Germania is read as a response to Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, and contrasted with Tacitus’ account of conquest in the Agricola. Focusing on the absence of historical narrative, discussion goes beyond the well-recognized denial of history to the Germanic Other to consider the implications of moments when Germania comes close to recounting history without doing so. Narrativity and the predominance of description are discussed, with a view to understanding Germania as epideixis. It is suggested that the absence of historical narrative emphasizes the vivid portrayal of Germania as unconquered territory, and that Germania provides a vivid exploration of the limits of Roman power and epistemologies. The text expresses an imperialist perspective, but does not claim a triumph for Roman ratio over a territory that is resistant to it.

In this chapter I explore some of the various ways in which modernity configures repetition as an improper relation to the past. This exploration mediates the wider question of what modernity wants to do with the past, whether it is to break with it, to sublimate it, or to form a new kind of relation altogether. This leads us to consider the tropes of repetition and of exemplarity as the grounds for an engagement with the past. That is to say, modernity does not merely employ these tropes in configuring a relation with the past; rather modernity's relation with the past is marked by the difference between ancient and modern uses of these tropes. Therefore, in the middle section of this chapter I turn to the theory and practice of exemplary thinking in ancient Rome, as a mode of thinking which infuses the present with the complex temporalities of subjective pasts and futures. Framing this discussion is a consideration of some ways in which Marx, in particular, characterised repetition and engaged with exemplarity in his attempt to create a new modernity.

In the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx presented, in the form of a political commentary on the revolutionary events in France between 1848 and 1851, a historical meditation on what it was to be modern, differentiating nineteenth-century forms of repetition – and of revolution – from what had gone before.

The Annals of Tacitus begin at the death of Augustus, whose funeral is narrated in chapters 8-10 of the first book. The ninth and tenth chapters, beginning “then there was much talk about Augustus himself,” record various interpretations of the emperor's life current at the time of his death; as has been “recognized” for nearly a century, these chapters contain precise and pointed allusions to Augustus' self-representation in the text entitled Res Gestae Divi Augusti (henceforth RGDA). Chapter 10 of the Annals, in particular, tellingly re-phrases Augustus' account of his activities in the aftermath of Julius Caesar's death: “At the age of nineteen I raised an army on my own initiative and at my own expense, with which I recovered the freedom of the Republic, which had been suppressed by the domination of a faction. On account of this the Senate, in the consulship of Gaius Pansa and Aulus Hirtius, decreed in my honor that I be enrolled as a senator, giving me the right to speak in the consular position, and bestowed on me imperium. The Senate also commanded me as propraetor, together with the consuls, to see to it that no harm should come to the state. But the people, in the same year, when both consuls had fallen in battle, made me consul and triumvir for the maintenance of the Republic. (RGDA 1.1-4)”

Seneca’s Menippean satire, often entitled Ludus de morte Claudii (“Funning with the death of Claudius”), offers a sort of interlude from the play of the Roman satirists and their critics. Indeed, many features of this branch of satire seem to preclude its being comfortably set alongside Horace, Persius, Juvenal, or even Petronius (which is not to imply that these four are at all comfortable set alongside each other …). While all satirists (sometimes angrily) celebrate their belatedness, their parasitic reliance upon the tropes of earlier genres and their mimicking even of these very celebrations, the Menippean satirist, eschewing indignation, turns to self-conscious mimicry - parody. Within this play of parody is created the image of an author both in control and not in control of the work he calls “his own.” Joel Relihan has elegantly formulated it thus: “Menippean satire, one may say, opposes the word-centered view of the universe, and is a genre that, in words, denies the possibility of expressing the truth in words.” How Seneca positions Roman culture, Roman emperors, and Roman authority within this generic view is the subject of this essay. By reading the Apocolocyntosis as a text engaged in the reception of classical literature, I hope to draw out the extent to which this satire, gleefully after every event, offers to subsequent writers and scholars a mode of expression which is more than just an admission of belatedness. The project of quotation and citation, as pursued in this paper, plays a fundamental role in the creation of classical literature as quotable, as worth alluding to.

In the previous chapter I suggested that the voice of the imperial woman constituted a historical narrative which at times subverted or controlled not only Julio-Claudian history but perhaps also Tacitus' own Annals. The dissent from imperial narrative is therefore voiced from within the imperial family itself, diverting the reader's attention away from the senatorial voice of the narrator. Hence I remarked at the end of the last chapter on how Tacitus questions his own narrative with the words ‘to what end will I commemorate?’(quem ad finem memorabimus). The question, couched in terms which evoke the end of memory, reminds us not only of the future to which the history is addressed, but also of the end of (the) history itself. Tacitus' fear is expressed here that the imperial strain on republican language will replace ‘true’ meaning, that the reader will have to internalise and gradually consent to this change of meaning.

The narrative of the Annals breaks off in mid-sentence nearly halfway through book 16. It is a fortuitous and fitting break, for it emphasises the death of Thrasea Paetus, the senator whose determined display of ‘liberty’ has been recorded at various points in Tacitus' narrative. As his blood spatters on the ground he offers it as a libation to Jove the liberator and exhorts his son-in-law Helvidius Priscus to follow examples of constancy. The memory of Thrasea Paetus and Helvidius Priscus becomes a site of contestation between senatorial writers and the emperors (particularly Domitian) at the start of Tacitus' much earlier monograph, the Agricola.

We have already seen, in chapters three and five, how certain imperial women display themselves or are displayed as sites of recollection and anticipation, as monuments or embodied texts of dynastic history. In this chapter I will examine the woman's voice as a source of historical narrative, in particular the voices of the ‘successful’ empresses, Livia Augusta the mother of Tiberius, and the younger Agrippina, mother of Nero. As women who marry emperors and manœuvre their sons into the succession, these empresses’ plots can be read as strong narratives which both subvert and replace the prevailing trends of imperial history. The empress redirects the emplotment of her husband's reign, constructing a new teleology which points inevitably to her own son. The empress's ‘plot’, then, involves the manipulation and shaping of events, with the aim of presenting her son as the logical conclusion to her husband's reign. Consequently these female narratives have an especially charged relationship with Tacitus' own history, which blends with or diverges from their version of events.

SENTENCE STRUCTURE AND HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION

Tacitus is a notoriously difficult writer; the central theme of this study is what the difficulty of Tacitus means and what are the possible ways a reader can respond to this difficulty. Examining what a difficulty means is a rather different action to examining what a difficulty is: in the latter case, we identify difficulty, overcome and disregard it; in the former case we bring it with us, as it were, entering into an ongoing relationship with difficulty. I will argue in this study that what is difficult and obscure in Tacitus' style of writing, what seems to call out for clarification, is central to Tacitus' modality of historical and political thought. In other words, Tacitus conveys to his readers his conception of imperial politics by enmeshing them in ambiguous and complicated Latin sentences. If we decode these sentences and translate Tacitus into clear prose, therefore, we lose the historical representation and analysis of which Tacitus' writing is the vehicle.