sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 1

Bram L. H. ten Berge: Writing Imperial History

Bram ten Berge's ambitious first book seeks to read all the works of Tacitus as one unit, with a goal of understanding how they relate to one another and to the historian's overall outlook on the Principate. Most Tacitean scholarship focuses either on the so-called opera minora (Agricola, Germania, Dialogus), or on the larger narratives (Historiae, Annales). Ten Berge resists this urge to split up Tacitus' oeuvre, and argues that all five texts are connected thematically and intertextually, "undermin[ing] the old thesis [...] that Tacitus became ever more pessimistic" as Trajan's reign progressed; rather, "our author is skeptical from the start" (8).

Ten Berge adopts a linear approach, considering how readers of Tacitus' previous works would bring awareness of them to their reading of works published later. He explicitly does not consider "the 'looking backward' aspect of intertextuality," how later works "allow us to reevaluate" ones composed earlier (12-13). The book is accordingly structured chronologically, with a chapter devoted to each of Tacitus' works in order of publication.

Chapter 1 argues that Agricola is "a crucial political document enunciating enduring Tacitean themes, concerns, and analytical methods" (23) that reverberate in the later works. Agricola's preface "reveals Tacitus' cynicism about the imperial system of government" (30), an idea that will recur. Another major feature of the text is its "didactic dimension" (31) focused on the figure of Agricola as a model general whose "qualities and faults [...] would continue to inform Tacitus' depiction of prominent individuals in his later works" (55), especially in relationship with bad emperors, of whom Agricola's Domitian serves as the archetype. Another focus is on the ethics of Roman imperial expansion. Ten Berge argues that Tacitus supports the conquest of areas like Britain, yet the famously critical speech of Calgacus shows that problems can arise because of the "rapacious" and "oppressive" actions of individual administrators, who make "the Empire ... oppressive and unbearable, much like the Principate, the power structure that steers it" (52).

These themes are traced through the Germania and Dialogus in chapters 2 and 3. Ten Berge argues that Germania is an open-ended text that "allows [...] readers to decide what foreign policy seems best to them based on the available data" (70), and as such "may be seen as implicitly endorsing" a more restrained "Tiberian policy in the North" later described in the Annals (105). Ten Berge brings Agricola's points about imperialism to bear, arguing that "Germania reinforces the Agricola in complicating the basic assumptions of the Romanization model, which assumes the moral superiority of the colonizing power" (101). The idea of Agricola as exemplar also resurfaces, with intertextual correspondences suggesting that he and the Germani display some of the same positive moral qualities - a relationship that "has military implications" because it pits the Germans against "a type of government that discourages excellence and at times appoints unqualified officials" (90).

The third chapter reads Dialogus in light of Agricola and Germania, arguing that different portions of the interlocutors' speeches are "endorse[d]" via intertextual parallels with the earlier texts (123). The dialogue has in common with Agr. the idea that literature may be subjected to politically or aesthetically motivated malignitas (137-9), and that the Principate has a chilling effect on free speech and literary production (179-182). Messala's recommended education for the ideal orator (D. 28.4, 29.1) has important intertextual echoes of the ideal mother-led practice of education (Agr. 4.2, G. 20.1). The most interesting part of chapter 3 is the argument that Aper's position in Dialogus is shown to be wrong when read in connection with the description of delatores in the narrative works: "Tacitus ... uses the arguments of his former teacher... to illustrate the sanitized version" of contemporary oratory as practiced by delatores, "a version he then blows out of the water" in Historiae and Annales (147). One could wish for more examples of this type of "back-reading" throughout the book.

Chapter 4 - the longest at over 100 pages - applies all these observations to the Histories. Intertextual references to Agricola lend depth to the character-portraits of participants in the civil war of 69 CE: "A reader who has read through the corpus" can spot the "intertextual code for 'men like Agricola' vs. 'those unlike him'" (239). Vespasian and Titus, "despite their faults, are depicted as capaces imperii, thoroughly Agricolan," whereas "Domitian mirrors himself" in Agricola (281). Most of the actors in Historiae are revealed to combine aspects of Agricola's Agricola and Domitian, showing the complexities of Tacitean characterization. Ten Berge also reads Germania as an intertext for the Vitellian and Batavian revolts: through intertextual parallels, "specific individuals ... are presented as ... either aware of historical precedents and ethnographic expectations or not," illustrating the "didactic value of Tacitus' monographs" (243). Again, some of ten Berge's intertexts are more convincing than others; for example, the similarities identified between the speeches of Otho and Agricola (218-20) largely consist of words and phrases common in a military context (in itinere, in agmine, labor, commeatus), and ten Berge does not consider the extent to which the conventional nature of commanders' addresses to their troops, rather than deliberate echoing on Tacitus' part, may be playing a role.

Chapter 5, on the Annales (Tacitus' longest preserved work), is, disappointingly, the shortest in this book. Ten Berge acknowledges that he has not performed "a full intertextual study of the Annales' engagement with the other four Tacitean texts" (303 n. 1), instead describing broad themes. Thus it is argued, e.g., that the restrictions on the military excellence displayed by Corbulo and Germanicus are a reprise of Agricola's predicament (310-11), or that Tacitus' experience of Domitian affected how he viewed all emperors, including Augustus (317-20), or that the criticisms of Roman imperialism in Agricola continue to echo in the descriptions of revolts and client kings (335-41). It would have been good to see these largely uncontroversial observations enriched with a thorough intertextual analysis.

One thing ten Berge does particularly well in this book is to make the case for the crucial importance of Agricola: the many intertextual references to aspects of Agricola's conduct and character force readers to continuously re-evaluate him, "which repeatedly reinforces the man's balanced, 'modern' behavior as constituting what [Tacitus] saw ... as the appropriate ... demeanor for senators and emperors in imperial Rome" (302). Not all of the intertexts ten Berge identifies will convince every reader; it is also noteworthy that there is no explicit theoretical discussion of what for ten Berge counts as an "intertext." He sometimes tries to prove his point through merely offering lists of passages, with cryptic systems of superscript letters and bold or underlined type to show alleged correspondences, not all of which are obvious without further explication (e.g. the section on Maternus' alleged indebtedness to Germania, where we get over four pages [183-187] of passages which are not thoroughly discussed or analyzed). This kind of shorthand can make the book hard to follow at times.

Still, ten Berge is to be congratulated for encouraging us to rethink the silos to which Tacitus' individual works have long been consigned. He is a careful writer with a good command of the bibliography, and his intertextual approach will surely inspire future research by other readers of Rome's greatest historian.