Tacitus

Victoria Emma Pagán

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781780763170
• eBook ISBN: 9781786721327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The greatest of Roman historians, Publius Cornelius Tacitus (56-117 CE) studied rhetoric in Rome. His rhetorical and oratorical gifts are evident throughout his most substantial works, the incomplete but still remarkable Annals and Histories. In concise and concentrated prose, marked by sometimes bitter and ironic reflections on the human capacity to misuse power, Tacitus charts the violent trajectory of the Roman Empire from Augustus' death in 14 CE to the end of Domitian's rule in 96. Victoria Emma Pagan looks at Tacitus from a range of perspectives: as a literary stylist, perhaps influenced by Sallust; his notion of time; his modes of discourse; his place in the historiography of the era; and the later reception of Tacitus in the Renaissance and early modern periods. Tacitus remains of major interest to students of the Bible, as well as classicists, by virtue of his reference to 'Christus' and Nero's persecution of the Christians after the great fire of Rome in 64 CE. This lively survey enables its readers fully to appreciate why, in holding a mirror up to venality and greed, the work of Tacitus remains eternal.

‌Notes

I. Prefacing a Life

1 Thomas Gordon, The Works of Tacitus. With Political Discourses Upon That Author (1728), as cited in Heritage, p. 176.

2 Thomas Hunter, Observations on Tacitus. In Which his Character as a Writer and an Historian, is Impartially Considered, and Compared with that of Livy (1752), as cited in Heritage, p. 186.

3 See Howard D. Weinbrot, ‘Politics, taste, and national identity: some uses of Tacitism in eighteenth-century Britain’, in Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition, pp. 168–84; Heritage, pp. xliii–xliv.

4 Peter Burke, ‘Tacitism’, in Thomas A. Dorey (ed.), Tacitus (New York, 1969), p. 150.

5 Christopher B. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New York and London, 2011).

6 Ag. 30.5; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York, 1983).

7 Ag. 1.1.

8 G. 1.1.

9 Dial. 1.1.

10 Hist. 1.1.1.

11 Ann. 1.1.1.

12 Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems (Philadelphia, PA, 1991), p. 223.

13 Michel de Montaigne, Essays (1588), as cited in Heritage, p. 134.

14 Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Religion and the Virtues of the Christian Prince against Machiavelli (1595), as cited in Heritage, p. 67.

15 Vespasian’s rule, Dial. 17.3; Tacitus as a young man, Dial. 1.2.

16 Ag. 9.6.

17 Hist. 1.1.3.

18 Ann. 11.11.1.

19 Ag. 45.5.

20 Pliny, Epistles 2.1.6.

21 Ibid. 2.11.

22 Anthony R. Birley, ‘The...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Emperors
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations
• I • Prefacing a Life
• II • Nobles and Nobodies
• III • Words and Deeds
• IV • Romans and Others
• V • Then and Now
• VI • Yesterday and Today
• Notes
• Bibliography