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Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2016
Extract
‘It has rightly been felt that in the words of Tacitus the authentic voice of ancient Rome is heard for the last time.’ So E. Fraenkel wrote in 1932, and nothing we have learned since about the literature and thought of later antiquity detracts at all from the truth of his words. The age of Trajan marks not the beginning, but the end of an epoch. Then, as scarcely thereafter, specifically Roman ideas of dignitas, grauitas, and uirtus, and that specifically Roman sense of continuity and tradition, still counted for much and conditioned both actions and attitudes. Tacitus speaks both for his own time and for the past.
The central conflict between Tacitus’ claim to write dispassionately and the manner in which he does in fact write can never be reconciled or removed. It is no less real because it partly arises from our acceptance of standards of historical accuracy quite unfamiliar to Tacitus.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1970
References
page no 43 note 1 Neue Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Jugendbildung viii (1932), 218 = Kleine Beiträge 2. 309.
page no 43 note 2 See Pöschl, V., ‘Der Historiker Tacitus’, Die Welt ah Geschichte xxii (1962), 1–10 Google Scholar = Tacitus (Wege der Forschung xcvii, Darmstadt, 1969), 161-76.