This congenial volume derives from a workshop on Tacitus’ shorter works organized by Olivier Devillers at Bordeaux in 2012. Thirteen chapters (seven in English, five in French, one in Italian) approach Agricola, Germania and Dialogus individually, in combination, or paired with one of the opera maiora. All are neatly written and produced, and most include interesting aperçus; the result is, if not a coherent picture of Tacitean ‘development’, a readable and sometimes provocative suite.
D. opens with a survey of the landscape, devoting a page or two each to genre, structure, sources, intertextuality, political ideology and — most importantly, in view of our title — questions of continuity and discontinuity within Tacitus’ oeuvre. The vexed dating of Dialogus is swiftly dispatched (13, n. 1) — perhaps a little too swiftly in disregarding the possibility that it postdates some or all of (our) Histories: the standard equation ‘minus = early’ may be misleading, and not only because ‘early’ is a crude term for a man well past forty. (Fortunately only one contributor talks of ‘opere giovanili’ (50).) D.'s conclusion sets the tone for the book as a whole: he observes ‘nuances, voir divergences’ (19) between op. min. and op. mai., but prefers to emphasize the integrity of a corpus in which the ethics of living (and writing) under an emperor serve as a unifying theme.
The chapters that follow are diverse in topic and approach. Of the four devoted to single texts, Victoria Pagán analyses fear in the Agricola, detecting unsettling implications for the Trajanic present as well as the Domitianic past, while José Mambwini Kivuila-Kiaku reflects on Romanization in Britain. Raphaëlle Cytermann tackles ‘Éloquence et régimes politiques’ in the Dialogus, concluding that Tacitus is a resigned admirer of the Principate. Timothy Joseph argues that Maternus’ first speech (Dial. 11–13) is notable for its linguistic and allusive audacity, and smartly interprets this as a substitute for the political boldness that both Maternus and (through him) Tacitus profess to eschew.
Among comparative readings, only Holly Haynes attempts to weave all three minora together at length: her supple essay finds them conspiring to reveal Tacitus as ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ at once, and as an author whose ‘traumatic’ experiences under Domitian define his whole output. Rhiannon Ash's chapter is also an outlier, both in privileging the two works largely marginalized and in proposing hard intertextuality within the corpus. When Julius Civilis in Histories 4 echoes phrases from Germania, she argues, Tacitus is not recycling or even ‘self-imitating’, but planting ironic ‘quotations’: Civilis has read his Germania, and read it well. Such metaliterary intent is more easily asserted than demonstrated, but the proposal is an intriguing one. Invigorating, too, is Dylan Sailor's novel pairing of Agricola and Dialogus as two works united by themes of youth and rejuvenation; his suggestive argument identifies in both pieces a middle-aged Tacitus who ‘toy[s] with the fantasy of wiping the slate clean and beginning life anew via a literary career’ (112).
Far and away the favourite combination (of course) is Agricola and Annals, occupying a full five chapters. Elizabeth Keitel's study of evidentia in the two works concludes that Tacitus’ use of the technique is essentially constant; Ellen O'Gorman sets Calgacus and Caratacus side by side, with neat remarks on the ‘fantasy’ value of barbarian speakers for the senator-historian. A second contribution by D. takes general soundings on ‘Analogies, transferts, interactions’ from Agricola to Annals, finding coherence tempered by slight points of divergence. That leaves Maria Giua and Isabelle Cogitore to state the stronger case for change. Giua's account of ‘il Tacito incompiuto di Arnaldo Momigliano’ is an engaging biography within a biography, tracing Momigliano's developing views of Tacitus as he prepared the book he never wrote. Both historians were essentially formed by their experiences of despotism; each became progressively disenchanted, Tacitus with Trajan, Momigliano with Tacitus, whose historical judgement he came to see as not only shaped, but actually distorted, by his Domitianic trauma.
Significant here, given the volume's title, is the theory of Tacitean Verdüsterung, a ‘darkening’ in his view of the present régime once routinely diagnosed (for Momigliano the shadows lengthened already in Germania), now rarely broached outright. (Syme, Tacitus (1958), 219–20, debunked it — on the basis that Tacitus saw few rays to start with.) Giua avoids committing herself, and D. himself is sceptical (29); the thought recurs, however, in Isabelle Cogitore's syncrisis of Agricola and Germanicus, where contrasts are taken to reflect a new political disillusionment by the time of Annals (161–2). It is bold geometry to trace an arc between two points, and there are plenty of variables to complicate the trajectory; nor does Cogitore note the possibility that Hadrian's accession intervened. Still, Tacitus patently did evolve across two decades or more (think only of his style; and le style, c'est …): quite how his political outlook developed over that time is a large and difficult question, but no less important for that.
If the burden of D.'s volume is to justify continued attention to the opera minora, it succeeds: novel juxtapositions and engaging responses amply prove the worth of these ‘lesser’ siblings. Inherited hierarchies remain, though: Germania stays bottom of the pile, and the sovereign polarity of minora and maiora — in which the axes of size, chronology and value are so easily collapsed into one — is inscribed into the project right from the title. It is good to be reminded what sway those handy but banal tags hold over us all.
