This is a most welcome and useful book and A. has done an impressive job of assembling a volume that serves well a range of purposes.
First, the book's shape. It contains nineteen previously published pieces on Tacitus by twenty scholars, a substantial introduction by A., an extensive list of works combining material cited in the chapters and in the introduction, and a short subject index. The two papers not originally published in English have been translated. In some cases the authors have taken the occasion to revise or provide reflection on their pieces; in others, the editor has supplied gentle but helpful updates. The book is well produced and there are only rare typographical errors.
The learned introduction does three jobs in three sections. First is a quick and interesting survey of work on Tacitus since the sixteenth century; the second attempts to capture some of the main lines of current research on Tacitus; the third offers a sequential characterisation of the contents, outlook and importance of each of the assembled chapters. Although all three sections are helpful and thoughtful, I found myself wishing that more space had been given to the second: it is an admirably fair-minded enumeration of the different kinds of things Tacitean scholars have been focusing on (spectacle, intertextuality, direct speeches, etc.) but it would perhaps have been interesting to read more about dialogue and conflict between different critical attitudes about how to read Tacitean historiography.
An Oxford Readings volume might aim to serve many and diverse purposes, and so rather than describing each of the pieces selected (many of these are in any case quite familiar to many who will consult this review and the table of contents is readily available on the website of the press) I will discuss how well some of the choices for inclusion serve those purposes.
The book contains a number of excellent and influential pieces that a scholar will be glad to have on hand under a single cover. As one indication of this, while teaching a graduate seminar on the Tiberian books of the Annals, I assigned four of the selections for reading by the whole group and directed a student individually to a fifth; over the years, I have assigned a further three in other courses. Another illustration of this point may be found in the treatments of Tacitus' minor works: in each case, A. has included the piece that I regard as the essential thing (Liebeschuetz's ‘The Theme of Liberty in the Agricola of Tacitus’, O'Gorman's ‘No Place like Rome: Identity and Difference in the Germania of Tacitus’ and the section of Bartsch's Actors in the Audience concerning the Dialogus) as well as providing a pair of papers that give productive alternative perspectives (Clarke's ‘An Island Nation: Re-reading Tacitus’ Agricola' and Goldberg's ‘Appreciating Aper: the Defence of Modernity in Tacitus’ Dialogus de oratoribus').
‘Get all the best things’ does not suffice as an organising principle for this kind of book, though, and the object of ‘coverage’ has also clearly played an important role in the editor's thinking, in a number of ways. There is a clear effort to ensure that discussions of all of the works, and major sections of those works, are represented, and there is little overlap of discussion of passages; indeed, the sequence of the first thirteen chapters largely follows the sequence by which they become relevant to particular sections of Tacitus' work. More than that, though, no one scholar appears more than once. I can easily imagine a collection of readings featuring multiple pieces by some of the authors represented here, but this is a selection that maximises the number of critics we hear from. There is much to be said for this way of doing things, and it may in fact be a norm suggested or enforced by the series. That does then put a good deal of pressure on the choice with which piece of writing to represent individual critics and their contributions to the history of interpreting Tacitus. To take one example, Sir Ronald Syme is represented by his paper ‘Obituaries in Tacitus’, which is unquestionably a classic discussion and which explores a question not addressed in any other paper included here; it also complements Ginsburg's extract ‘The Beginning of the Year in Tacitus’. But if given only one chance to give readers a sense of what makes Syme so important and so fascinating as a student of Tacitus, I might have been tempted to print the ‘Tacitus and Tiberius’ chapter from Tacitus (1958) or ‘The Political Opinions of Tacitus’ from Ten Studies in Tacitus (1970).
An appealing and not inevitable feature of the book is that it can be read as a companion to Tacitus' work. Most basically this is enabled by the sequential arrangement of discussions of Tacitus' works in chronological order that then opens up into a handful of essays that reflect on his œuvre or consider his legacy, but perhaps the best indication of the editor's intent to make the book available for this purpose is the inclusion of an extract of E. Paratore's Tacito (1951). This is a book now infrequently read and from an early point overshadowed by Syme; the translated portion printed here, after the discussions of the minor works, is given the title ‘The Agricola: Stepping Stone to History’. I was initially surprised to encounter Paratore, but this extract works extremely well itself as a ‘stepping stone’, allowing us to see the ensuing discussions of Histories and Annals as part of a story about Tacitus as a writer; its main job, it seems to me, is to make the volume something you can read through, rather than just a collection of valuable papers.
Editing such a volume seems like an enticing opportunity to make more widely available discussions that might otherwise be difficult to access. A number of significant pieces are reprinted from books that are only reliably available in a good research library. In addition to Paratore, a worthwhile contribution has been reintroduced to currency: the twinned individual readings of Histories 3.38–9 by N.P. Miller and P.V. Jones, which I had not thought about in some time but which seem to me to have high pedagogical potential as instances of clear and sensitive close readings of Tacitus.
At the end of the volume, the scope expands to Tacitus' legacy; these pieces are less likely to be familiar to students of Tacitus. Unquestionably the ugliest part of his legacy has been the excursus on the Jews in Histories 5, and we are given a translation of R. Bloch's survey of the history of reception of this excursus; that history is on the whole as nauseating as one would expect, but Bloch permits us to see writers, including Jewish writers, grappling with the excursus, and lays out a story in which National Socialism is only the last, supremely appalling and stupid chapter. Momigliano's piece, ‘Tacitus and the Tacitist Tradition’, is a brilliant reflection on Tacitus' achievement that proceeds into a survey of his influence as a political thinker; it concludes, perfectly, that ‘he makes us realize that we, too, are inside’ (p. 433). Last word is given to celebrated critic-at-large L. Trilling, who gives a short, acute and moving assessment of Tacitus' achievement as a writer.
This is a significant and valuable collection that anyone with an interest in Tacitus should be eager to have in hand.
