Widely regarded as ancient Romes greatest historian, Tacitus has shaped much of early modern and modern thought on Rome and its emperors. Substantial portions of his major historical works Histories and Annals, however, have not survived, depriving us of his account of crucial episodes and developments in Romes early imperial history. This first-of-its-kind volume seeks to fill those gaps, using a range of historical and linguistic approaches to reconstruct the missing portions of Tacitus work. The volume offers reconstructions of the fragmentary Tacitean emperors (Augustus, Caligula, Nero, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian) and of important lost episodes such as the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem and the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.
By using the concept of incompleteness as a narrative tool, Tacitus and the Incomplete provides novel insights into what Tacitus oeuvre might have been like if the lost books had survived, and also expands on recent work on counterfactual historiography, the influence of hindsight on historical writing, the use of prolepsis and other narrative techniques, and on the limitations of historiography in the imperial period.
Arvustused
The contributors to Tacitus and the Incomplete represent some of the best, most experienced, and respected current scholars of Tacitus, Roman history, and Roman historiography in the world. Together they have created a work of scholarship that manages to shed genuinely fresh light on one of the most important, widely studied Roman historians. -- Alain M. Gowing, University of Washington A novel and needed approach to this eminently familiar but also fragmentary and consistently evasive author. The essays in Tacitus and the Incomplete take us to the spaces beyondand between, and hidden withinthe surviving texts of the Histories and Annals, forwarding our understanding of the historians work and methods while also demonstrating new ways to approach incomplete texts. -- Timothy Joseph, College of the Holy Cross
About the Contributors
Introduction
Part
1. Fragmentary or Missing Portions: Reconstructing Tacitus
Kelly Shannon-Henderson, Completing Tacitus with Fragments: The Destruction
of the Jewish Temple
Salvador Bartera, Tacitus Titus
Bram ten Berge, Tacitus Domitian and Imperial (Mis)Representation
David Potter, Britannia in the Historiae and the Annales
Ellen OGorman, Quem ad finem memorabimus? The End of the Neronian Annals
Part
2. Narrative Incompleteness: Purposeful and Suggestive Omission
Holly Haynes, The Tragic Incomplete: Historical Thought in Tacitus Style
Christopher Whitton, Tacitus and Pliny on Vesuvius
Victoria Pagán, Augustus in the Annals
Panayiotis Christoforou, Relating at the Appropriate Time: Tacitus
Caligula
Coda. Early Modern Attempts at Filling the Gap
Rhiannon Ash, Mind the Gap: Saviles Bridge Between the End of Tacitus
Annals and the Start of the Histories
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index Locorum
Panayiotis Christoforou is a Marshall Research Fellow at the Pharos Foundation, a Junior Research Fellow at New College, University of Oxford, and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at Technische Universität Dresden.
Bram L. H. ten Berge is Associate Professor of Classics at Hope College. He is the author of Writing Imperial History: Tacitus from Agricola to Annales.
