"It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar - that I call an achievement"
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Savage praise disguised as etiquette: Horace hands Tacitus a compliment, then uses him as a measuring stick to roast a different species of writer entirely. The line turns on a brutal distinction that still governs media culture: brevity is easy when you actually have substance; the real (perverse) “skill” is producing volume without meaning and still persuading people it matters.
The Tacitus name-drop is doing double duty. It flatters the Roman ideal of compressed force, the kind of sentence that lands like a verdict. But it also sets up an ambush. Horace isn’t really interested in style tips; he’s interested in moral accounting. “Makes truth into a liar” frames empty verbosity as a civic offense, not an aesthetic lapse. When you have “nothing to say” yet publish anyway, language stops describing reality and starts falsifying it. The writer becomes an alchemist of noise, turning fact into something suspect by burying it under rhetoric.
Calling this an “achievement” is the knife twist. Horace’s irony treats sham productivity as a kind of excellence, the way we might grudgingly admire a con artist’s technique while hating the con. In a Rome crowded with patrons, reputations, and public performance, the subtext is clear: the marketplace rewards output and posture, not necessarily insight. He’s warning that the most dangerous writing isn’t clumsy or illiterate; it’s fluent, confident, and empty enough to overwrite the truth.
The Tacitus name-drop is doing double duty. It flatters the Roman ideal of compressed force, the kind of sentence that lands like a verdict. But it also sets up an ambush. Horace isn’t really interested in style tips; he’s interested in moral accounting. “Makes truth into a liar” frames empty verbosity as a civic offense, not an aesthetic lapse. When you have “nothing to say” yet publish anyway, language stops describing reality and starts falsifying it. The writer becomes an alchemist of noise, turning fact into something suspect by burying it under rhetoric.
Calling this an “achievement” is the knife twist. Horace’s irony treats sham productivity as a kind of excellence, the way we might grudgingly admire a con artist’s technique while hating the con. In a Rome crowded with patrons, reputations, and public performance, the subtext is clear: the marketplace rewards output and posture, not necessarily insight. He’s warning that the most dangerous writing isn’t clumsy or illiterate; it’s fluent, confident, and empty enough to overwrite the truth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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