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Can You Trust Tacitus?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

K. Wellesley
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Extract

In November or December 1528 a citizen of Lyon was digging the foundations for a house on the northern outskirts of the town. In so doing he turned up the bronze tablet known to us as the Claudian Tablet. This document, copied from the Acta Senatus and displayed in the federal district at Lugudunum, is a verbatim report of the speech pronounced by Claudius in the Senate in a.d. 48 in favour of the admission to that body of certain Gallic chieftains. Forty-one years after its discovery a historian first placed it alongside the literary version of this same speech which we find in the Annals of Tacitus (xi. 24), and we have not yet exhausted the lessons which this vital juxtaposition can offer us. It is not very often that we are able to look over the shoulder of an ancient writer and see how he wields paste and scissors and box of paints. It is therefore with anticipation and relief that we turn to an undeniably authentic document known, in its original version, to Tacitus, and try to measure the historian's fidelity in using it.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , February 1954, pp. 13 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1954

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