I leave for the conference in Austin on the 27th. I was hoping to have time to draft my paper and run it past the head of the Classics department here, who’s a Tacitus specialist and who was kind enough to do a directed study with me a couple years as a lead-up to being one of my examiners on Roman rhetoric, but it’s end-of-the-semester grade-crunch time, and I don’t think it’d be fair to ask her to look over the paper in the space of three days. (Despite the fact that she’s a wonderfully kind and witty person who makes me wish I still had coursework to do, so I could take another couple of Latin seminars with her and get back into the groove of translating.) Maybe I’ll use the comments at the conference to revise it, and show her a better version afterwards, with some questions about where I might submit it. I was thinking PRE/TEXT might be the best option, but their broken links suggest that the journal may now be defunct — anybody know? JAC might work, I suppose, if I tried to frame it as a call for adding Tacitus to the rhet/comp canon: while I wholly believe in rhet/comp’s feminist “reclaiming” project associated with the classical tradition, it bugs the hell out of me that Aspasia, from whom we have no original writings whatsoever and whose entire history is questionable, gets ten pages in Bizzell and Herzberg, while Tacitus gets zip.
Let me offer one long quotation as further evidence of his relevance. I leave making the concrete and specific connections to our contemporary situation as a perhaps overly facile exercise for the interested reader.
“Tacitus is less concerned with the specific secrets of long-dead emperors and their officials than with the way in which language is used to disguise the truth and deceive the unwary. Calgacus comments that the phrase Pax Romana disguises much violence, and Cerialis warns the Gauls that the Germans use the rallying cry of ‘Freedom’ and other ‘deceptive terms’ (speciosa nomina) merely in order to become their new masters. Tacitus relishes the exposure of official lies and the misuse of language. [. . .] Galba calls his stinginess ‘economy,’ and his cruelty ‘severity.’ Elsewhere defeats were celebrated as triumphs; ‘facts were scorned in favor of appearances.'” (Mellor 94)
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