In several smaller essays written in the late 1760s and the 1770s, Herder discussed German political history. In How the German Bishops Became an Estate of the Realm Herder spelled out his views on the ancient German constitution and the history of the Holy Roman Empire, whilst On the Influence of Governments on the Sciences, and of the Sciences on Governments returned to the political history of wider Europe, including Germany. This chapter discusses these essays as Herder’s contributions to the debate on German national spirit, highlighting the relevance of Möser’s History of Osnabrück to the development of Herder’s views on German history. I argue that Herder sought to understand the causal origins of modern European states, including, most importantly, the Holy Roman Empire. Like Möser, Herder was fascinated by Tacitus’s account of ancient German freedom, while being very critical of the Frankish polity. Both also rejected Montesquieu’s history of modern monarchy. Although Herder acknowledged some advantages of the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, he was not a Reichspatriot. The 1779 essay restated Herder’s fundamental commitment to modern liberty and trade, whilst arguing that German imperial government was badly in need of reforms.

This chapter explores ideals and practices of turning classical histories into political lessons for the present, focusing on a number of individuals who translated the histories of Tacitus into Spanish, while they also served their king as soldiers, counsellors and informants. All testified about the practical value of Tacitus in the present, as they struggled with the internal contradictions and the fact that their author had produced the texts many centuries ago, in a different, pagan world. The counsel of historical experience was tirelessly advocated in reason-of-state discourse, and this chapter shows that the call was answered in practice as the Tacitists in various capacities engaged with the problem of the Dutch Revolt. The chapter argues that although they were well aware of change, they had no scruples in using anachronism and historical analogies, or using the ancients as rhetorical tools to express their ideas and further their political aims. Memorials and pieces of counsel were written from the perspective of events from recent history and could effortlessly be placed alongside Tacitean phrases. Yet the ancient past was also a safe space that could be used to criticize present policies or express warnings, without infringing on the domain of Providence.

Chapter 7 examines a Plutarch translation entitled Recueil d’avis et conseils sur les affaires d’estat tire des vies de Plutarque by Du Haillan (c. 1535–1610) and strands of Montaigne’s (1533–1592) political thought related to his conception of the public sphere as developed in The Essays. I also briefly examine the translations of Plutarch effected by Montaigne’s close friend Etienne de la Boétie.

The chapter shows how Jacob Grimm’s idea of culturally autonomous peoples was troubled by the intimate interactions that he uncovered in his historical scholarship on ancient German tribes. Seeking to unify his knowledge of diachronic linguistics and ethnic history in a final work, Grimm paid special attention to the one thing that had survived of the myriad tribes – their names – but also conceded that names were always generated by outside observers; names, Grimm admitted, were never chosen, always given. When Jacob Grimm explored the prehistory of Germany, then, he found not proud acts of autonomous self-naming by nations, but only boundary-defining encounters between groups and peoples. Grimm suspected that such cultural encounters had first become visible within the structures of literate imperial civilizations that housed multiple peoples and languages. Indeed, the practice of philology itself with its comparative grasp of several languages and cultures was an imperial phenomenon. The nationalist philologist, Jacob Grimm’s own writings ironically suggested, was the inheritor of the transnational and polyethnic empire rather than self-enclosed Germanic tribe.

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.

Tacitus’ Germania is notable for its absences: lacking a preface and programmatic statements, and being the only ethnographic monograph to have survived from Greco-Roman antiquity, readers have often leapt to fill in its perceived blanks. This chapter aims at redressing the effects of overdetermined readings by interpreting the text’s absences as significant in their own right.

The chapter explores the styles of self-promotion available to elite Romans, ranging from frugal self-restraint and material sobriety to prodigial acts of civic generosity, and analyses the debates over and constraints on luxury and encouragement of frugality with respect to building projects and expensive heirlooms, not least those made of silver, from the late republic to the early imperial period. The chronologically and thematically wide-ranging investigation foregrounds in particular the enhanced social mobility that civil war and autocracy introduced into Roman society, including a discussion of why provincial newcomers such as Tacitus and Pliny the Younger affected particular enthusiasm for frugality and disapproved of luxury, as a way of positioning themselves as new arrivals within the ruling class of Rome.

This brief paper begins by asking whether examples of hexameter rhythm in Sallust and Livy, two of Tacitus’ principal models, are allusions to, or even quotations from, Ennius’ Annals. After a brief survey of the rhythmical sequences in Tacitus’ Annals, the main focus of the paper is his obituary of Piso the Pontifex (Ann. 6.10.3), which, it is argued, constitutes an allusion to one of Ennius’ most famous fragments, the so-called “good companion” passage. I failed to mention Ennius in my recent commentary on Book 6, but the case for Ennian influence seems stronger than the parallels adduced by Skutsch and has interesting implications for the workings of allusion.

In this chapter I provide a sketch of rhetorical performance practice as it emerges from the rich, complex, and contradictory texts of the Greco-Roman world. A visual conception of ancient rhetoric: John Bulwer’s representation of rhetorical stage acting, which contrasts the stage actor with the dialectician. Greece and Rome: Greece developed the art of rhetoric, accepting the centrality of acting or ‘hypokrisis’, while Roman orators placed more emphasis on the constant persona of the orator. Cicero and Roscius: a case study of how Cicero used performance skills to defend the celebrity stage actor in court. Cicero’s ‘De Oratore’: Cicero’s masterpiece, couched as a dialogue to make it clear there is no single set of rules for being an orator. Quintilian: who codified Cicero, and made rhetoric the foundation of an educational programme. Tacitus: who dissented from Quintilian’s political conformism. Augustine: who tried to adapt his rhetorical training to serve the needs of Christian preaching, anticipating the dilemmas faced by rhetorical performers in the Renaissance.

Epistles 1.20 is an unorthodox plea for length in court speeches. It is also one of the two salient peaks of ‘Quintilian in Brief’, a whole letter modelled, selectively and unpredictably, on Quintilian’s chapter on style (Institutio 12.10). This chapter reads it in detail, for argument and for intertexture, and shows that it is an imitative tableau of unusual complexity, focused on Institutio 12.10 but ranging widely across Quintilian’s work and looking through ‘windows’ to Cicero’s Brutus and Orator. The letter – addressed to Tacitus – also engages obliquely but closely with his Dialogus de oratoribus; Pliny’s anonymous interlocutor, I suggest, is a version of Tacitus’ Aper. A postscript on Epistles 1.21 reads this short note about buying slaves as a wry miniaturisation of Institutio 11, and sharp intertextual annotation of Epistles 1.20 and its virtuosic imitatio.

This last long chapter sharpens the profile of ‘Quintilian in Brief’, and widens the gaze, through syncrisis. I first compare Quintilian’s place in Epistles 1–9 with that in ‘Epistles 10’ (non-existent) and the Panegyricus (limited), and draw some inferences about the different nature, composition and audience of Pliny’s three works. The chapter then devotes itself to Pliny’s contemporary Tacitus. I consider briefly how the Annals imitates the Epistles (and note that Juvenal does too). The focus here, though, is on his Dialogus, both as another punctilious response to the Institutio and as an important ingredient of Pliny’s collection. I propose that the Dialogus antedates the Epistles; show that Pliny imitates it frequently, complicatedly and wittily; and argue that the whole Tacitus cycle is bound into a specifically Quintilianic project. The chapter includes close readings of the Dialogus, Annals 4.32, 4.61 and 15.67 and Epistles 3.20, 4.11, 4.25, 6.21, 7.20, 9.2, 9.10, 9.23 and 9.27; it ends where Chapter 1 began, in Epistles 1.6.