Tacitus Reviewed.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Rubbed dust jacket, otherwise very good. / Beriebener Schutzumschlag, sonst sehr gut. - Tacitus is acknowledged to be ancient Rome�s greatest historian; the Annals is his greatest work. This book gathers together the papers which Professor Woodman has written on Tacitus over the past twenty-five years, focusing almost exclusively on the Annals. The Annals is a text of immense subtlety, recognised as being difficult and complex; it is also a very familiar text, read and reread by generations of scholars and students who want to find out about the early Roman empire. One of Professor Woodman�s principal contentions is that, through familiarity, readers have accepted too easily the conventional interpretations of significant passages, thereby gaining and perpetuating a distorted view of what Tacitus has to say, especially about Tiberius. This book attempts a review of such passages by means of minute and detailed literary analysis. The author offers radically new or different interpretations of some of the most famous sections of the narrative: the murder of Agrippa Postumus, the accession debate of Tiberius, Tacitus� statement of the so-called �highest function of history�, Tiberius� obituary, Nero�s debauched water-borne party, and the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero in ad 65. He also discusses major passages in Books 1 and 4, concentrating on such matters as structure, vivid representation, imitation and allusion, and the dramatic and generic manipulation of a narrative which, as Professor Woodman insists, must be seen in ancient rather than in modern terms. Such interpretations, which have significant implications for those who wish to use the Annals as a source for what happened in the first century ad, should be of value to all scholars interested in Latin prose literature, but especially to those working on classical historiography, and on the reigns of the emperors Tiberius and Nero. - A. J. Woodman is Professor of Latin at the University of Durham. ISBN 9780198152583