Tacitus and the Incomplete

Widely regarded as ancient Rome’s greatest historian, Tacitus has shaped much of early modern and modern thought on Rome and its emperors. Substantial portions of his major historical works Histories and Annals, however, have not survived, depriving us of his account of crucial episodes and developments in Rome's early imperial history. This first-of-its-kind volume seeks to fill those gaps, using a range of historical and linguistic approaches to reconstruct the missing portions of Tacitus’ work. The volume offers reconstructions of the fragmentary Tacitean emperors (Augustus, Caligula, Nero, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian) and of important lost episodes such as the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem and the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.

By utilizing the concept of incompleteness as a narrative tool, Tacitus and the Incomplete provides novel insights into what Tacitus’ oeuvre might have been like if the lost books had survived, and also expands on recent work on counterfactual historiography, the influence of hindsight on historical writing, the use of prolepsis and other narrative techniques, and on the limitations of historiography in the imperial period.

Panayiotis Christoforou is a Marshall Research Fellow at the Pharos Foundation, a Junior Research Fellow at New College, University of Oxford, and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at Technische Universität Dresden. 

Bram L. H. ten Berge is Associate Professor of Classics at Hope College. He is the author of Writing Imperial History: Tacitus from Agricola to Annales.