Tacitus’ History of Politically Effective Speech

Tacitus’ History of Politically Effective Speech
Author: Ellen O'Gorman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2020-09-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350095508

This study examines how Tacitus' representation of speech determines the roles of speakers within the political sphere, and explores the possibility of politically effective speech in the principate. It argues against the traditional scholarly view that Tacitus refuses to offer a positive view of senatorial power in the principate: while senators did experience limitations and changes to what they could achieve in public life, they could aim to create a dimension of political power and efficacy through speeches intended to create and sustain relations which would in turn determine the roles played by both senators or an emperor. Ellen O'Gorman traces Tacitus' own charting of these modes of speech, from flattery and aggression to advice, praise, and censure, and explores how different modes of speech in his histories should be evaluated: not according to how they conform to pre-existing political stances, but as they engender different political worlds in the present and future. The volume goes beyond literary analysis of the texts to create a new framework for studying this essential period in ancient Roman history, much in the same way that Tacitus himself recasts the political authority and presence of senatorial speakers as narrative and historical analysis.

Tacitus' History of Politically Effective Speech

Tacitus' History of Politically Effective Speech
Author: Ellen O'Gorman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2020
Genre: Communication
ISBN: 9781350095526

"This study examines how Tacitus' representation of speech determines the roles of speakers within the political sphere, and explores the possibility of politically effective speech in the principate. It argues against the traditional scholarly view that Tacitus refuses to offer a positive view of senatorial power in the principate: while senators did experience limitations and changes to what they could achieve in public life, they could aim to create a dimension of political power and efficacy through speeches intended to create and sustain relations which would in turn determine the roles played by both senators or an emperor. Ellen O'Gorman traces Tacitus' own charting of these modes of speech, from flattery and aggression to advice, praise, and censure, and explores how different modes of speech in his histories should be evaluated: not according to how they conform to pre-existing political stances, but as they engender different political worlds in the present and future. The volume goes beyond literary analysis of the texts to create a new framework for studying this essential period in ancient Roman history, much in the same way that Tacitus himself recasts the political authority and presence of senatorial speakers as narrative and historical analysis"--

Tacitus’ History of Politically Effective Speech

Tacitus’ History of Politically Effective Speech
Author: Ellen O'Gorman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2020-09-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350095516

This study examines how Tacitus' representation of speech determines the roles of speakers within the political sphere, and explores the possibility of politically effective speech in the principate. It argues against the traditional scholarly view that Tacitus refuses to offer a positive view of senatorial power in the principate: while senators did experience limitations and changes to what they could achieve in public life, they could aim to create a dimension of political power and efficacy through speeches intended to create and sustain relations which would in turn determine the roles played by both senators or an emperor. Ellen O'Gorman traces Tacitus' own charting of these modes of speech, from flattery and aggression to advice, praise, and censure, and explores how different modes of speech in his histories should be evaluated: not according to how they conform to pre-existing political stances, but as they engender different political worlds in the present and future. The volume goes beyond literary analysis of the texts to create a new framework for studying this essential period in ancient Roman history, much in the same way that Tacitus himself recasts the political authority and presence of senatorial speakers as narrative and historical analysis.

Writing Imperial History

Writing Imperial History
Author: Bram ten Berge
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2023-08-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472221248

The late first- and early second-century Roman senator and historian Cornelius Tacitus, whom Edward Gibbon described as “the first of the historians who applied the science of philosophy to the study of facts,” shaped the development of the modern understanding of history as a crucial vehicle for social analysis. The breadth of his thinking is fully revealed only through analysis of how the political, geographical, and rhetorical theories expounded in his early works influenced his later narrative of the evolution of the Roman monarchy. Tacitus, who was one of the oratorical luminaries of his time, produced a collection of works widely recognized as offering the most authoritative account of Rome’s early imperial history. His oeuvre traditionally is divided into the so-called minor and major works. Writing Imperial History offers the first comprehensive analysis of Tacitus’ five texts and their interconnections and serves to confront longstanding assumptions that have led to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and development of his oeuvre and historical thinking. Tracing many of the enduring themes and concerns that Tacitus explores across his works, the book shows how the vision articulated in his earlier texts persists in his later ones and how he used the former as sources for the latter.

Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography

Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2021-01-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004445080

Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography contains 11 articles on how the Ancient Roman historians used, and manipulated, the past. Key themes include the impact of autocracy, the nature of intertextuality, and the frontiers between history and other genres.

Representing the Dynasty in Flavian Rome

Representing the Dynasty in Flavian Rome
Author: Jonathan Davies
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2023-07-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 019888303X

Representing the Dynasty in Flavian Rome investigates the problem of contemporary historiography and regime representation in Flavian Rome through a close study of a text not usually read for such purposes but which has obvious promise for a study of this theme, the Jewish War of Flavius Josephus. Having surveyed the evolution of our conception of Josephus' relationship to Flavian power, taken a broad account of issues of political expression and regime representation in Flavian Rome outside Josephus and examined questions relating to the structure and date of the work, Davies provides a series of thematically-focused readings of the three senior members of the Flavian family, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, as represented by their contemporary and client Josephus. Key topics explored include the level of independence of Josephus' vision, his work's relationship to how the regime is depicted in other contemporary sources, how Josephus makes the Flavians serve his own agenda (which is distinct from the heavy focus of much previous scholarship on how Josephus served their agenda), and the viability and usefulness of certain types of reading practices relating to figured critique which have recently become influential in Josephan scholarship. The book offers a new approach to Josephus' relationship to the Flavian Dynasty and sheds new light on contemporary historiography and political expression in the Early Principate.

Unspoken Rome

Unspoken Rome
Author: Tom Geue
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2021-09-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108915884

Latin literature is a hotbed of holes and erasures. Its sensitivity to politics leaves it ripe for repression of all sorts of names, places and historical events, while its dense allusivity appears to hide interpretative clues in a network of texts that only the reader's consciousness can make present. This volume showcases innovative approaches to the field of Latin literature, all of which are refracted through this prism of absence, which functions as a fundamental generative force both for the hermeneutics and the ongoing literary aftermath of these texts. Reviewing and working with various influential approaches to textual absence, the contributors to Unspoken Rome treat these texts as silent types, listening out for what they do not say, and how they do not speak, whilst also tracing the ill-defined borders within which scholars and modern authors are legitimized to fill in the silences around which they are built.

Libertas and Res Publica in the Roman Republic

Libertas and Res Publica in the Roman Republic
Author: Catalina Balmaceda
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2020-09-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004441697

Libertas and Res Publica examines two key concepts of Western political thinking: freedom and republic. Contributors address important new questions on the principles of, and essential connection between res publica and libertas in Roman thought and Republican history.