W.'s book is organised around a striking juxtaposition: Tacitus’ narrative technique is analysed through a series of comparisons with visual techniques used in the Classical Hollywood cinema of 1917–1960. Alongside these cinematic comparisons, four of the five chapters adduce Roman visual artworks as points of comparison. W.'s rationale for his approach is that visual techniques in cinema are well suited to Tacitus’ ‘visual narrative’ and that modern readers of Tacitus may find Hollywood cinema a recognisable point of departure for understanding Tacitus’ prose technique. The strength of the book is primarily in the latter of these contentions, as W. draws a number of parallels that could provide valuable models for introducing readers to Tacitus’ rhetoric.
The idea that Tacitus’ prose has qualities of vividness that virtually bring a scene before readers’ eyes, in other words, that Tacitus is a master of what is variously referred to as enargeia / evidentia (or other synonyms) is of course well established. W.'s particular contribution is to use specific cinematic techniques as ways to reflect on Tacitus’ narrative. Nevertheless, the volume is concerned also with comparisons drawn from Roman wall painting and sculptural relief. While W. offers some ingenious readings, he does little to place his work in the very long tradition of reading Tacitus as, virtually, a writer of paintings. On this note, W. does cite R. Mellor, Tacitus (1993), who mentions Racine's and Napoleon's appraisals of Tacitus as a ‘painter’ (see also Mellor, The Annals of Tacitus [2011]). Nevertheless, readers of this volume would not come away with an impression of just how pervasive such a response to Tacitus has been over a period of centuries. To note one monograph in particular that is not cited, but which fills out that history, U. Rademacher, Die Bildkunst des Tacitus (1975), offers a review of scholarship reaching back to the Tacitism of the seventeenth century and proposes a typology of Tacitean ‘pictures’, identified by a range of linguistic features. More broadly, Tacitean Visual Narrative sometimes resorts to arguing against false premises, when contextualising arguments against earlier scholarship would have helped to make the case better, for example, in close succession: p. 149, on Annals 2.41.3 (Germanicus’ triumph), states, ‘Commentators have paid scant attention to the dramatic change in tone from jubilation to one of impending disaster’: this dynamic, central to the cited excerpt, cannot be said to have been overlooked by commentators (cf. B. Walker, The Annals of Tacitus [1952], p. 119). On p. 152, in regard to Livilla's affair with her doctor Eudemus and procurement of poison for her husband Drusus, it is remarked, ‘That even Pliny was familiar with this minute fact … suggests that the story would have been well-known to Tacitus’ second-century readers’: here it is not clear what is meant by ‘even Pliny’ in reference to the tireless collector of facts, nor does it seem obvious to identify a story relating to murder in the house of the Caesars as a minute detail. Elsewhere, ‘straight third-person narrative’ is adduced as a foil to show, by contrast, the sophistication of Tacitus’ language (p. 50), though it is not clear why unadorned third-person narrative is a useful point of comparison for a writer who worked in the context of imperial Roman rhetorical culture.
The book is divided into two parts: ‘Lens and Voice’ and ‘Transition and Connection’. Part 1 contains the chapters (1) ‘Focalizing Empire’, (2) ‘Vox Caesaris, Vox Taciti: Imperial Alignment’ and (3) ‘The Directed Gaze and the Construction of Meaning’. Part 2 contains (4) ‘Shadows over Rome: Temporal Suggestion’ and (5) ‘Eloquent Collisions: the Quick-Cut’. Perhaps for readers already familiar with Tacitus, the discussion of focalisation and speech representation in Chapters 1 and 2 will not offer significantly different insights from established approaches based on rhetorical analysis, though W. suggests a range of analogies and parallels from cinema that effectively communicate the workings of Tacitus’ prose in these respects. Certainly asking the questions ‘who sees?’ (Chapter 1) and ‘who speaks?’ (Chapter 2) is a rewarding approach to Tacitean narrative. For English speakers, Latin oratio obliqua offers a range of effects that can be difficult to parallel; W.'s suggestion of considering it in terms of camera shots (p. 57) is an interesting way to think around this question. In Chapter 2 W. suggests that Tacitus’ authorial voice becomes aligned with the character of the emperors Tiberius and Claudius. It would have been good to see R. Syme, Tacitus (1958), vol. 2, pp. 703–10 credited with the argument that the antiquarian digressions of the Claudian Annals are derived from the emperor's own speeches. In a chapter so focused on questions of tone and voice a little more support was needed for some of the assertions that were made, for instance the strongly worded judgements of some of the digressions (e.g. ‘tedious in the extreme’, p. 88; the same page also seems to attribute a statement in the digression directly to Claudius, which pushes the case too far). W.'s discussion of a Pompeian fresco of Narcissus offers a nice play with the directed gaze in Chapter 3. The headline question, ‘what are we made to see?’, is also eminently suitable for interrogating the Annals, though the assertion that Tacitus ‘often controls [our gaze] to a greater degree than do other historians’ needed backing up. Chapter 4, on foreshadowing and backshadowing, is mostly concerned with the sense of repetition within the Julio-Claudian dynasty, a sense reinforced by names that recur across the generations. The most successful discussion here is in relation to Germanicus and Caecina in the battles against Arminius in Annals 1 and 2, where W. works through the question of whether characters are trapped by memories of the past or striving to break free from them. Chapter 5 on the ‘quick-cut’ offers the most novel application of film terminology to Tacitus’ narrative. W. considers the implications of Tacitus’ abrupt juxtapositions, primarily on the episodic level, but with a nod to Tacitean syntax (p. 182, though the ablative absolute is treated here rather briefly), and proposes a comparison with Trajan's column, in which abrupt and contrasting scene changes raise a variety of possibilities for viewers to construct narrative connections. W.'s interpretative approach is appealing and offers a helpful way to think about the effects of juxtaposition.
Sometimes the Hollywood model does not quite match the material. Recourse to the language of protagonists and villains is hard to reconcile with Tacitus’ characterisation, which cannot so easily be cast in light of a good/bad dichotomy (e.g. the remarks on ‘positive characters such as Germanicus and Drusus the Younger’, p. 147). There are, unfortunately, a fair few typographical errors.
The book is most appealing for some striking choices of imagery and phrasing taken from cinema that seem well suited to understanding some of the passages at hand. The remark that Nero's attempted assassination of Agrippina ends up ‘on rails’ towards a grim end was a memorable turn of phrase. Nevertheless, W.'s sense of relish in pursuing the twists and turns of Tacitean narrative was palpable, and in this regard, as well as some fresh approaches, especially in Part 2, the book offers good ideas for how to talk about Tacitus’ rhetoric in the twenty-first century.
