Bibliography
| Title: Principate and Civil War in the Annals of Tacitus Secondary Title: American Journal of Philology Volume: 105 Pages: 306-325 Type: Journal Article Year: 1984 Abstract: "Tacitus presents the principate as in complete continuity with the civil wars of the late Republic, which it ostensibly ended.
-- Applies motifs of urbs capta to reigns of Tiberius and Nero, which go back to invective of late Republic (Cicero and Sallust);
-- T.'s accounts of the senators' motives, whether they oppose the regime, support it, or profit from delation, reveal the same values that provoke civil war in the first place.
306 -- "His accounts of maiestas trials also reveal a breakdown of morality and misuse of law at Rome under pax et princeps very like that found in Thucydides' and Sallust's classic descriptions of stasis".
-- Ironies: the movement from civil war to pax is really a perpatuation of civil war, war on the city by the princeps, who treats it as urbs capta;
-- Augustus, Tiberius, Sejanus eagerly prosecute those accused of sedition as a danger to the state, whereas it is their very prosecutions that create the sedition and the danger to the state;
-- civil war is really like external war in its effects on the city;
I SAY: for Josephus, the ostensible foreign war was in fact a civil war". - S.M. |