ricardienne | Why Tacitus was Angsty:

How could a certain violent and bitter indignation not have beset his noble mind more each day and deeply disturbed it? Who does not see that what contributed so much to the pleasing and happy style of writing, which he used as a young man, must have been altered? For this is the rule and nature of the human mind: if someone who has been enraged and savaged once achieves a moment of expounding what things anguish and oppress his mind, he will indulge his everlasting anger with voluble, outpouring speech. If on the other hand for a length of time he is forced to force in his soul's impetus, when at last the power of speaking is returned, having spent so much time in angry thoughts he will lay bare his old indignation in harsh, short, truncated, bitter turns of phrase. Tacitus, for fifteen years forced into unwilling idleness and shameful silence, oppressed and injured by exceptionally cruel rule, in which Domitian, with no intervals of time and pauses for breath, but, as it were, with a single blow drank down the commonwealth, Tacitus, who watched so great a slaughter of former consuls, so many exiles and near-escapes of the most highly-born ladies, drenched as if with "the blood of innocent Senecio," in mental suffering and anguish spent a life full and packed with continuous anger and indignation.

For which reason it is not strange at all that he, when he finally began to compose "the memory of prior servitude and witness of present goods," the ability to speak freely finally restored, he was unable to revive that blooming and luxuriant, copious and even style in which he had flourished as a young man, just as a field injured and stricken down by continuous rains does not resurrect its earlier original and luxuriant growth, especially when it had begun to put up rich and frequent ears of grain. Such a style no longer fit his stricken, afflicted, embittered soul; he was almost unable to use another style than the one he did: short and vigorous, sometimes harsh and bitter.

Quare fieri non poterat, quin dolor quidam vehemens et acerbus nobilem eius animum in diem magis occuparet et penitus perturbaret. Quod quantum valuerit ad gratum illud ac laetum diceudi genus, quo iuvenis usus erat, immutandum, quis non videt? Nam haec est animi humani ratio ac natura, ut, si quis iratus ac lacessitus statim nanciscatur occasionem aperiendi, quae animum angant et premant, oratione volubili, profluente, perenni irae indulgeat, si vero per quoddam tempus ad animi impetum coercendum cogatur, oblata tandem libere loquendi potestate, diu in cogitationibus iracundis versatus, indignationem inveteratam patefaciat sententiis asperis, brevibus, abruptis, acerbis. Per quindecim annos Tacitus ad invitam desidiam et turpe silentium coactus, durissimo imperio pressus ac vexatus, quo Domitianus non per intervalla et spiramenta temporum sed continuo et velut uno ictu rem publicam exhausit, tot consularium caedes, tot nobilissimarum feminarum exsilia et fugas intuitus, innocenti Senecionis sanguine quasi perfusus, vitam degerat animi dolore et angore, continua ira ac indignatione plenam ac refertam. Quare minime mirum, eum, cum recuperata tandem libere loquendi facultate „memoriam prioris servitutis et testimonium praesentium bonorum" componere inciperet, redintegrare non potuisse floridum illud ao laetum, numerosum et aequabile dicendi genus, quo iuvenis viguerat, sicut continuis imbribus vexata et prostrata seges non ad priorem integrum laetumque florem resurgit, cum praesertim uberes iam et frequentes spicas conceperit. Animo eius concusso, exacerbato, indignato talis sermo non amplius conveniebat; uti potuit oratione non fere alia, quam qua usus est, brevi et nervosa, interdum aspera et acerba. --De Tacito Dialogi Auctore, Johann Andreas Heinrich Gerard Jansen (Gronigen: 1878), 69-70