Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations and editions used
- Introduction: a life, in fragments
- Chapter 1 Autonomy, authority, and representing the past under the Principate
- Chapter 2 Agricola and the crisis of representation
- Chapter 3 The burdens of Histories
- Chapter 4 “Elsewhere than Rome”
- Chapter 5 Tacitus and Cremutius
- Conclusion: on knowing Tacitus
- Works cited
- Index of passages discussed
- General index
Chapter 5 - Tacitus and Cremutius
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations and editions used
- Introduction: a life, in fragments
- Chapter 1 Autonomy, authority, and representing the past under the Principate
- Chapter 2 Agricola and the crisis of representation
- Chapter 3 The burdens of Histories
- Chapter 4 “Elsewhere than Rome”
- Chapter 5 Tacitus and Cremutius
- Conclusion: on knowing Tacitus
- Works cited
- Index of passages discussed
- General index
Summary
We do not know much about the posthumous ancient reception of Tacitus' work, beyond that his books did not disappear entirely. One of our few data concerns the emperor Tacitus:
Cornelium Tacitum, scriptorem historiae Augustae, quod parentem suum eumdem diceret, in omnibus bibliothecis collocari iussit; ne lectorum incuria deperiret librum per annos singulos decies scribi publicitus in †evicos archis† iussit et in bibliothecis poni.
(HA Tacitus 10.3)He ordered to be placed in every library Cornelius Tacitus, the author of a Historia Augusta, because he said he was his ancestor. Lest for lack of readers' interest he cease to exist, he ordered the book to be copied out ten times annually at public expense … and placed into libraries.
As always, the testimony of the Historia Augusta calls for caution, but true or not, the story is interesting. It presents the worst fate that Tacitus' work can imagine for itself, and an end it was designed to avoid. The historian who strove to show that his work owed nothing to the regime's authority and influence, indeed that he had produced it in the face of institutional obstacles presented by the existence of principes, had in the end to be rescued from oblivion by an emperor, whose supposed intervention is far too much like the authorizing signature Josephus sought from Titus (Vit. 363) as proof that he had been right in his portrayal of the Jewish War.
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- Information
- Writing and Empire in Tacitus , pp. 250 - 313Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008