"[T]he effect of Tacitus, the best historian that Rome produced, can be felt in Gibbon, the best modern historian of Rome... Gibbon realized that Tacitus, sometimes seen as primarily a literary artist, preferring point and drama to the dispassionate search for truth, was a genuinely philosophic historian; and Tacitus showed him how a philosophic history could be not hindered but served by irony, disenchantment, and apophthegmatic wit... In both men this way of speaking brings out the ambiguity of history, the hiddenness of human motive. Influence or coincidence? It is impossible to be sure, but it is fair enough to say that Gibbon has Tacitus in his bones."