber is a worse.

Id., p. 266:

They find themselves obliged to rake into the histories of former ages (which they have ransacked with a malignant and profligate industry) for every instance of oppression and persecution which has been made by that body or in its favour, in order to justify, upon very iniquitous, because very illogical principles of retaliation, their own persecutions, and their own cruelties. After destroying all other genealogies and family distinctions, they invent a sort of pedigree of crimes. It is not very just to chastise men for the offences of their natural ancestors: but to take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession, as a ground for punishing men who have no relation to guilty acts, except in names and general descriptions, is a sort of refinement in injustice belonging to the philosophy of this enlightened age.

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961; rpt. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1965), pp. 121-122:

This drives me to a question which I never asked myself until a few years ago. Can I say with certainty that any evaluative criticism has ever actually helped me to understand and appreciate any great work of literature or any part of one? When I inquire what helps I have had in this matter I seem to discover a somewhat unexpected result. The evaluative critics come at the bottom of the list.

At the top comes Dryasdust. Obviously I have owed, and must continue to owe, far more to editors, textual critics, commentators, and lexicographers than to anyone else. Find out what the author actually wrote and what the hard words meant and what the allusions were to, and you have done far more for me than a hundred new interpretations or assessments could ever do.

I must put second that despised class, the literary historians; I mean the really good ones like W.P. Ker or Oliver Elton. These have helped me, first of all, by telling me what works exist. But still more by putting them in their setting; thus showing me what demands they were meant to satisfy, what furniture they presupposed in the minds of their readers. They have headed me off from false approaches, taught me what to look for, enabled me in some degree to put myself into the frame of mind of those to whom they were addressed. This has happened because such historians on the whole have taken Arnold's advice by getting themselves out of the way. They are concerned far more with describing books than with judging them.

Thirdly, I must in honesty place various emotive critics who, up to a certain age, did me very good service by infecting me with their own enthusiasms and thus not only sending me but sending me with a good appetite to the authors they admired. I should not enjoy rereading most of these critics now, but they were useful for a while. They did little for my intellect, but much for my 'corage'. Yes, even Mackail.

Id., p. 124:

If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him.

Dante, Convivio 4.5.20 (on Rome; tr. Richard H. Lansing):

I am most certainly of the firm opinion that the stones lodged in her walls are worthy of reverence and that the soil on which she rests is more worthy than is commonly proclaimed or established.

Certo di ferma sono oppinione che le pietre che ne le mura sue stanno siano degne di reverenzia, e lo suolo dov'ella siede sia degno oltre quello che per li uomini è predicato e approvato.

Pindar, Pythian Odes 8.95-97 (tr. Anthony Verity):

Creatures of a day! What is man? What is he not?
He is the dream of a shadow; yet when Zeus-sent brightness comes
a brilliant light shines upon mankind and their life is serene.

ἐπάμεροι· τί δέ τις; τί δ᾿ οὔ τις; σκιᾶς ὄναρ
ἄνθρωπος. ἀλλ᾿ ὅταν αἴγλα διόσδοτος ἔλθῃ,
λαμπρὸν φέγγος ἔπεστιν ἀνδρῶν καὶ μείλιχος αἰών.

96 ἄνθρωπος (e schol. ad Nem. 6.4) Boeckh: ἄνθρωποι codd.
97 φέγγος ἔπεστιν Heyne: ἔπεστι φέγγος codd.

August Boeckh's Latin translation:

Diem unum viventes! quid tandem est quis? quid non quis? Umbrae somnium homo. Sed quando splendor ab Iove datus venit, fulgens lumen adest hominibus et suavis vita.

C.M. Bowra, Pindar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 98:

This αἴγλα διόσδοτος is the highest point in human experience. It can be found in action and in song, in glory and in friendship, in the warmth of generosity and the confidence of controlled power. Men are indeed at the mercy of the gods, but they are often enough merciful, and when they send something of their own radiance to men, then life is transfigured and breaks away from its narrow, temporal limitations. This is the conclusion to which Pindar's long meditations on the relations of gods and men led him, and it is his final answer to his misgivings about the uncertainty and the brevity of the human state.

Hermann Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy, tr. Moses Hadas and James Willis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 500:

The epode begins abruptly with the word which contains the essence of that view of human nature: 'creatures of the day'. As the day changes, so do we change; we are not really anything, since there is nothing into which we cannot at some time be changed: 'What is man, and what is he not?' Since we have no firm and enduring substance, we are dreaming shadows in a dreamer's mind.¹⁶ This is expressed by Pindar in a verse which for weight and brevity has no rival even in his poetry. He then comforts his hearers again by swinging back to the brilliant fortune and delightful existence which a favorable day sent by the gods can bring to us—such a day as that which has now dawned for the young Aristomenes and the people of Aegina.<sup>17

16</sup> The conclusion that anything liable to change was unreal was developed to its ultimate consequences by Pindar's contemporary Panncnides. In his philosophy phenomena (and men along with them) are no more than phantoms (see above p. 353ff.).

¹⁷ Pindar will not bear of any other consolation for the basic nothingness of man except that pride and rejoicing are very pleasant while they last. He does not seek to interfere with extremities of joy and sorrow, unlike Archilochus, who in the fragment cited above (n. 13) urges that they should be moderated (fr. 67): 'Do not rejoice nor be cast down too much.'

Fränkel understood ἐπάμεροι (i.e. ἐφήμεροι) to mean "subject to the (changing) day, variable." See also his article "Man's 'Ephemeros' Nature According to Pindar and Others," Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 77 (1946) 131-145. For a defence of the traditional meaning "short-lived," see Matthew W. Dickie, "On the Meaning of ἐφήμερος," Illinois Classical Studies 1 (1976) 7-14.

Charles Portis (1933-2020), The Dog of the South, Chapter 4:

"All right, listen to me. Are you a reader? Do you read a lot of books?"

"I read quite a bit."

"And you come from a family of readers, right?"

"No, that's not right. That's completely wrong. My father doesn't own six books. He reads the paper about twice a week. He reads fishing magazines and he reads the construction bids. He works. He doesn't have time to read."

"But you're a big reader yourself."

"I have more than four hundred volumes of military history in my apartment. All told, I have sixty-six lineal feet of books."

"All right, now listen to me. Throw that trash out the window. Every bit of it."

He reached into his grip and brought out a little book with yellow paper covers. The cellophane that had once been bonded to the covers was cracked and peeling. He flourished the book. "Throw all that dead stuff out the window and put this on your shelf. Put it by your bed."

What a statement! Books, heavy ones, flying out the windows of the Rhino apartment! I couldn't take my eyes from the road for very long but I glanced at the cover. The title was With Wings as Eagles and the author was John Selmer Dix, M.A.

Dr. Symes turned through the pages. "Dix wrote this book forty years ago and it's still just as fresh as the morning dew. Well, why shouldn't it be? The truth never dies. Now this is a first edition. That's important. This is the one you want. Remember the yellow cover. They've changed up things in these later editions. Just a word here and there but it adds up. I don't know who's behind it. They'll have Marvin watching television instead of listening to dance music on the radio. Stuff like that. This is the one you want. This is straight Dix. This is the book you want on your night table right beside your glass of water, With Wings as Eagles in the yellow cover. Dix was the greatest man of our time. He was truly a master of the arts, and of some of the sciences too. He was the greatest writer who ever lived."

"They say Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived."

"Dix puts William Shakespeare in the shithouse."

E. Courtney, Musa Lapidaria: A Selection of Latin Verse Inscriptions (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), pp. 146-147, 355:

Custos sepulcri pene destricto deus
Priapus ego sum. mortis et uitae locus.

I am the god Priapus, guarding the tomb with my penis unsheathed. The place of life and death.

CLE 193 = CIL 6.3708, 5173, 30092 = ILS 3585

From a first-century columbarium; Priapus guards a tomb placed in a garden or vineyard, cf. CIL 5.3634 Dis Manib(us) C H C locus adsignatus monumento in quo est aedicla Priapi and H. Herter, De Priapo (1932), 229 = his summary in the RE article Priapos 1929. Such a setting justifies uitae locus, because it is protected by the generative phallos (RE s.v. 1728; this passage 1732.9) of Priapus. The metre is iambic trimeter. With destricto the phallus is compared to a weapon (often called telum etc.); cf. uses of stringo in OLD s.v. 4.

On the phallus as a weapon see also J.N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (London: Duckworth, 1982), pp. 19-22.

Statue of Priapus, in Boston, Museum of Fine Arts (accession number RES.08.34a):

Tertullian, On the Soul 1.6 (tr. Edwin A. Quain):

Learn from God about that which you have received from God; if you don't learn it from God, you never will from anyone else. For, who can reveal what God has concealed? Whom would we ask? If we are ignorant, let us be content. It is safer and better to be ignorant, if God has not revealed it, than to know something which human presumption has discovered.

a deo discat quod a deo habeat, aut nec ab alio, si nec a deo. quis enim revelabit quod deus texit? unde sciscitandum est? unde et ignorare tutissimum est. praestat per deum nescire, quia non revelaverit, quam per hominem scire, quia ipse praesumpserit.

Id. 2.7:

The Christian, however, can plumb the depths of this topic with the aid of a few simple words. Things that are absolutely certain are always simply explained and his investigations should go no further than we are permitted. The Apostle has forbidden us to indulge in endless questions. We can learn no more about the soul than God has revealed and His revelation is the sum and substance of the whole matter.

Christiano autem paucis ad scientiam huius rei opus est. nam et certa semper in paucis, et amplius illi quaerere non licet quam quod inveniri licet; infinitas enim quaestiones apostolus prohibet. porro non amplius inveniri licet quam quod a deo discitur; quod autem a deo discitur, totum est.

Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912), "The Fallen Oak" ("La quercia caduta"), tr. Arturo Vivante:

Where it cast its shadow the dead oak now
   Lies outspread, nor does it vie with whirlwinds anymore.
   People say: Now I see: it was really large!

Here and there the little nests of spring
   Droop from its crown.
   People say: Now I see: it was really good.

Everyone praises, everyone cuts. At evening
   Everyone goes home with a heavy bundle.
   In the air, a cry...of a chickadee

That seeks the nest she will not find.

---

Dov'era l'ombra, or sé la quercia spande
   Morta, né più coi turbini tenzona.
   La gente dice: Or vedo: era pur grande!

Pendono qua e là dalla corona
   I nidietti della primavera.
   Dice la gente: Or vedo: era pur buona!

Ognuno loda, ognuno taglia. A sera
   Ognuno col suo grave fascio va.
   Nell'aria, un pianto...d'una capinera

Che cerca il nido che non troverà.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson †.

Labels: arboricide

Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1953), p. 306 (December 30, 1764):

We supped in a great town hall, and eat and drank considerably. After which they pelted each other with the crumb of their bread formed into little balls. This was rather rude in a large company and in presence of a stranger. I however threw with the rest, partly to keep them in countenance, partly to indulge my whim. I asked if this was the common custom at Geneva. They said they did so only among friends. They were monstrously familiar, the men pawing the sweaty hands of the women, and kissing them too, as the minister slabbered the greasy, unwashen hands of a married woman. Had I been the husband, I should have kicked the fellow downstairs. I was disgusted much, and only consoled myself that I beheld a nauseous example of the manners of republicans. I was glad to get home.

Aeschylus, Libation Bearers 391-396 (tr. Herbert Weir Smyth):

CHORUS
Full against my heart's prow wrath bloweth keen in rancorous hate.
ELECTRA
And when will mighty Zeus bring down his hand upon them — ah me! — and cleave their heads asunder?

ΧΟΡΟΣ
πάροιθεν δὲ πρῴρας
δριμὺς ἄηται κραδίας
θυμὸς ἔγκοτον στύγος.
ΗΛΕΚΤΡΑ
καί πότ᾽ ἂν ἀμφιθαλὴς
Ζεὺς ἐπὶ χεῖρα βάλοι,        395
φεῦ φεῦ, κάρανα δαΐξας;

Anthony Grafton, "Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Budé and His Books," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 91.2 (June, 1997) 139-157 (at 146):

No one has yet tried to reconstruct Budé's library in full. Anyone who does so will have to grapple with the difficulties that always confront students of printed books with manuscript annotations. These hybrid creatures, neither fish nor flesh, often escape the eagle eyes of curators, whose special interests usually lie on one side or the other of Gutenberg's discovery. Often they rest unknown in even the most orderly libraries. Budé's heavily annotated copy of the Aldine edition of Demosthenes belongs to the new Preußische Staatsbibliothek in the former West Berlin. But no single one of the many catalogues under the lurching roof of that massive, abstract yellow building records the book's presence. I found it only because a librarian in the old Staatsbibliothek in the East finally told me, on the last day of a year spent in Berlin, where to look. Impartial observers report that I then set a record for the mile-long run through traffic from one Staatsbibliothek to the other.

Rhiannon Ash, "Introduction," Tacitus, ed. Rhiannon Ash (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 1-35 (at 7):

The nineteenth century also saw the airing of some bold theories about Tacitus. John Wilson Ross (1818-87), for example, published anonymously in 1878 a study arguing that the Annals were not in fact written by Tacitus, but were a brilliant forgery concocted by the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini, who was aided in his scheme by a helpful monk from the abbey of Fulda who transcribed the forgery. By a series of close comparative readings of the Histories (considered genuine) and the Annals (an 'immortal and wonderful forgery'),²³ Ross argues that Bracciolini produced an audacious forgery in order to make himself rich and promote his own career. The theory did not win supporters, but Ross certainly constructs an exciting and dramatic narrative.<sup>24

23</sup> Ross (1878: 88). Hochart (1890) and (1894) rejects both the Histories and the Annals as forgeries. Wiener (1920) argues that the Germania is a forgery. For an overview of such (discredited) theories, see Mendell (1957: 219-20).

²⁴ Furneaux (1896: 8-12) defends the Annals as a genuine work. In debates about authenticity, one particularly contentious passage is Annals 15.44 on Nero and the Christians.

Clarence W. Mendell, Tacitus: The Man and His Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 219-220:

Two curious attempts were made toward the end of the nineteenth century to prove not that Tacitus was a liar but that what purported to be his writings were fifteenth-century forgeries. W.R. Ross published anonymously in 1878 a book entitled Tacitus and Bracciolini, intended to prove that Poggio Bracciolini was the author of what had come down from antiquity under the name of Tacitus. Twelve years later P. Hochart (De l'Authenticité des Annales et des Histoires de Tacite) maintained the same thesis with a much greater show of learnng, following up by a supplementary volume. These two attempts gave ample assurance that the attack on these lines was futile, and only one further attempt of this sort has been made. That was in 1920 when Leo Wiener (Tacitus' Germania and Other Forgeries) sought in vain to prove by a bewildering display of linguistic fireworks that the Germania and, by implication other works of Tacitus were forgeries made after Arabic influence had extended into Europe.

Bibliographical details:

• [John Wilson Ross,] Tacitus and Bracciolini. The Annals Forged in the XVth Century (London: Diprose & Bateman, 1878)
• P. Hochart, De l'authenticité des Annales et des Histoires de Tacite (Paris: Ernest Thorin, 1890)
• Polydore Hochart, Nouvelles considérations au sujet des annales et des histoires de Tacite (Paris: Thorin et Fils, 1894)
• Leo Wiener, Contributions Towards a History of Arabico-Gothic Culture, Vol. III: Tacitus' Germania & Other Forgeries (Philadelphia: Innes & Sons, 1920)

I haven't seen Louis Paret, The Annals of Poggio Bracciolini and Other Forgeries (Paris: Augustin S.A., 1992).

At unz.com, where no crackpot theory, no matter how bizarre, fails to find a welcoming home, someone calling himself "The First Millennium Revisionist" appears to take seriously the theory that the writings of Tacitus are forgeries — How Fake Is Roman Antiquity? (June 26, 2020).

I rank this one up there with the theory that Ovid was never exiled — see e.g. A.D. Fitton Brown, "The Unreality of Ovid's Tomitan Exile," Liverpool Classical Monthly 10 (1985) 18-22.