Trajan and Tacitus' Audience: Reader Reception of Annals 1-2

Abstract

In his monumental work on Tacitus, Syme suggested that Tacitus made veiled criticisms directed against Hadrian in the Annals; subsequent scholars have not always accepted his suggestion. Yet those scholars who are sceptical of Syme's argument have not yet, on the whole, taken up the question of the reception of Tacitus' work by his contemporaries; this is a peculiar gap, when one considers the politically charged nature of Tacitus' Annals, which places under a miscroscope not only individual emperors, but the institution of the principate itself. It is, therefore, the intent of this essay to examine the audience's reception of Tacitus' Annals within the work's historical and cultural context: for Tacitus' audience (which I assume to consist primarily of elite males of senatorial and equestrian status), an understanding of the past about which he writes was made meaningful in part, I should like to suggest, by the present. Such an approach results in an open-ended understanding of the work, and decentralises it from its author in favour of the audience. The end result is a text which simultaneously questions even as it reaffirms Trajan as princeps.

Flavian Rome

“…28 Tacitus is, however, quite clear in the Agricola about his targeted audience, and it is neither the Emperor nor his own senatorial colleagues. 28 See, for instance, Rutledge (1998) 141-59 on correspondences between episodes of Annals 1-2 and Trajan's situation. This implied rejection of his contemporaries as the primary audience for which he is writing is reiterated in the last sentence of the work, which carefully repeats the 26 As Liebeschuetz (1966) 133 wrote: 'The age which is hostile to virtue and is unfavourably contrasted with and earlier, better age therefore of necessity includes the time when Nerva and Trajan are reigning and Tacitus is writing'.…”