`Long may the barbarians continue, I pray, if not to love us, at least to hate one another.' Cornelius Tacitus, Rome's greatest historian and the last great writer of classical Latin prose, produced his first two books in AD 98. He was inspired to take up his pen when the assassination of Domitian ended `fifteen years of enforced silence'. The first products were brief: the biography of his late father-in-law Julius Agricola and an account of Rome's most dangerous enemies, (...) the Germans. Since Agricola's claim to fame was that as governor for seven years he had completed the conquest of Britain, begun four decades earlier, much of the first work is devoted to Britain and its people. The second is the only surviving specimen from the ancient world of an ethnographic study. Each in its way has had immense influence on our perception of Rome and the northern `barbarians'. This edition reflects recent research in Roman-British and Roman-German history and includes newly discovered evidence on Tacitus' early career. (shrink)

The Germania of Tacitus is the most extensive account of the ancient Germans written during the Roman period, but has been relatively neglected in the scholarship of the English-speaking world: the last commentary appeared in 1938, and only a handful of studies have appeared since that time. In recent decades, however, there have been important scholarly developments that significantly affect our understanding of it. Ongoing archaeological work in western and central Europe has greatly increased our knowledge of the iron-age (...) cultures in those regions, while new anthropological and literary approaches have called into question some of the traditional assumptions that shaped the use of this text as a historical source. This new commentary, together with the extensive introduction, provides a current and comprehensive guide to the relevant textual and archaeological evidence and also examines the methodological issues involved in the interpretation of this important work. (shrink)

**A newly revised edition of two seminal works on Imperial Rome** Undeniably one of Rome’s most important historians, Tacitus was also one of its most gifted. *The Agricola* is both a portrait of Julius Agricola-the most famous governor of Roman Britain and Tacitus’s respected father-in-law-and the first known detailed portrayal of the British Isles. In the *Germania*, Tacitus focuses on the warlike German tribes beyond the Rhine, often comparing the behavior of "barbarian" peoples favorably with the decadence (...) and corruption of Imperial Rome. (shrink)

Der Niedergang der römischen Monarchie Die Annalen, das letzte und bedeutendste Werk des P. Cornelius Tacitus, schildern den Niedergang des Prinzipats, der von Augustus begründeten Form der römischen Monarchie. Mit scharfem Blick erfasst der Autor die Verfallserscheinungen des Regierungssystems und geißelt die Sitten seines Volkes, dem die Kaiser durch Zügellosigkeit und Gleichgültigkeit Vorschub leisteten.

Tacitus makes much of Tiberius' dependence upon Augustus. This article examines four citations of Augustan precedent which occur in the Annals: 1.77.1–3; 2.37–38.5; 4.37–38.3 and 6.3.1–3. In each case, I explore how the citation of precedent functions within the individual incident that Tacitus narrates, observing the ways in which the meaning of Augustus' dicta are constructed, manipulated and even contested by the individuals Tacitus describes. I conclude by making some suggestions about the role of Tiberius' dependence upon (...) Augustan precedent in the narrative as a whole. (shrink)

Although Tacitus began his writing career during the Principate at the end of the first century CE, the dominant approach to thinking about political life was still guided by Republicanism, a constellation of concepts from the mid-first century BCE Roman Republic. Republicanism held that there was only one type of monarchy and that it necessarily precluded libertas. Tacitus, who was living under different iterations of monopolistic power in the Principate, questions this tenet by examining various Germanic tribes. The (...) Germania explores different types of monarchical arrangements, showing that monarchy is not a one-size-fits-all form and that there are significant political differences among the Germanic monarchies, some of which preserve libertas. In this examination, he highlights the inapplicability of Republicanism to a system as dynamic as the Principate. (shrink)

Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso (1612) provides us with a satirically inflected view of how Tacitean quotation was used throughout the sixteenth century as a medium of political knowledge. A detailed analysis of some Tacitean scenes in Ragguagli will help us to elicit some of the issues underlying the turn to Tacitus in the intellectual climate of the period: the search for truth in a new era of moral relativism; debates about the applicability of ancient maxims to contemporary realities; and (...) the connection between externally acquired techniques and internalized wisdom. In both Ragguagli and Comentarii Tacitus’ characterization of the emperor Galba becomes emblematic of the gulf that can open up between theoretical knowledge and practical understanding. When the same model is used to measure Tacitus’ own unsuccessful tenure of power over Lesbos in Ragguagli, Boccalini presents a case study of how ‘properly’ to make use of Tacitean political insight. (shrink)

Tacitus' claim that history should inspire good deeds and deter bad ones should be taken seriously: his exempla are supposed to help his readers think through their own moral difficulties. This approach to history is found in historians with clear connections to Stoicism, and in Stoic philosophers like Seneca. It is no coincidence that Tacitus is particularly interested in the behavior of Stoics like Thrasea Paetus, Barea Soranus, and Seneca himself. They, and even non-Stoic characters like Epicharis and (...) Petronius, exemplify the behavior necessary if Roman freedom was to survive the monarchy. (shrink)

In 1626, the Neapolitan Ottavio Sammarco published the Discorso politico intorno la conseruatione della pace dell'Italia in which the author referred to the King of Spain as arbiter among the Italian princes and his ministers in Italy as efficient instruments to ensure the stability. This piece of political literature shows an explicit practical orientation, through which the author carries out a systematisation of the political means to achieve quietness in Italy. In articulating the praxis into formal language, Sammarco looks to (...) the past searching for the wisdom of History and uses Tacitus’ account to build a discourse around the tools and mechanisms for preserving stability and avoiding conflicts. The aim of this article, in the first instance, is to examine Sammarco's discursive programme and the purpose of his discourse; in the second place, how Tacitus serves the author's aim and how his account means a fundamental anchor. Furthermore, it will be useful to trace how the political language that transforms the continuous threat of war into politics is modelled by 1626 in Italy and how Sammarco contextualizes his political vocabulary within the Spanish Monarchy political dialectic at the beginning of XVII century. (shrink)

The focus of this article is on a curious episode at the end of the first book of Tacitus’Annals. It is argued that Tacitus here is at his most metaphoric and allusive, allowing a senatorial debate on the possibly prophetic meaning of an inundation of the Tiber to become a debate about the overwhelming power of the river's namesake Tiberius. Parallels from Dio (and perhaps also from Livy) indicate that inundations of the Tiber by the end of the (...) Republic had become prophetic warnings of the rise of the dynasts undermining the stability of the Republic. In Tacitus, procedural anomalies and suggestive wordplay bring to the fore the religious and constitutional issues that in the Senate's handling of this Tiberineprodigiumreflect its submission to the ever more oppressive power of Tiberius. (shrink)

A new political practice, the ‘reason of state’, informed the ends and practices of natural study in the late sixteenth century. Informed by the study of the Roman historian Tacitus, political writers gathered ‘secrets of empire’ from both history and travel. Following the economic reorientation of ‘reason of state’ by Giovanni Botero (1544–1617), such secrets came to include bodies of useful particulars concerning nature and art collected by an expanding personnel of intelligencers. A comparison between various writers describing wide-scale (...) collections, such as Botero, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Jakob Bornitz (1560–1625) and Matthias Bernegger (1582–1640), reveals that seventeenth-century natural intelligencers across Europe not only were analogous to political intelligencers, but also were sometimes one and the same. Those seeking political prudence cast themselves as miners, prying precious particulars from the recesses of history, experience and disparate disciplines, including mathematics, alchemy and natural philosophy. The seventeenth-century practice of combining searches for secrets of empire, nature and art contests a frequent historiographical divide between empirical science and Tacitism or reason of state. It also points to the ways political cunning shaped the management of information for both politics and the study of nature and art. (shrink)

This article is a discussion of Plin.Ep. 7.29 andEp. 8.6, in which he presents his reaction to seeing the grave monument of Marcus Antonius Pallas, the freedman and minister of the Emperor Claudius, beside the Via Tiburtina. The monument records a senatorial vote of thanks to Pallas, and Pliny expresses intense indignation at the Senate's subservience and at the power and influence wielded by a freedman. This article compares Pliny's letters with Tacitus’ account of the senatorial vote of thanks (...) to Pallas atAnn. 12.52–3 and explores the differences between the ways in which the two authors encourage readers to relate to past events. It is noted that the Pallas letters are unusual amongst Pliny's letters for their treatment of material unconnected with the life and career of Pliny and his friends, and argued that inEp. 7.29 Pliny uses language and attitudes drawn from satire to evoke the past.Ep. 8.6 is read as an idiosyncratic piece of historical enquiry, considering Pliny's use of citation and his anonymization of historical individuals. Both letters are considered in the context of the surrounding letters, and a hypothesis is offered regarding the identity of their addressee Montanus, considering evidence from Tacitus’HistoriesandAnnals. Discussion of Tac.Ann.12.52–3 focusses on the use of irony. Pliny's evocation ofenargeia(‘vividness’) is compared with that of Tacitus. The article concludes with comparison of the historical accounts offered by Pliny and Tacitus through reflection on Juvenal,Satire1. (shrink)

The Germania of Tacitus is the most extensive account of the ancient Germans written during the Roman period, but has been relatively neglected in the scholarship of the English-speaking world: the last commentary appeared in 1938, and only a handful of studies have appeared since that time. In recent decades, however, there have been important scholarly developments that significantly affect our understanding of it. Ongoing archaeological work in western and central Europe has greatly increased our knowledge of the iron-age (...) cultures in those regions, while new anthropological and literary approaches have called into question some of the traditional assumptions that shaped the use of this text as a historical source. This new commentary, together with the extensive introduction, provides a current and comprehensive guide to the relevant textual and archaeological evidence and also examines the methodological issues involved in the interpretation of this important work. (shrink)

Mr. Reed has performed a distinct service by reminding us ,309 ff.) of the odd statement by Guglielmo da Pastrengo that Tacitus was once the director of Titus' private library: if authentic, the information is too precious to be neglected. We cannot deny that Guglielmo may have had ancient sources now lost. When we know that a short epic, probably by Rabirius, one of the most admired poets of the Augustan age, disappeared after 1466, although it was protected by (...) a false ascription to Virgil, it would be foolhardy to claim that any loss after 1350 was impossible. On the other hand, we all know that instant erudition was a speciality of many Medieval sciolists whom admirers of the Middle Ages now call ‘Humanists’’ and ‘scholars’’, e.g. Arnulf of Orleans, whose recondite learning enabled him to inform us that Lucan was called Annaeus because bees settled on the infant's lips, and that he was brought to Rome as a captive after Nero stormed Cordova. (shrink)

The Oxford Classical Texts, or Scriptorum Classicourm Bibliotheca Oxoniensis, are renowned for their reliability and presentation. The series consists of a text without commentary but with a brief apparatus criticus at the foot of each page. There are now over 100 volumes, representing the greater part of the classical Greek and Latin literature.

The fact that vocabulum appears with far more frequency in Tacitus' texts than in any other author except for the encyclopaedists argues for his idiosyncratic usage of the term. This article argues that imperial discourse, nearly identical in structure and expression to that of the Republic but divorced from Republican connotations, provided an empty site where Roman fantasies of self-definition took strong hold, and that Tacitus uses vocabulum to indicate words and concepts that illustrate this process, particularly with (...) reference to representations of the foreign and the past. Such a discourse was congenial for the concentration of power in the hands of one person, as it no longer expressed the conflicting desires of a community engaged in public affairs, but collectivized the public desire for an image of Roman superiority. Thus Germany and the old Republican past were easily mythologized as what Rome desired to be, but feared it was not. Tacitus' use of vocabulum highlights the words in imperial discourse that betray the gap in the political unconscious between Romans' idea of themselves as masters of the Empire and as slaves to one ruler. Nor does he position himself as an outside observer of this process, but creates an experience of it for the reader through gaps and inconsistencies within his narrative. (shrink)

This article offers a realist interpretation of Tacitus’s analysis of political failure. Tacitus described the early Roman Empire as a balance between the conflicting and irreconcilable values and interests of the emperor, the army, and the senate. For him Stoic-republican morality in itself—without the intervention of a political standard demanding political agency in every circumstance—cannot provide an all-purpose guide to action. He provides a fine-grained analysis of types of political failure, such as failing to act, or to realize (...) one’s limited scope for maneuver, or the inevitability of failure given particular political circumstances. Tacitus also describes Thrasea, a moderate member of the senatorial opposition to Nero, as an exceptionally laudable figure. His preference for moderate politics places Tacitus on the side of contemporary status-quo oriented, liberal, realists (e.g., Bernard Williams), rather than on the side of radical realists (e.g., Raymond Geuss, Enzo Rossi), but the central lesson of his understanding of Roman politics is not so much that political order is fragile as that the cost of political failure can indeed be unbearably high. (shrink)

The Germania of Tacitus is the most extensive account of the ancient Germans written during the Roman period, but has been relatively neglected in the scholarship of the English-speaking world: the last commentary appeared in 1938, and only a handful of studies have appeared since that time. In recent decades, however, there have been important scholarly developments that significantly affect our understanding of it. Ongoing archaeological work in western and central Europe has greatly increased our knowledge of the iron-age (...) cultures in those regions, while new anthropological and literary approaches have called into question some of the traditional assumptions that shaped the use of this text as a historical source. This new commentary, together with the extensive introduction, provides a current and comprehensive guide to the relevant textual and archaeological evidence and also examines the methodological issues involved in the interpretation of this important work. (shrink)

It is usual to read nomina , with which three interpretations are possible. The stronger arrogates to himself the titles of moderation and justice. So in the excellent Rumanian translation of 1871 by Gavrilu J. Munteanu: ‘Cându are sâ decida pumnulu, celu mai tare si atribue titlu de moderatu şi de onestu.’.

It is usual to read nomina, with which three interpretations are possible. The stronger arrogates to himself the titles of moderation and justice. So in the excellent Rumanian translation of 1871 by Gavrilu J. Munteanu: ‘Cându are sâ decida pumnulu, celu mai tare si atribue titlu de moderatu şi de onestu.’.

The first sentence of the Annals reads urbem Romam a principio reges habuere. Commentators observe the echo of Sallust, Catiline 6.1 urbem Romam, sicuti ego accepi, condidere atque habuere initio Troiani, and of Claudius, ILS 212 quondam reges hanc tenuere urbem. In a stimulating recent contribution David Levene also compares the first sentence of Justinus' Epitome of the Histories of Pompeius Trogus: principio rerum gentium nationumque imperium penes reges erat. A fourth potential model may now be taken into consideration: Ἀθηναῖοι (...) τὸ μὲν ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἐχρῶντο βασιλɛίαι. (shrink)

Tacitus and Sima Qian are eminent representatives of Roman and ancient Chinese historiography. The starting-point of the paper is a striking parallel between the two historians: During the reign of autocratic emperors both authors undergo experiences which not only affect them on a personal level, but also influence their historiographie practice. The paper traces this influence with respect to the representations of individual historical characters. On the one hand it analyses the representations of rulers: of Tiberius, adoptive son and (...) successor of Augustus, and of Wendi, natural son and successor of Gaodi, the founder of the Han-dynasty; on the other hand it studies the representations of second and third rank characters such as senators, ministers, generals, and - in the case of Sima Qian - also of people from other walks of life. The similarities which can be observed between the two authors point to the existence of certain anthropological constants, whereas the differences are to be attributed to basic differences in Roman and Chinese political thinking and to differing degrees of the intensity of the experiences undergone by each historian. (shrink)