Done with the secondary sources: Benario’s Introduction, Dorey’s edited collection, and Mellor’s Tacitus. Syme’s magisterial two-volume work will have to wait until next summer, although I might do some JSTOR work within the next week or two, depending on how much time I find. I’ll say, though, that if you have any interest in ancient Rome, Tacitus is a wonderful read: his style glitters, especially (for English readers) in the Church and Broadribb translation, which only begins to capture the historian’s beautifully pointed brevity.

And Tacitus suits my left melancholia, writing of a time when “truth was regarded as treasonous” (Mellor 92). There are, certainly, truisms: “The lasting lesson of the Dialogue is that art and society are intertwined, and both depend on the structure of political life. It is a lesson that cultural critics have revived with great enthusiasm in our own time” (Mellor 19). Furthermore, “In our age of ‘disinformation,’ secrecy hardly seems extraordinary. Tiberius’s unforthcoming silence at meetings of the Senate is a form of control popular among Renaissance princes and modern business tycoons. Tyrants from political dictators to football coaches prefer to instill insecurity through control of information and calculated ambiguity” (Mellor 92). This, to me, seems a lesson that applies as well to the writings of Lawrence Lessig as it does to those of the proponents of composition’s critical pedagogy.

Mellor remarks that “Tacitus’s account of the first century of the Empire makes it clear that ‘private profit is preferred to the public interest.’” (59) We gain our words capital and capitalism from the Latin caput, capitis. It means “head”. We seem to have largely forgotten the Roman proverb that Of the fish, the head rots first.

So I’ve finished the Annals, and am doing a quick burn through some secondary sources on Tactitus before moving on to Hardt & Negri. Unsurprisingly, I’m finding the original material much more interesting than the criticism, and as I’ve noted before, part of the reason is that most of said criticism refers to Tacitus as a historian rather than a rhetorician.

That’s not to say that I find history uninteresting. In fact, some of the reflections Tacitus offers on the topic of historiography seem to me to be as important today as they were two thousand years ago. My original concerns about taking lessons from the past to better understand the present were misguided: Tacitus firmly believes in history as a discipline that uses the threat of historical notoriety in the future as a means by which to guide moral action in the present.

The question then becomes: how concerned are we today about future notoriety? In terms of public policy, the two most explicitly future-oriented concerns of the United States are social security and the environment — and our record sucks on both.

In the Agricola, Tacitus places a famous critique of Rome in the mouth of the Scottish chieftain Calgacus, who says of the Romans:

“Plunderers of the world, after they, laying everything waste, run out of land, they probe even the sea: if their enemy has wealth, they have greed; if he be poor, they are ambitious; neither East nor West has sated them; alone of mankind they covet poverty with the same passion as wealth. Robbery, butchery, rape they misname empire: they make a wasteland and call it peace.” (80)

In AD 65, Nero chose to believe the dream-vision of a man who told that great masses of gold lay under his land, and sent a massive expedition to recover the gold, which — as it was thought — would increase the imperial treasury. The passage is worth quoting at length.

“Nothing else at the time was the subject of the credulous gossip of the people, and of the very different conversations of thinking persons. It happened, too, that the quinquennial games were being celebrated for the second time, and the orators took from this same incident their chief materials for eulogies on the emperor. ‘Not only,’ they said, ‘were there the usual harvests, and the gold of the mine with its alloy, but the earth now teemed with new abundance, and wealth was thrust upon them by the bounty of the gods.’ These and other servile flatteries they invented, with consummate eloquence and equal sycophancy, confidently counting on the facility of his belief.” (344)

Of course, nothing was found, and “the expectation of riches was one of the causes of the poverty of the State” (344). And we should not at all think it appropriate to draw any sorts of parallels to contemporary notions of wealth thrust upon a nation by some mysterious providence, or the credulity of leaders who might believe in such things, or those whose agreeable public words might encourage them. The United States is, after all, a democracy, and we have not a ruler who thinks his own power supreme.
(more…)

I want to start tonight not with Tacitus and his descriptions of the reign of Nero, son of Agrippina the Younger and adopted son of her husband the emperor Claudius, but with Seneca the Elder, the father of Nero’s tutor and advisor.
(more…)

Tacitus points out that liberty fell with the coming of Augustus and the principate, but suggests that circumstances, still, were not so bad. People still had a fair degree of individual freedom, even into reign of Tiberius. But with the ascension of Sejanus, the ambitious and treacherous head of the Praetorian Guard, the terrors began. According to Tacitus, Sejanus secretly poisoned Drusus, the only son of Tiberius, so that he might have sole and unimpeded access as a counsellor to Tiberius. After the death of Drusus in 23 AD, the role of delatores, or political informants who stood to gain a portion of the estates of those upon whom they informed, grew considerably in Roman political life. As Tacitus remarks, “the informers, a class invented to destroy the commonwealth, and never enough controlled even by legal penalties, were stimulated by rewards” (138), and “every day a stronger and fiercer host of informers pursued its victims, without one alleviating circumstance” (156). Sejanus cultivated a wide network of these delatores, who he used to take out his numerous political enemies, “and the good will of Sejanus was to be gained only by a crime” (157). Tiberius, in 27 AD, retreated to his twelve villas on the island of Capri, leaving Sejanus effectively in charge of Rome, and “Never was Rome more distracted and terror-stricken. Meetings, conversations, the ear of friend and stranger were alike shunned; even things mute and lifeless, the very roofs and walls, were eyed with suspicion” (158).
(more…)

Let me offer some background: Cornelius Tacitus was a successful politician and orator, about 20 years younger than Quintilian, who retired to write history after his consulship under the emperor Nerva. The stated intent of the Dialogus de oratoribus, as Tacitus indicates from the outset, is to explore the reasons for the decline of oratory. To this end, Tacitus sets up his four interlocutors — Maternus, Aper, Messalla, and Secundus — at the house of Maternus, in a situation clearly intended to echo Cicero’s dialogue on rhetoric. James Mayer and Michael Winterbottom both attest to the difficulties of dating the composition of the Dialogus: the best consensus available seems to be sometime between 101 and 104 AD, during the reign of Trajan, the second of the five “good” emperors (moviegoers: in Russell Crowe’s Gladiator role, Marcus Aurelius was the last of the five “good” emperors, succeeded by Commodus, about whom there was indeed a scandal involving a gladiator, if memory serves), though there are other arguments. In terms of form, Mayer points out that the Dialogus “comprises a trio of paired speeches. Each of the three interlocutors speak twice. The set speeches, six in all, have single themes, and are adversarial in form, since the dialogue parodies a trial. In each of the three pairs, the second is shorter” (17). However, Luce takes the same observation a step further, to point out that the form of the Dialogus comes directly out of Seneca the Elder’s Controversiae. Furthermore, Mayer points out that the dialogues “are set in the context of political strife, and the role of oratory within the Roman state is always the issue,” much in the manner of Cicero’s Brutus, and “the fate of oratory is seen to hang in the balance: despotism has once again silenced the forum” (13). One of Tacitus’s primary interests — as I’ve lately seen from his historiographical work — is in attempting to explore some of the reasons for rhetoric’s decline. More than that, though, the prose of the Dialogus and of the Histories, as well — like Plato’s dialogues — is a live wire. Like Cicero’s prose, this is writing that bites, in a good way.

Anyway. I started this post intending to write about the most recent hundred pages of the Histories, and especially the stuff Tacitus does with Tiberius and his ear-poisoning lieutenant Sejanus and the twelve country houses on the island of Capri (at points, the Histories resemble a grim soap opera), but maybe I can do that tomorrow. I figure I’d best first give some context as a rationale that rhet/comp scholars might take for actually reading Tacitus. Aside from the fact that, in practice, he’s almost as much fun as Cicero.

Yeah, yeah. So here goes.
(more…)

I’ve gotten up through Book III of the Annals of the imperial Roman historian Tacitus. A couple years ago, I read the Dialogus de Oratoribus for my exams, and loved it, and the more secondary material I’ve read on him, the more I want to know. Composition has completely ignored him, choosing to focus — from the Romans — on Cicero and on the starry-eyed (and frequently blind to political context) educational-theory idealism of Quintilian. Tacitus is much more dark and spiky and gloomy than either of the two, and has a great deal to say about the uses and abuses of rhetorical and imperial power that Quintilian simply ignored. Still, to cut comp some slack, I think he’s largely ignored because he’s a historian rather than a rhetorician or an educational theorist. However, he does have a great deal to say — by implication — about rhetoric, and about the contexts for rhetoric, and what he has to say is worth listening to.
(more…)