Over the past 40 years W. has challenged and ultimately conquered the literary study of Latin historiography. Beginning with his two volumes of commentaries on Velleius Paterculus and then most comprehensively in his Rhetoric in Classical Historiography, W. has insistently argued that ancient historiography is above all a literary genre, closer in aims and methods to epic poetry than to its modern namesake. Not only were factual accuracy and actual geographical detail not concerns of the ancient historians; they are categories that did not exist in the ancient world as they have for the last several hundred years. W. did not invent this line of interpretation, but he is the scholar who has most carefully and broadly provided the underpinning for it. Whereas originally he presented his arguments as challenging the prevailing orthodoxy, in his new commentary on the Agricola, a biography with significant historiographical features, he acknowledges that the tables have turned and his interpretation now dominates the field (pp. 29–30). W.'s pre-eminence within the study of Latin historiography (which is not especially welcome to ancient historians) is in no small part the result of his productivity. The commentary on the Agricola is his second in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series, his third on Tacitus and his fifth commentary on Roman historical works overall. His translations of Tacitus’ Annals and all Sallust's extant writings, as well as the Cambridge Companion to Tacitus, which he edited, have further cemented the predominance of W.'s interpretation of Roman historiography. Undergraduate and graduate students in the English-speaking world will first read Latin historical prose with W.'s guidance.
The commentary on the Agricola is not written entirely by W., C. Kraus provides the notes for Chapters 10–12 and is credited with offering a few unspecified notes here and there. Nevertheless, all the hallmarks of W.'s approach and interests are on display. First and most importantly, he puts his deep knowledge of Latin to use to help his readers understand Tacitus’ language. There is ample discussion of grammatical structures, complicated expressions, rhetorical figures and prose rhythm. The commentary succeeds in leading its readers through the grammar and language of the Agricola. W. provides two further arguments to justify publishing a new commentary on the Agricola even though many of his readers will already be familiar with Ogilvie and Richmond's excellent edition from 1967. First, a truly new English-language edition of the Agricola has not been produced since the end of the nineteenth century. The commentary of Ogilvie and Richmond is ultimately a revision of J.G.C. Anderson's 1922 edition, itself a revision of Furneaux's edition of 1898. W.'s second reason for writing the commentary concerns the language of Tacitus. While Ogilvie and Richmond certainly expend significant energy on Tacitus’ style, W. far more exhaustively investigates the learned and thoroughly literary texture of the language of the Agricola. W. finds allusions not just to predictable earlier authors such as Sallust, Livy, Cicero and Virgil, but also to authors of both prose and verse closer in time to Tacitus such as Seneca, Lucan, Silius Italicus and Statius. The number of parallels W. offers and his discussion of them sometimes makes reading the commentary a difficult task. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students reading the Agricola for the first time will certainly not need the depth of W.'s discussions and may well end up skimming significant portions of his notes. W. anticipates this criticism in his preface (p. vii) but defends his inclusion of so many parallels as a means to correct misconceptions about Tacitus’ engagement with Latin literature that readers may draw from H. Heubner's 1984 commentary. For the scholar digging deeply into Tacitus’ language, W.'s commentary will be a valuable resource.
As readers familiar with his other work will expect, W. depreciates the actual historical value of the Agricola. He specifically notes that he pays significantly less attention to the archaeology of Roman Britain than Ogilvie and Richmond did. W. argues that the work is principally a rhetorical encomium of Agricola, and therefore capturing Agricola's deeds accurately was not of particular interest to Tacitus – though Kraus notes at one point that this approach does not preclude Tacitus from writing factually (p. 146). W. replaces an examination of the details of Agricola's governorship and methods of command with frequent references to the qualities of an ideal general and the generic expectations of encomium as they were laid out by Menander Rhetor in the late-third century a.d. Thus, the many details Tacitus provides about the style of leadership Agricola displayed, his affability towards the well-behaved men under his command, his trait of personally selecting sites for camp and his careful method of always maintaining supply-lines are not, in the commentary's view, necessarily a reflection of Agricola's actual command.
In a similar vein, W. also contends that the Caledonian chieftain Calgacus’ famous speech (Agr. 30–2) before the battle of Mons Graupius, the climax of the biography, is not a meaningful challenge to Agricola's accomplishments and to Roman imperialism more generally. W. brings two principles to bear on the question of the significance of the speech. First, he notes that its criticism of Agricola does not harmonise with a few explicit statements in the text. For instance, early on Tacitus characterises the biography as an act of pietas (Agr. 3.3) and he ends it with a lengthy panegyric to Agricola (Agr. 44–6). W. concludes that Tacitus would not subvert this praise with sympathy for Calgacus’ criticism of Roman imperialism. Second, W. notes that the Romans considered military conquest their mission, as Anchises famously sets out at Aeneid 6.851–3, and were comfortable with the mass slaughter that such conquest required. Nevertheless, while he rejects the premise that Tacitus sympathises with Calgacus, he also acknowledges that some of the ‘anti-Roman sentiments in these speeches resonate with criticisms, especially of Roman social and imperialist policies’ (p. 21), a position with which I entirely agree. Tacitus elsewhere expresses disapproval of the brutal conduct of some administrators of Roman rule (e.g. Hist. 4.14 and Ann. 14.31), the very thing that Calgacus is warning the Caledonians and other British tribes that they will have to face if conquered. W.'s presentation of the issue is too limited, however. The question is not whether Agricola's accomplishments themselves are evil; he is patently an exemplary figure who demonstrates traditional virtus. But the text raises larger questions related both to the changed circumstances of Roman imperialism under the principate, when emperors take libertas from the very Roman citizens who traditionally take it from others, and to the nature of Roman imperialism at this stage in Roman history. The empire is vast and many, many governors, administrators and tax collectors do not perform their jobs scrupulously. Seen in this way, Tacitus’ encomium of Agricola becomes far more interesting. Has the principate created a situation in which even an individual acting virtuously contributes to something that in the end is not virtuous?
In his notes on the opening words of the Agricola, W. detects allusions to Cato and Xenophon, two authors who affirmed the belief that farmers make the best soldiers. This is classic W. His careful attention to literary references provides a set of allusions to famed advocates of farming as the best source of soldiers at the outset of the biography of a military man named Farmer. He finds agricultural metaphors throughout. While not all readers will accept W.'s interpretative premises, his notes demonstrate an exemplary way of reading Tacitus. He scrutinises each word and phrase of the text to reveal the depth of Tacitus’ language and engagement with classical literature. Under his guidance, the new generation of students encountering the Agricola for the first time in Latin will be in good hands.
