Ronald Syme’s Tacitus was the culmination of both Syme’s career and modern Tacitean

scholarship. Cementing the reputation for diligent thoroughness that he acquired with The

Roman Revolution, it also seemed to provide the last word on the ancient historian. While recent

scholars have done a great deal to go beyond Syme’s work, my contention is that this picture of

finality is substantially correct, at least in its broad outlines. Proof of this is to be found in both

the nature of Syme’s achievement, and the ways in which later writers attempted to build upon

and surpass it. But to properly understand what Syme was reacting to, it is vital to have some

understanding of Tacitus’ modern reception history.

What follows are the highlights of Tacitus’ early modern and modern reception history.

After his rediscovery in the Renaissance, his thoroughgoing Realpolitik exerted a massive

influence on humanist thought, although significantly, Machiavelli opted to write his Discourses

on Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita rather than Tacitus’ Annales. From Ben Jonson’s Sejanus to Tacitus’

formative impact on Gibbon’s historiography, Tacitus was held up as a bastion of republican

values in the face of autocratic tyranny over the next few centuries. But notes of skepticism

began to be sounded in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Napoleon’s vituperative criticism can be

chalked up to his anti-republicanism, though he apparently “laughed at the notion that he disliked

Tacitus for his opposition to tyranny.”1 Perhaps the most noteworthy objector is Voltaire, whose

misgivings centered chiefly around Tacitus’ utility as a historical source. Voltaire complained

that from Tacitus’ operatic accounts of dynastic maneuvering, he learned very little of practical

import about Roman economics, legislation, and customs. On top of this, he criticized what he

perceived as “the extraordinary improbabilities in his account of Tiberius, Nero, and the others.” 2

1
Holland Rose (1912) 214.
2
Morley (1900) 304.
 This ominous charge culminated in the mid-to-late 19th century, with the rise of scientific

historiography in Germany. As Ronald Martin writes, “By the 1860s a clear dichotomy had

begun to develop in Tacitean scholarship, and this split was to dominate the approach to Tacitus

for more than half a century. As a historian Tacitus’ reputation declined…But as a stylist he

continued to be acclaimed.”3 Work on Tacitus, in other words, was not viewed as entirely

worthless. His “histories” could still be studied in the way one might study Ovid’s love poems

or, perhaps more to the point, Seneca’s tragedies, but his days as a reputable source appeared to

be over. Martin goes on to speak of Mommsen’s “destruction” of Tacitus’ historiographical bona

fides, concomitant with the publication of important studies of his style. It is precisely this

dichotomy between substance and style, rather than a simple denigration of Tacitus as historian,

that will be so important to consider in looking at Syme’s accomplishment, to which we now

come.

Perhaps the first thing to strike the reader of Syme’s Tacitus is the sheer mass of

information which has been digested and marshalled by its author. It seems almost implausible,

that a single scholar, rather than, say, a small army of graduate assistants, could be responsible

for such a vast accomplishment. On closer inspection, this data is primarily related to

individuals, most of them unheard of and unheralded, who lived in the ancient Roman Empire.

Already on the second page, we hear that the emperor Nerva was the only friend of Nero’s to be

immortalized in a pair of statues, other than “the commander of the Praetorian Guard, Ofonius

Tigellinus.”4 In this sense, among the defining features of Syme’s magnum opus is its

employment of the prosopographical method he had perfected in The Roman Revolution. In that

work, Syme had utilized a minute account of the bit players in Augustus’ dynastic maneuverings

3
Martin (1981) 241.
4
Syme (1958) 2. Syme goes on to observe, somewhat glibly, that “[w]hat Nerva did to equal Tigellinus has not been
disclosed.”
to reach a portrait of Rome’s first emperor not far removed from Syme’s contemporary, Benito

Mussolini. In Tacitus, similarly, by mining every possible extant source, from the great

historians to the far corners of epigraphy, Syme aimed at an exhaustive picture of not just the

familiar faces in Roman history, but the relative nobodies. It should be pointed out that these

figures were almost invariably aristocratic nobodies, in keeping with Syme’s view of history as

shaped by the few and the powerful. In his description of Pliny’s career, for example, examined

as paralleling Tacitus’ in important ways, Syme paints a moving portrait of one Julius Bassus as

“an aged man, of many tribulations.”5 This imposing contextual edifice it not erected for its own

sake, however, but masterfully deployed to situate Tacitus the man, Roman, and historian,

rendering Syme’s work essentially unrepeatable. Even the most far-ranging excursuses are

shown to contribute to a fuller rendering of Syme’s main subject. Moreover, the

prosopographical method goes a long way toward rehabilitating Tacitus’s reputation as a

historian by showing the thoroughness of his own inquiries. In a sense, Tacitus himself followed

the same methodology as Syme avant la lettre.

Equally unique is Syme’s combination of historical and literary expertise. Tacitus is in

some respects a difficult work to categorize, encompassing as it does elements of biography,

prosopography, literary criticism, and analysis of historiographical method. For example, Syme’s

treatment of Tacitus’ use of earlier historians as sources bespeaks the same level of scrupulous

detail as his prosopographical efforts, while his lengthy excursus on the prose style of the

Annales is arguably the most thrilling part of the book. Delving into the minutiae of, for

example, how Tacitus’ vocabulary evolved over the course of his career toward a taste for the

recherché and the archaic, Syme exhibits both philological exactitude and acute literary

sensitivity. Or consider the following evocation of Tacitus’ sentence structure: “Tacitus seldom
5
Ibid. 79.
bothers to write a genuinely periodic sentence. Whereas Sallust was abrupt and truncated,

stopping before the reader expected, Tacitus goes ahead with preternatural prolongations, piling

on new items, often loosely co-ordinated, eked out with a participle or ablative absolute, on

which may depend another construction, until the sentence when it ends has generally carried the

story several steps forward, perhaps modifying or subverting the initial statement.”6 The shape of

Tacitus’ sentences becomes a mini-drama, one fascinatingly paralleled in Syme’s own breathless

verbiage—on which more below. In both cases, the historical and the literary, his expertise is

hard-won. While the footnotes exhibit his mastery of the relevant literature, mostly German, his

chief contributions are as a historian writing about a fellow historian, and a stylist writing about a

fellow stylist.

But in thus integrating historical exactitude with literary criticism, Syme was not just

doing something difficult to imitate. He was solving and dissolving the above-mentioned

dichotomy, almost a century old by the time he was writing, between Tacitus the historian and

Tacitus the stylist. Where German scholarship had hacked the two apart, despairing of the former

while continuing to praise the latter, Syme takes both sides of Tacitus seriously. His preface

states as much: “Tacitus has never gone short of praise for style and composition. His quality as

a historian might be another matter…The time is due for a juster appraisal, a closer approach to

the author and his epoch.”7 Syme’s achievement, then, is twofold. By rehabilitating the historical

aspect of Tacitus’ reputation, whether as a source for modern historians or a serious writer of

history in his own right, Syme was also able to reintegrate considerations of Tacitus’ substance

with an appreciation of his literary style.

6
Ibid. 347.
7
Ibid. v.
 Syme’s own style is perhaps the hardest aspect of his work to pin down. Consider the

terse, dramatic opening of his prologue to Tacitus: “The Principate arose from usurpation. If one

man seized the power, so might another. Birth or energy, chance or a horoscope would declare

the ruler of the world.”8 There is no qualification, no hemming and hawing, just an abrupt,

almost prophetic declaration that reminds one, inexplicably, of the first blast of Beethoven’s 9 th

Symphony. In “Tacitus’ Syme,” Mark Toher has detailed the extent to which Syme’s work

involved assimilating and becoming his great predecessor and subject, and nowhere is this more

apparent than in his prose style. While Tacitean to the point of pastiche, Syme’s style somehow

reads as both original and impossible to replicate. From concision, harshness, and a disdain for

periodic structure, to a taste for ambiguity and sententiae, the hallmarks of post-Senecan Latin

prose, and of Tacitus’ prose in particular, are on ample display. While counter-examples could

no doubt be marshalled, it is difficult to imagine contemporary scholars choosing to present their

findings in so stylized and self-consciously literary a manner. Even in his own day, Syme was

perhaps an anachronism in this regard, hearkening back to Gibbon or Macaulay. By not

neglecting either half of Horace’s prescription prodesse et delectare, “to instruct and delight,”9

Syme enshrined his scholarship in a monumentum aere perennius, “a monument more enduring

than bronze.”10

What responses has this feat elicited? I have determined that they fall essentially into

three categories. First come the overwhelmingly positive assessments. Of this kind is Toher’s

article, mentioned above. A sophisticated treatment of the ways in which Syme emulated not

only Tacitus’ prose style, but his very worldview, “Tacitus’ Syme” verges on hagiography in its

blend of capsule biography and literary-historical appreciation. He quotes Syme’s evaluation of

8
Ibid. ix.
9
Ars Poetica, 333.
10
Odes, 3.30.
Mommsen and applies it to Syme’s own work: “It is a brilliant literary artifact, composed with

passion and enthusiasm—and with style in accord.”11 He goes on to posit that Syme “will remain

fundamental reading for anyone with a serious interest in Roman history.”12 Even Momigliano’s

famous (negative) characterization of Syme as a “moralist historian” is turned to good effect by

Toher via a quote by Syme about Sallust, demonstrating his awareness of this fact and its

concomitant dangers: “If his standpoint seemed to become moral rather than political, that was

not unmixed gain for an historian.”13 Syme is thus shown to be in no way blind to Momigliano’s

charge that he divided history into “good guys” and “bad guys.” While Toher is by no means a

blind or partial judge of Syme’s work, the relatively unmixed character of his praise is telling,

especially appearing as it does in Cambridge’s cutting-edge Companion to Tacitus.

Equally significant for my thesis are pieces such as S. P. Oakley’s on “Style and

Language” in Tacitus. While it is not directly an assessment of Syme’s achievement, his name is

scattered liberally throughout the footnotes, and the criticisms are, as in the case of Toher,

glancing at best. Syme is described as merely a “starting point” for the influence of Sallust’s

style upon Tacitus, but Tacitus shows up in a list of “scholarly work of a very high standard”

devoted to Tacitus’ vocabulary. In the “Further Reading” section, Martin’s 1981 treatment of the

topic is described as “the most balanced…in English,”14 but Oakley goes on to concede that

Tacitus’ tone is “evoked more forcefully by Syme.”15 The overall impression given by Oakley’s

bibliography is that Syme (alongside Draeger and other earlier scholars) is still authoritative. The

chief task is that of “updating” him with more recent yet substantially supplementary studies,

which build on Syme’s efforts rather than contesting or overturning them.

11
Toher (2009) 328.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid. 321.
14
Oakley (2009) 211.
15
Ibid.
 Finally, some recent articles stake out territory that was simply beyond Syme’s purview,

at least in his famous monograph. Syme’s focus was on Tacitus and his historical context;

questions of transmission, reception, and influence, while undeniably valuable, were not a part of

the task he appointed for himself. As such, even where contemporary scholars have seemed to

surpass him, they have in no way undermined the enduring value of his work. Martha Malamud,

for example, has examined Tacitus’ impact on the twentieth century novel, from usual suspects

like Robert Graves to more obscure figures such as Naomi Mitchison. Her stirring evocation of

Tacitus as providing writers with “‘examples of fortitude’ in troubled times”16 is a welcome

contribution to reception studies, but in no way detracts from Syme’s achievement. Indeed, many

of the other articles in the Cambridge Companion that rely least on Syme’s foundation are found

in the “Transmission” (=reception) section, including his influence on early modern political

thought, his relationship to Gibbon, and Krebs’ piece on the reception of the Germania, which

was later expanded into a book. Again, the emphasis is suggestive: the authors who have most

successfully moved out from under Syme’s shadow are those who have focused on topics

untouched by the master; Tacitus was laser-focused on the historian’s immediate context, rather

than his Nachleben.

It is no disparagement to later scholars to say that recent work on Tacitus consists largely

of “footnotes to Syme,” literal or otherwise. Even those articles which deal with the gaps and

silences in Syme’s work are a testament to the very thoroughness and finality of those areas

which he did address. Tacitus paradoxically called Galba capax imperii, nisi imperasset:

“capable of rule—if only he hadn’t ruled.”17 With Syme, the case is a little simpler. He was

capax imperii—of such imperium as the scholar possesses, that of a fiefdom of dates and

16
Malamud (2009) 316.
17
Historiae, 1.49.
footnotes and inscriptions and critical judgments—quia imperavit. Because he ruled. More

concretely, he did so by all but single-handedly reversing the Teutonic consensus that Tacitus,

while doubtless worth studying as a literary artist, was near worthless of serious consideration by

the standards of modern historiography. Syme put the lie to this assessment, and did so in an

enduring monument of scholarship, erudition, and critical acuity.

Works Cited

Holland Rose, John (1912). The Personality of Napoleon: The Lowell Lectures Delivered at
Boston in February-March 1912. G. Bell & Sons, Ltd.

Malamud, Martha (2009). “Tacitus and the twentieth-century novel.” The Cambridge
Companion to Tacitus, ed. A. J. Woodman, pp. 300-316. Cambridge University Press.

Martin, Ronald H. (1981). Tacitus. University of California Press.

Oakley, S. P. (2009). “Style and Language.” The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus, ed. A. J.
Woodman, pp. 195-211. Cambridge University Press.

Syme, Ronald (1958). Tacitus, vol. I. Oxford University Press.

Toher, Mark (2009). “Tacitus’ Syme.” The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus, ed. A. J.
Woodman, pp. 317-329. Cambridge University Press.