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Tacitus, Agricola, c. 24.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2012
Extract
The account of the military operations of Agricola in his fifth year as governor of Britain, A.D. 81 (or possibly A.D. 82), has caused much perplexity and discussion. The account is extraordinarily brief and vague; it is contained in the first three lines of c. 24, the rest of which is occupied with Agricola's motives for his action, a short notice of Hibernia, Agricola's opinion as to the ease with which it could be conquered, and the information that he had received and detained a fugitive prince from that island (not, it is to be observed, necessarily in that particular year). The three lines run:—
Quinto expeditionum anno naue prima transgressus ignotas ad id tempus gentis crebris simul ac prosperis praeliis domuit; eamque partem Britanniae quae Hiberniam aspicit copiis instruxit.
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- Copyright ©J. B.Bury1922. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
References
page 58 note 1 It is obvious from the numerous cases of identical errors in the Vatican Mss. A and B, which are not in E (the Iesi Ms.), that there was one intermediary at least between them and E (cf. Anderson, p. xvii). But there may have been more; and two are perhaps suggested by the passage in c. 36, 1, where E furnishes one of its few valuable contributions to the text: quattuor Vatauorum cohortis. A and B omit quattuor. The assumption of two intermediaries, X and Y, would help to explain how quattuor came to be omitted. If X reproduced quattuor by iv, Y might have omitted the numeral before the first letter of Vatauorum.
page 59 note 1 E.g. Ann. i, 42, seditionem verbo uno compescuit, ‘by a single word’; xiii, 44, noctem unam, ‘just one night’; xiv, 16, nec ore uno fluens, where the position of uno makes more pointed the suggestion that the poems published under Nero's name were really the work of a syndicate.