Tacitus - Mellor - Hardcover

Mellor, Ronald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415906652 ISBN 13: 9780415906654

Publisher: Routledge, 1993

Synopsis

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

About this title

Review

"Professor Mellor offers a lucid introduction to the later influence, no less than to the ideas and methods, of the last great mind of Roman paganism."
-Colin Haycraft, "The London Evening Standard
"This is a distinguished work of scholarship, written with energy of thought and clarity of style. It is worthy of its subject and will surely make some of its readers turn to the original and admire the most profound moral and political philosopher that pagan Rome ever produced'."
-Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Sunday Telegraph, March 14, 1993
." . . all will be glad to be obliged by this biography to concern themselves with Tacitus the man."
-Enoch Powell, "The Guardian
"Going beneath the surface of the dramatic stories told in the "Annals and "Histories, [Mellor] examines issues of historical reliability, psychological motivation, and above all, Tacitus' repute as a gloomy moralist."
-Gilbert Taylor, "ABA Booklist, November 1992
"[Mellor] has set out to write a book about Tacitus for the non-specialist reader to convey why Tacitus's histories exercised a powerful fascination over centuries of dramatists, philosophers and even politicians'."
-"Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Synopsis

The histories of the Roman senator Cornelius Tacitus constitute the most influential discussion of tyranny, political behaviour and public morality of antiquity. For centuries these portraits of courageous martyrs to freedom, of paranoid tyrants and of sycophantic flatterers and informers shaped modern political attitudes. In this book Ronald Mellor provides an analysis of the ideas of the greatest historian of evil in the western intellectual tradition. Tacitus is presented as a moralist, psychologist, political analyst, and literary artist. Tacitus' greatest impact has never been on historians. His political vision and dramatic images left their mark on painters, poets and thinkers, especially when contemporary monarchs resembled Tacitus' Roman emperors. His histories were inflammatory texts which provoked imprisonment or persection. Thomas More, Ben Jonson, Racine, Bacon, Montaigne, Vico, Montesquieu, and Thomas Jefferson all used him to understand political autocracy. Even Napoleon angrily denounced him as a slanderer of the Roman emperors "whom their people loved". In this book, Ronald Mellor conveys the full intellectual and literary and political force of Tacitus.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0415906652
• ISBN 13: 9780415906654
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224