This contribution attempts to reconstruct the lost voices of Roman freed persons by focusing on the performative function of literary texts, rather than on their authorship. A study of the performative function of texts considers the contextual motivations of an author’s decision to cite, (re)phrase, and frame freed person’s words, and allows for a nuanced deconstruction of certain passages that might otherwise be labeled merely “elite discourse.” The texts chosen for this analysis are Cicero’s correspondence with Tiro, Tacitus’ historical works, and a letter written by the freed man Timarchides as quoted by Cicero in his oratio against Verres. Ultimately, the contribution’s goal is to suggest a methodological approach that – to some extent – rehabilitates literary texts as evidence for the freed person’s voice, and to argue that the value of literary sources when trying to recover this voice lies specifically in the tension between the public limits of freed persons’ (discursive) agency on the one hand, and the range and inventiveness of their self-representation in the context of their own or their patron’s trust network on the other.

The Conclusion uses the downfall of Nero to consider the legacy of the body politic metaphor in Roman political thought. Julio-Claudian writers relied on the duality of head and body to express fears about the recurrence of civil war. Without a head to command Rome’s warring limbs, they argued, Rome would return to its ancestral cycle of self-destruction. The Year of the Four Emperors confirmed the prescience of their warnings. Plutarch and Tacitus relied on symbolism of a headless body politic to describe the conflict, confirming their perception of sole rule as necessary if not ideal. This contest for power therefore did not weaken the Principate so much as confirm its viability as an institution independent of its Augustan origins. With the rise of the Flavians came the formalization of both sole rule and the Imperial model of the body politic for centuries to come.

Shakespeare and George Peele’s Titus Andronicus (1591–94) stages both the proliferating texts and the religious violence of the early 1590s. These years saw a spate of sectarian libels from persecuted Puritans and Catholics alike. In Titus, the marginalized Andronici likewise launch ephemeral scraps of writing into the sky, texts that join appeals for redress with violent threats. These libels bear an especially close resemblance to those scattered in the streets by the Puritan extremist William Hacket and his accomplices in 1591. But the echoes are also cross-confessional, indicating a broader interest in the “manner” of religiopolitical speech. The play folds its topical allegory into a Tacitean-humanist history of political communication: the rise of the emperor, Saturninus, brings about the end of public oratory. Their speech silenced, the Andronici unleash a flurry of texts that takes the Tacitean story of rhetorical decline into its early modern future. By yoking libels not just to the pursuit of justice but also to factionalism and violence, Titus takes a hard look at the viral and virulent media of the late Elizabethan public sphere.

This chapter has a simple argument: Pliny’s Epistles is a work of many intertextual parts. Neither beholden to Cicero’s Epistles, its professed generic forebear, nor privileging ‘poetic memory’ over prose, it integrates a broad range of predecessors, old and new, verse and prose. In a larger study of Plinian intertextuality Whitton has argued that Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria is its unsuspected protagonist, with Tacitus’ Dialogus tightly caught up in the same weave. Rather than rehearsing those claims, he uses this short contribution to pick out some other ingredients to his mix. Three short passages (from Ep. 4.3, 5.16 and 7.1) include a long-forgotten reworking of Cicero’s Orator and hitherto unremarked imitations of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, Valerius Maximus’ Facta et Dicta Memorabilia and Tacitus’ Agricola. In examining these liaisons, the chapter exemplifies some modes and norms of Plinian imitatio and demonstrates that these works and authors all have a role in his pages (so, incidentally, adding to their reception histories). More broadly – if very selectively – it argues that Pliny’s generic self-positioning is a literary act of high ambition: for all its professed simplicity, the Epistles integrates a wide range of exemplary texts into its blend. We just need to start plumbing its depths.

How does Plinian intertextuality contribute to making a book unit distinctive from its fellows? Taking Book 6 as its subject, this chapter first looks at the depth of intertextual investment made by Pliny in the second Vesuvius letter (6.20), and looks at the challenge set by its apparent references to Petronius. It then looks at the persistent intertextual presence across Book 6 of Cicero, Catullus, Vergil, Quintilian and Tacitus, and argues for a coherent programme of engagement particularly with Vergil, Quintilian and the Dialogus of Tacitus. The chapter ends by reflecting on why Pliny appeared to have good reason in the early second-century CE to be confident about the vigour and life-expectancy of public oratory at Rome.

In two letters addressed to a certain Montanus, Pliny’s focus is on the once powerful imperial freedman Pallas. In his first letter (7.29) Pliny tells how he accidentally came across Pallas’ tomb and read an inscription engraved on it, which he now quotes as a particularly blatant example of the freedman’s arrogance and hypocrisy. Pliny’s feelings about Pallas are those of indignatio mitigated by risus; both words evoke satire and in fact references to satire and other literary genres (paradoxography, antiquarian literature and the palliata) are scattered throughout this short letter. In the second letter of this pair (8.6), we are told that Pliny, now took the trouble to trace the senatorial decree referred to in the inscription. Thus for a moment we encounter Pliny the historian, or rather Pliny the antiquarian – but he is quickly replaced by Pliny the political moralist. Pliny voices his indignation at the senators’ debasement but, crucially, does not give any details about the reasons for honouring Pallas or the circumstances behind it. Evidently Pliny did not deem it advisable to consult available historical accounts of the event and to learn more about its context (see Tac. Ann. 12.53 and cf. Plin. HN 35.201).

The chapter explores the anxious cultural construction of women as intergenerational mediators that emerges from several epistles in Pliny’s collection (3.3 and 4.19; 4.2 and 4.7; 2.7 and 3.10). At once expected to be bearers of their father’s imprint and vehicle for the transmission of their husband’s identity, Roman women were the object of a discourse in which notions of biological filiation significantly intersected with issues of artistic reproduction and literary allusion. Building a typology of intra-, inter-, extra-, and alter-textual relations which connect Pliny’s topic and diction to relevant passages in Martial (6.37 and 38) and Tacitus (Dial. 28-29), my argument illuminates some crucial, common semiotic practices in his age.

In several smaller essays written in the late 1760s and the 1770s, Herder discussed German political history. In How the German Bishops Became an Estate of the Realm Herder spelled out his views on the ancient German constitution and the history of the Holy Roman Empire, whilst On the Influence of Governments on the Sciences, and of the Sciences on Governments returned to the political history of wider Europe, including Germany. This chapter discusses these essays as Herder’s contributions to the debate on German national spirit, highlighting the relevance of Möser’s History of Osnabrück to the development of Herder’s views on German history. I argue that Herder sought to understand the causal origins of modern European states, including, most importantly, the Holy Roman Empire. Like Möser, Herder was fascinated by Tacitus’s account of ancient German freedom, while being very critical of the Frankish polity. Both also rejected Montesquieu’s history of modern monarchy. Although Herder acknowledged some advantages of the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, he was not a Reichspatriot. The 1779 essay restated Herder’s fundamental commitment to modern liberty and trade, whilst arguing that German imperial government was badly in need of reforms.

This chapter explores ideals and practices of turning classical histories into political lessons for the present, focusing on a number of individuals who translated the histories of Tacitus into Spanish, while they also served their king as soldiers, counsellors and informants. All testified about the practical value of Tacitus in the present, as they struggled with the internal contradictions and the fact that their author had produced the texts many centuries ago, in a different, pagan world. The counsel of historical experience was tirelessly advocated in reason-of-state discourse, and this chapter shows that the call was answered in practice as the Tacitists in various capacities engaged with the problem of the Dutch Revolt. The chapter argues that although they were well aware of change, they had no scruples in using anachronism and historical analogies, or using the ancients as rhetorical tools to express their ideas and further their political aims. Memorials and pieces of counsel were written from the perspective of events from recent history and could effortlessly be placed alongside Tacitean phrases. Yet the ancient past was also a safe space that could be used to criticize present policies or express warnings, without infringing on the domain of Providence.

Chapter 7 examines a Plutarch translation entitled Recueil d’avis et conseils sur les affaires d’estat tire des vies de Plutarque by Du Haillan (c. 1535–1610) and strands of Montaigne’s (1533–1592) political thought related to his conception of the public sphere as developed in The Essays. I also briefly examine the translations of Plutarch effected by Montaigne’s close friend Etienne de la Boétie.

The chapter shows how Jacob Grimm’s idea of culturally autonomous peoples was troubled by the intimate interactions that he uncovered in his historical scholarship on ancient German tribes. Seeking to unify his knowledge of diachronic linguistics and ethnic history in a final work, Grimm paid special attention to the one thing that had survived of the myriad tribes – their names – but also conceded that names were always generated by outside observers; names, Grimm admitted, were never chosen, always given. When Jacob Grimm explored the prehistory of Germany, then, he found not proud acts of autonomous self-naming by nations, but only boundary-defining encounters between groups and peoples. Grimm suspected that such cultural encounters had first become visible within the structures of literate imperial civilizations that housed multiple peoples and languages. Indeed, the practice of philology itself with its comparative grasp of several languages and cultures was an imperial phenomenon. The nationalist philologist, Jacob Grimm’s own writings ironically suggested, was the inheritor of the transnational and polyethnic empire rather than self-enclosed Germanic tribe.

Germania is read as a response to Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, and contrasted with Tacitus’ account of conquest in the Agricola. Focusing on the absence of historical narrative, discussion goes beyond the well-recognized denial of history to the Germanic Other to consider the implications of moments when Germania comes close to recounting history without doing so. Narrativity and the predominance of description are discussed, with a view to understanding Germania as epideixis. It is suggested that the absence of historical narrative emphasizes the vivid portrayal of Germania as unconquered territory, and that Germania provides a vivid exploration of the limits of Roman power and epistemologies. The text expresses an imperialist perspective, but does not claim a triumph for Roman ratio over a territory that is resistant to it.

Tacitus’ Germania is notable for its absences: lacking a preface and programmatic statements, and being the only ethnographic monograph to have survived from Greco-Roman antiquity, readers have often leapt to fill in its perceived blanks. This chapter aims at redressing the effects of overdetermined readings by interpreting the text’s absences as significant in their own right.

The chapter explores the styles of self-promotion available to elite Romans, ranging from frugal self-restraint and material sobriety to prodigial acts of civic generosity, and analyses the debates over and constraints on luxury and encouragement of frugality with respect to building projects and expensive heirlooms, not least those made of silver, from the late republic to the early imperial period. The chronologically and thematically wide-ranging investigation foregrounds in particular the enhanced social mobility that civil war and autocracy introduced into Roman society, including a discussion of why provincial newcomers such as Tacitus and Pliny the Younger affected particular enthusiasm for frugality and disapproved of luxury, as a way of positioning themselves as new arrivals within the ruling class of Rome.