Why I Love Tacitus

Let me offer some background: Cornelius Tacitus was a successful politician and orator, about 20 years younger than Quintilian, who retired to write history after his consulship under the emperor Nerva. The stated intent of the Dialogus de oratoribus, as Tacitus indicates from the outset, is to explore the reasons for the decline of oratory. To this end, Tacitus sets up his four interlocutors — Maternus, Aper, Messalla, and Secundus — at the house of Maternus, in a situation clearly intended to echo Cicero’s dialogue on rhetoric. James Mayer and Michael Winterbottom both attest to the difficulties of dating the composition of the Dialogus: the best consensus available seems to be sometime between 101 and 104 AD, during the reign of Trajan, the second of the five “good” emperors (moviegoers: in Russell Crowe’s Gladiator role, Marcus Aurelius was the last of the five “good” emperors, succeeded by Commodus, about whom there was indeed a scandal involving a gladiator, if memory serves), though there are other arguments. In terms of form, Mayer points out that the Dialogus “comprises a trio of paired speeches. Each of the three interlocutors speak twice. The set speeches, six in all, have single themes, and are adversarial in form, since the dialogue parodies a trial. In each of the three pairs, the second is shorter” (17). However, Luce takes the same observation a step further, to point out that the form of the Dialogus comes directly out of Seneca the Elder