An examination of how Tacitus responds to representations of Nero's commander, Corbulo, probably idealised posthumously as a hero under the Flavian dynasty. Since Tacitus knew that his readers would have certain expectations about Corbulo's presentation in the Annals, he creates instead a problematised portrait of the general, which highlights the perpetual tensions in the imperial power structure between centre and periphery (and between image and reality). The paper suggests, using comparisons drawn primarily from Plutarch, that Tacitus shows Corbulo repeatedly replaying significant moments from the career of the republican general, Lucullus, and that Corbulo's standing as a general suffers as a result. Yet there is more at stake here than the reputation of an individual commander. This nexus of connections between Corbulo and Lucullus, highlighted by Tacitus, must prompt readers to make comparisons: in the end, Corbulo cannot really emulate Lucullus, because the worlds in which the two men operate have changed so much.
This chapter examines the creative fusion between Roman oratory and historiography. Each genre is enhanced and enriched by the other, with practitioners often operating in both spheres. Yet if historians used rhetoric for “expansion of the past,” fleshing out skeletal events through inventio by adding speeches and set pieces (e.g., battle descriptions), what are the consequences about the reliability of historical narratives? The first section elucidates how rhetoric adds impact to the building blocks of historiography, such as in choices of vocabulary and interlinked metaphor and wordplay; these are enhanced by recitatio, the practice of reading literary works to an invited audience. Historians used their rhetorical training to enhance an audience’s enjoyment of the narrative, which in turn served the historian’s moralizing agenda. The second section extends the analysis to consider broader overlapping techniques between both spheres in the use of counterfactual arguments to reconstruct what must have happened.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.