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V. Tacitus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2016
Extract
The younger Pliny in one of his letters repeats a story which had been told to him by Tacitus (Ep. 9.23.2-3):
I have never derived more pleasure than from a recent exchange with Cornelius Tacitus. He was saying that a Roman knight had sat next to him at the last races: after various learned exchanges he had asked ‘Are you Italian or provincial?’, and Tacitus had replied ‘You know me – from your reading’. To this he had said ‘Are you Tacitus or Pliny?’
Engaging though it is to visualize the seemingly austere historian as a racing devotee, Pliny’s delight at the knight’s uncertainty was perhaps not reciprocated by Tacitus. Nevertheless Pliny elsewhere makes out that the two authors were fellow spirits and the best of friends (Ep. 7.20.4), and it is from references in Pliny’s correspondence that we know the period during which Tacitus was writing his Histories.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1997