Tacitus Reviewed

ISBN-13: 9780198152583 / Angielski / Twarda / 1998 / 272 str.

A. J. Woodman

Opis

Tacitus was Rome's greatest historian, and the Annals his greatest work. This book collects A.J. Woodman's writings on Tacitus over the past twenty-five years, focusing almost exclusively on the Annals. Woodman offers new or different interpretations of some of the most famous passages in the work, and argues that, through familiarity, generations of scholars have misread significant passages, thereby gaining and perpetuating a distorted view of what Tacitus had to say, especially about Tiberius. His iconoclastic insights will have major implications for those who wish to use the Annals as a source for what happened in the first century AD.

Recenzje

A. J. Woodman has always combined meticulous Latinity with a larger sweep, and his boldest suggestions, which often have important implications for Roman history, come from precise linguistic analysis ... Woodman is a brilliant Latinist, and his arguments demand engagement ... He is usually successful in opening up new possible interpretations and nuances ... Woodman is particularly strong, too, on the darker motifs: an emperor's treatment of Rome as a foreign city, the mismatch between the colourful ecpectations of historiography and the drab imperial reality. His work is the most important contribution to the study of Tacitus' technique since Syme's in the 1950s, and the collection was a very good idea.