Writing and Empire in Tacitus by Dylan Sailor

194 PHOENIX evidence that it was ever undertaken. The Pomponia whom Quintus married was Atticus’ sister, not his daughter (160), who in fact married Agrippa. The estimable Caecilia of Pro Sexto Rosico was not the future wife of the consul of 79 (426, but cf. T. P. Wiseman, CQ n.s. 21 [1971] 182). Lintott has not been well served by his press: typos, mostly minor, are abundant. A paperback version, for use in university courses, is much to be desired. All Roman historians will want to consult this book—frequently. Victoria University of Wellington W. Jeffrey Tatum Writing and Empire in Tacitus. By Dylan Sailor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2008. Pp. xii, 321. A big title for a big book: Sailor stakes his claim to a place in the first rank of Tacitean scholarship, tackling head-on the great conundrum: how to reconcile Tacitus the successful careerist with Tacitus the embittered critic of the principate? Traversing the oeuvre from Agricola’s first words to Annals’ last, he proposes a stimulating thesis, supported by elegant, subtle, and novel readings of some of the most intensely scrutinized passages in this most elusive of authors. The book’s self-professedly “breathtaking” claim is that Tacitus’ paraded anxieties about the dangers of writing history and the threat of censorship are a deliberate and misleading construct. He had no reason to fear a hostile reception from the principate: the shadows in his text are better read as an assertion of his autonomy. Other senators took a more precipitous route to martyrdom; for Tacitus, it is his literary output which attempts to prove him—despite his political career—no creature of the regime. After an opening gesture with the cursus inscription, Chapter One gets straight to the issue of reconciling this “real” Tacitus with the “Tacitus” of the text, and the tricky choice between martyrdom and obsequium. How to escape the charge of being compromised by the regime, when “Stoic martyrs” and fashionable exitus literature made the best route all too obvious? Whatever Trajan’s own interests in literature and/or censorship,1 his status qua princeps makes him a notional source of pressure to which Tacitus must parade his resistance. With daring spin, Tacitus brings the martyrs down a peg or two by reframing their deaths as servilis patientia (Ann. 16.16), while making space for his own historiographical project as an alternative path to the glory of regime-opposition. The second chapter explores Agricola in a decoction of Sailor’s own début.2 A brilliant exposition of the proem and its difficult temporal ambiguities finds Tacitus both praising the new regime and creating a space for his own literary intervention in an élite suffering the after-effects of slavery. There follow readings of Agricola’s early life and career, a world of gloria unimpeded by an emperor’s interference; the ethnography and its symbiosis of military and literary conquest; and Agricola’s unhappy end in Rome, including a finely balanced judgment on his “suspicious” death. Chapter Three puts Histories 1.1 under intense and sustained scrutiny. The key-word for Sailor is dominantes, defining historians, like all imperial subjects, as slaves to their 1 S. Fein, Die Beziehungen der Kaiser Trajan und Hadrian zu den litterati (Stuttgart 1994) deserves mention here. 2 D. Sailor, “Becoming Tacitus: Significance and Inconsequentiality in the Prologue of Agricola,” Cl. Ant. 23 (2004) 139–177. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 195 emperor. In damning all history after Actium, Tacitus sets the bar for his own success almost impossibly high: a variant, then, on other readers’ recognition that all the talk of libertas lost amounts to a mighty claim to libertas on Tacitus’ own part (and, one might add, reflected praise of Trajan for presiding over it). A superb excursus on 2.101 (165– 171) reveals Tacitus’ Flavian predecessors stained by the narrative of infidelity within the text. One could similarly compare the lost veritas of historians in 1.1 with the fawning mob’s lack of veritas at 1.32 (the sole reappearance of the word in Histories); and there is more to be said about the “slavery” motif, not least on the framing responsion of dominantes...

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