The Annals of Tacitus: A Study in the Writing of History

AGRIPPINA'S (UN-)AUGUSTAN ANGER: TACITUS, ANNALS 12.22.3 AND OVID, TRISTIA 2.127

“…Readers of Tacitus have focussed on the historian's adaptation of language and imagery from a number of poetic predecessors, most of all Virgil and Lucan. 19 His engagement with Ovid's language seems to be more limited, 20 but we have seen here that the most celebrated and controversial poet of the Augustan era also has a meaningful spot on the intertextual palette of the historian of Augustus' successors. While Ovid had told the tale of Augustus' anger, its power and its capacity for restraint, Tacitus un-checks, perpetuates and creatively stretches out the story of that anger in his narration of Agrippina's rise, overreach and fall.…”