Writing and Empire in Tacitus (review)

Over the past decade, scholars such as Ash, O'Gorman, and Haynes have taken up a cause long championed by Woodman, insisting that we must treat Tacitus' works as literary productions before we can use them as historical documents. By remaining attentive to issues of voice, allusion, and narrative presentation, these scholars have shown how Tacitus is worthy of the kinds of intense readings we might perform on any ancient author writing in poetry or prose; in many ways they do for Tacitus what Miles, Jaeger, and Feldherr did for Livy in the 1990s. Dylan Sailor's Writing and Empire in Tacitus continues the trend. The book is a study of Tacitus' aims in writing his histories, rather than a historical study of the events he chooses to describe; according to Sailor, Tacitus believes that his historical works compete not only with other written works of history but also with other cultural and political modes of representation, above all those emanating from the princeps himself. As such, the study is especially concerned with those moments when Tacitus is most explicit about his aims as a historian and the purpose of historiography more broadly, such as the prefaces to the Agricola and to the Histories and the excursus preceding the trial of Cremutius Cordus (Ann. 4.32–33). But the book also ranges far beyond these self-reflexive moments, and one of the many merits of the study is Sailor's ability to find evidence for Tacitus' program in unexpected places.

After a brief introduction surveying the book's organization and argument, Sailor's first chapter ("Autonomy, Authority, and Representing the Past under the Principate") acts as an extended overture of the book's main themes. The chapter examines Tacitus' decision to write history in the broader context of the crisis of elite autonomy and authority under the Principate. The consolidation of power inverts older systems of representation and meaning: even the consulship, the pinnacle of traditional power, now becomes the ultimate sign of being the emperor's lackey. Historians, too, are at constant risk of being seen as endorsers or promoters of the emperor's version of history—at risk, therefore, of losing authorship of their own work, according to Sailor. To be an independent author during the Principate one must therefore assert one's distance from the princeps himself; indeed, even the assertion of independence can come across as currying favor, as anyone who has read Pliny's Panegyricus is well aware. Hence the esteem among the senatorial elite for the political martyrs whose death is the ultimate proof of their independence. Tacitus on the other hand served as consul under Nerva and did rather well under the Flavians, too, even under the hated Domitian. Sailor's contribution is not to read this apparent contradiction as simple hypocrisy on the author's part but rather as the ultimate claim to independence. Martyrs, by killing themselves rather than submitting to the whims of a particular princeps, legitimate the system if only by contrast, since the meaning of their actions still depends upon the existence of the princeps. Tacitus, on the other hand, attempts to transcend the false dichotomy of obsequiousness or defiance, and his historical writing "has to perform alone the hard task of proving a degree of alienation that is otherwise quite imperceptible in the life he led" (49). The remainder of Sailor's book sets out to explore how Tacitus' historical works establish this sense of isolation.

In his second chapter ("Agricola and the Crisis of Representation"), Sailor reads the biography as Tacitus' attempt to outdo Domitian in a contest of representation. The imperial family's monopoly on glory was not only an assertion of power but also an assertion of meaning: under tyrants such as Domitian, deeds that would traditionally merit glory attract negative or invidious attention from the emperor. By emphasizing the topsy-turvy system of representation that applied during Domitian's reign in particular, Tacitus clears space for his own work, which can...