SENTENCE STRUCTURE AND HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION

Tacitus is a notoriously difficult writer; the central theme of this study is what the difficulty of Tacitus means and what are the possible ways a reader can respond to this difficulty. Examining what a difficulty means is a rather different action to examining what a difficulty is: in the latter case, we identify difficulty, overcome and disregard it; in the former case we bring it with us, as it were, entering into an ongoing relationship with difficulty. I will argue in this study that what is difficult and obscure in Tacitus' style of writing, what seems to call out for clarification, is central to Tacitus' modality of historical and political thought. In other words, Tacitus conveys to his readers his conception of imperial politics by enmeshing them in ambiguous and complicated Latin sentences. If we decode these sentences and translate Tacitus into clear prose, therefore, we lose the historical representation and analysis of which Tacitus' writing is the vehicle.