Tacitus' epic wars

This study looks at Tacitus' relationship with epic poetry, especially Virgil's Aeneid and Lucan's Bellum Civile. These works, I argue, influence his presentation of the civil wars in Histories 1-3 as repetitive, even timeless. Corresponding with and corroborating this inheritance of repetitiveness is the series of allusions to Virgil's and Lucan's wars in the Histories. By means of this intertextual program, Tacitus, in the tradition of both Roman historiography and Roman epic, instructs his readers about the dangers of Rome's seemingly endless pattern of civil war. In the first chapter I address Tacitus' engagement with poetry in the earlier Dialogus, in which he simultaneously rejects the option of writing poetry and announces the poetic program of the historiography that he will soon undertake. Chapter 2 looks closely at the prominent, programmatic passages in the Histories as well as the Annals in which Tacitus articulates most clearly the kinship between his historiography and epic. Chapter 3 focuses on the presentation of the repetitiveness of civil war through the character of Galba, whose murder in Histories 1.6-49 is presented as a rehashing of several of the pivotal murders in Virgil's and Lucan's wars. Chapter 4 furthers the argument of chapter 3 by examining how Tacitus crafts the battle scenes of Histories 2 and especially 3 as reenactments of the fall of Troy in Aeneid 2 and of the battles of Aeneid 7-12 and the BC. In the fifth and final chapter, I look at the capitulation and death of Otho in Histories 2 as a response to and correction of Virgil's and Lucan's epic heroes, and thus a possible model for release from the repetitive cycle of Roman civil war.