How The Annals of Imperial Rome drew on The Works of Cicero
A documented line of influence: Publius Cornelius Tacitus demonstrably engaged Marcus Tullius Cicero’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Works of Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero · c. 50 BCE
Ancient RomeThe influenced
The Annals of Imperial Rome
Publius Cornelius Tacitus · c. 117
Ancient RomeRelevance
4/10
On The Annals of Imperial Rome’s page
- Tacitus learned his craft on Cicero — the Ciceronian rhetoric of his teacher Quintilian stands behind everything he wrote, and his own Dialogus is patterned on De Oratore and Brutus
- The Annals both alludes to Cicero and pushes hard away from him: the famous broken, compressed style is a deliberate refusal of the flowing Ciceronian sentence
- Read Cicero first and you hear what Tacitus is rebelling against in every clipped line
On The Works of Cicero’s page
- Cicero is the rhetorical bedrock Tacitus was trained on — his Quintilian-led education was avowedly Ciceronian, and his Dialogus de Oratoribus is openly modeled on De Oratore, Brutus, and Orator
- But the Annals is also a swerve away: its clipped, jagged prose defines itself against Cicero's balanced period, reaching instead toward Sallust