Character and Literary Choice: the Minor Individuals in Tacitus' "Annals" I-Vi (Historiography, Roman History, Latin).

Abstract

This dissertation explores Tacitus' use of minor characters in Annals I-VI through an in-depth examination of three exemplary series of minor individuals: (1) In Chapter I, the series of female characters deliberately portrayed as parallel to Agrippina Maior. Tacitus juxtaposed and made analogues of the wife of Arminius, Plancina and Livilla. Because they are presented as analogous to Agrippina the Elder, the reader applies comments, inferences and conclusions about these women to Agrippina. This nexus of minor female characters is central to an underst and ing of Tacitus' portrait of Germanicus' wife. (2) In Chapter II, two series of episodes in which canonical annalistic elements, the obituary and the account of res externae, are used by Tacitus to maintain the central theme around which Book III is built. The series of funeral notices and obituaries, in which men of prisca virtus are commemorated alongside men who rose to power under the new regime, are used to exemplify the theme of Book III: old morality giving way to new Real-politik. The narrative of the war with Tacfarinas in Book III gives Tacitus the opportunity to trace the same decline of virtue in the military sphere. Both series are examples of the use of minor characters to maintain a theme over a prolonged narrative composed of numerous short episodes, as well as examples of the manipulation of annalistic conventions. (3) In the final chapter, the use of a series of minor characters to trace a theme over the entire narrative of the Annals: loss of liberty concomitant with increased civilization. The German episodes plot the loss of libertas among the once pristine northern barbarians, while tracing the blame for this decline to the pernicious influence of Rome and Romanization.