Michael Hendry Ouden pros ton Erôta: The Staging of Tacitus’ Dialogus

This paper deals with three interrelated problems in Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus. Why does a man just ending a distinguished career as an orator open his new career as a historian with a dialogue set at the beginning of his oratorical career? Why does he begin his work with a debate between Poetry (specifically Tragedy) and Oratory, omitting History? And why does he give his fictional self nothing whatever to say? I will argue that the answers to these questions could not be stated outright, even under the relatively benevolent despotism of Nerva and Trajan.

1. ‘Staging’: Several details suggest that Tacitus thought of the Dialogus itself as something like a play. There are three main speakers, one subsidiary speaker, and one silent participant. Is it purely coincidental that the man who secundas partes agit is named ‘Secundus’ and the kôphon prosôpon ‘Tacitus’?

2. Action: The effect of the speeches on the silent participant is often disregarded. Most moderns prefer Maternus to Aper, but we know that the historical Tacitus became an orator, not a poet, and his fictional counterpart leaves with Aper at the end. He must therefore have found Aper’s position more attractive than Maternus’. The implicit hierarchy is: Oratory > Poetry.

3. Setting: The dialogue is modeled on Plato’s Symposium: friends visit a playwright after he has presented his tragic drama to the public. The choice of model is distinctly odd: Tacitus is the least erotic of major authors. A thought that has surely occurred to many others is that the comparison of Poetry and Oratory implies a third term, History, which combines the advantages of both. Like Poetry, History is composed in the peace and tranquillity of one’s own home or the countryside, does not depend on the whims of the mobile uulgus, and deals with subjects that do not lose their interest in later generations. Like Oratory, History has everything to do with the real world, is useful rather than merely ornamental, and is, in the best case, just as much as Poetry a ktêma es aiei. I go one step further and suggest that Tacitus’ Platonic opening alludes to the end of the Symposium, where Socrates argues that the same man (surely Plato) could write Tragedy and Comedy. Similarly, Tacitus more obliquely suggests that the same man (again himself) might write works that combine the advantages of Poetry and Oratory. The implicit hierarchy is now: History > Oratory > Poetry. Oratory is the safe second-best, a suitable career for one who is waiting for a regime that will tolerate History.