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Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition
By T. J. Luce, A. J. Woodman PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1993 Princeton University Press
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ISBN: 978-0-691-06988-3
CHAPTER 1
TACITUS AND THE PROVINCE OF ASIA
G. W. Bowersock
It has often been observed that the historian Tacitus took a special interest in the affairs of the province of Asia. In the second book of the Annals he describes in detail the petitions of no fewer than twelve cities of the province for assistance from the Roman government after a devastating earthquake. In the third book of the same work he shows exceptional knowledge of the claims to the right of asylum in various shrines of the same province. By way of introduction to an important new document on Rome and the rights of asylum in Greek sanctuaries, the epigraphist Peter Herrmann saw fit to begin with a review of Tacitus' evidence, which he rightly described as a reflection of the historian's well-known interest in res Asiae. In the fourth book of the Annals eleven cities of Asia present a petition to Rome for a temple of the imperial cult to honor Tiberius, Livia, and the senate.
Although virtually all the material in these chapters devoted to the history of the province of Asia could have been culled from the acts of the senate, and probably was, the interest of the historian in the area does seem to go beyond what might be expected even in a relatively full account of the years he is chronicling. A well-known inscription from the city of Mylasa in the southwest part of the Asian province long ago provided the precious evidence that Cornelius Tacitus had served as a proconsul there, and recent prosopographical research has been able to establish that his tenure of the post fell almost certainly in 112–13.
It was not unnatural, therefore, to postulate some relationship between Tacitus' interest in the history of the province and his service as a governor of it. The classic statement of the connection between Tacitus' work and his proconsulate comes in Ronald Syme's great study of the historian: "There is enough in the second historical work of Tacitus to reveal the man who had held the fasces in that province. Several crowded chapters are taken up with the affairs of Asia." Syme cites in proof of his assertion the three substantial passages on the earthquake, asylum, and temple of the imperial cult. Any reflection of the Asian proconsulate must necessarily be sought only in what Syme calls "the second historical work of Tacitus," namely the Annals, inasmuch as the Histories had undoubtedly been completed well before Tacitus left to take up his position in 112. On Syme's own reckoning, which seems entirely reasonable, the Histories had been completed by 109.
By insisting that the episodes in the second, third, and fourth books of the Annals reflect the proconsulate, Syme is able to bolster his view that Tacitus did not begin writing that work until the last years of the reign of Trajan, who died in 117. To quote Syme's own statement on the time of composition of the Annals, "There will be no reason to suppose that the author had begun writing before 115. It follows that almost all the books of the Annals are Hadrianic." Students of Syme's work will know that the postulate of Hadrianic composition is fundamental for Syme's view that crucial events of the early years of Hadrian are reflected in Tacitus' account of the first years of Tiberius.
Now we should remember that the suggestion that Tacitus' experience as a proconsul in Asia is reflected in the Annals constitutes only an ancillary argument to Syme's case for the late composition of that work. His principal point, which has been much discussed over the years,11 is that the reference in Annals 2.61 to the eastern extremity of the Roman Empire at the time of Germanicus' visit to Egypt must allude to Trajan's Mesopotamian conquests. It will be recalled that in that passage Tacitus records that Germanicus reached Elephantine and Syene (the modern Aswan). These places he describes as formerly the claustra Romani imperii, whereas now (nunc), Tacitus declares, Rome's empire rubrum ad mare patescit.
Syme, like Lipsius centuries before, believed that rubrum mare (or Red Sea) here meant the Persian Gulf. The issue was open because the phrase "Red Sea" can be documented as referring to any part of the Indian Ocean and its offshoots—the Persian Gulf, what we call the Red Sea, the Gulf of Suez, or the Gulf of Aqaba. But the solution of Lipsius and Syme had always had one major problem associated with it, and that is that in the immediately preceding chapter in the same book of the Annals the Parthian Empire appears to be still in full control of its territories and revenues. At the time that Trajan reached the Persian Gulf, the Parthians had already capitulated to him.
The problem has long seemed to me to be resolved decisively in favor of interpreting rubrum mare as what we know today as the Red Sea. Epigraphical evidence that turned up after the publication of Syme's Tacitus has proved that the Roman province of Arabia, annexed in 106, actually extended along the coast of the Red Sea on the northwest side of the Saudi Arabian peninsula. Syme and virtually everyone else had formerly discounted the possibility of a province of such extent. But with the new evidence Tacitus' statement makes perfect sense. There is no point in reexamining this debate in detail. It will suffice simply to observe that, if the argument from rubrum mare has been weakened or, as I believe, collapsed, then the ancillary point about Tacitus' interest in Asia must either be made to support a weight greater than it can bear or else collapse as well.
Neither Syme nor any other scholar ever seems to have asked whether the special interest that Tacitus shows in the affairs of Asia in the Annals is all that different from his interests as reflected in the Histories, which were certainly composed before he went to his proconsulate in Asia. In view of the geographical theater in which the events of 69 take place in the surviving books of the Histories, one could not easily expect extensive discussion of Asia Minor. And yet there are some indications of unusual interest in the region that are not all that different in character from those in the Annals.
Tacitus provides in Book 2 of the Histories an exceptionally detailed account of the career of an adventurer who claimed to be a resurrected Nero—one of the three false Neros to convulse the eastern empire toward the end of the first century. In fact, Tacitus' interest in this renegade in Asia bears striking resemblances to his account of a similar pretender in the Annals in A.D. 31. At that time a person who claimed to be Drusus, the son of Germanicus, wrought havoc throughout the same region as the false Nero later. Tacitus was obviously interested in pretenders, particularly pretenders in the East as well as pretenders who said they were Nero. At the very beginning of the Histories he gives an allusion forward to an account that we unfortunately do not have of the false Nero of 88, a character who would not be known to us at all, were it not for this reference and another equally allusive remark in Suetonius.
It must be acknowledged that such indications of Tacitus' interest in Asia as we can find in the Histories are neither more nor less persuasive than those in the Annals. They constitute a rather frail reed, but they do suggest that Tacitus' interest in the province was not something new when he took up writing the Annals. There is fortunately a far more decisive indication of Tacitus' long-standing interest in Asia. This indication has apparently been wholly overlooked until now, and it would seem to establish that both the Histories and the Annals reflect a common and curious perspective on Asia. It will be readily appreciated that, if they do, the conclusion follows inevitably that Tacitus' proconsulate can have had nothing whatever to do with that interest.
In the Annals Tacitus displays an unusual stylistic habit of conjoining Asia together with Achaea, the province that represented old Greece. For example, in narrating the appearance of the false Drusus in 31 Tacitus declared that Asia and Achaea were terrified ("Asia atque Achaea exterritae"). In another passage he can speak of the agreeable places of the East—"per amoena Asiae atque Achaeae." Later in the Annals we come across the expression "possessa Achaea Asiaque." And in the memorable account of the theft of works of art in the time of Nero, Tacitus writes, "per Asiam atque Achaeam non dona tantum, sed simulacra numinum abripiebantur." It may well be, of course, that in all of these instances what happened happened in both the provinces of Asia and Achaea, but it is hard to believe that there is any good reason for Ieavingout Pontus and Bithynia or Lycia and Pamphylia or Galatia or Macedonia or any number of other parts of that portion of the Roman Empire. The combination of Asia and Achaea seems to come naturally to Tacitus as a phrase.
What is so astonishing, therefore, is that the same stylistic mannerism can be found in several passages in the Histories as well. In particular the account of the false Nero of 69, paralleling that of the false Drusus of 31, begins with exactly the same words, "Achaea atque Asia ... exterritae," although in the Histories Tacitus adds the helpful, if obvious, word falso, "Achaea atque Asia falso exterritae." Elsewhere we find the shores of the Aegean described as "oram Achaeae et Asiae," and in another place a geographical indication "Asia atque Achaea tenus," or again "tuta pone tergum Achaea Asiaque." There is no obvious reason why this conjunction should recur, and in geographical descriptions it is downright confusing, since the two places are at some remove from one another.
This stylistic mannerism of Tacitus does seem to reveal to us something peculiar to himself, not to his theme or to the Latin style of his age. For example, in the biographies of the emperors written by Tacitus' contemporary Suetonius, Asia is mentioned by name fourteen times and Achaea nine times. Never are the two mentioned together. In the correspondence of another of Tacitus' contemporaries, the younger Pliny, there is an interesting reference to eastern lands that were fertile in miracles. Achaea and Asia are among them, but so is Egypt; and hence we read in a letter in Book 8: "Achaea Aegyptus Asia aliaue quaelibet miraculorum ferax commendatrixque terra." Pliny is as instructive as Suetonius in demonstrating that the repeated conjunction of Achaea and Asia alone is simply not natural or to be expected in a writer of this age.
It would appear therefore that Tacitus' interest in Asia, insofar as it can be deduced from his historical narratives, must not only have antedated his proconsulate of Asia in 112–13. For some reason, in his mind, that interest must also be linked somehow to Achaea, which he conjoins with Asia in his thought and style. Obviously we have to ask why this should be; and to find an answer, we must look at the earlier phases of Tacitus' career, before he began work on the Histories.
After a praetorship in 88, during the reign of Domitian, we know from the Agricola that Tacitus was absent on imperial service of praetorian rank for a four-year period or quadriennium. Tacitus was still away on service in August of 93 when his father-in-law Agricola died. This was an absence that pained him to recall since he would have wanted to attend the great man in his final days: "noster hie dolor, nostrum uulnus, nobis tam longae absentiae condicione ante quadriennium amissus est." So between 89 and 93 Tacitus was holding a series of praetorian posts. One is amazed to discover just how little attention has been given to what those posts might have been.
Syme, who recognized in Tacitus a successful senator, reaching the consulate in 97 (just nine years after his praetorship) and moving on, after an appropriate interval, to the pinnacle of the proconsulate of Asia, was convinced that Tacitus must have held praetorian posts appropriate for what he liked to call the uiri militares. But he stated his view of the matter only briefly and very rarely: "It is a fair assumption that Tacitus commanded a legion, as did almost every novus homo ambitious to see his name on the fasti.... If Tacitus' sojourn abroad comprised four full years, it might have terminated with a year as proconsul somewhere in a minor province." Yet, although it might seem natural for Tacitus to have held praetorian posts of this kind, it is by no means necessary. Syme himself, with characteristic precision and candor, recognized that there were several distinguished exceptions to the pattern he outlined. Among them was Pliny himself and the distinguished senator from Perge in Pamphylia, Cornutus Tertullus.
But the most brilliant exception was the eminent citizen of Pergamum, Gaius Antius Aulus Julius Quadratus. Quadratus began his senatorial career under the Flavians, probably late in the reign of Vespasian, by adlection inter praetorios—that is to say, he was made a senator at praetorian rank. He reached a suffect consulate before Domitian's death in the year 94 and continued to prosper, so as to arrive at an ordinary consulate under Trajan in the year 105. This man, who had held two consulates, became proconsul of Asia just three years before Tacitus. It will be noted that his first consulate in 94 also fell just three years before Tacitus' consulate. Yet with so many successes this provincial senator, who made his career to the consulate almost entirely under Domitian, just as Tacitus had done, never commanded a legion as a praetorian. Instead he held three administrative posts in the eastern empire, all in Asia Minor. He was legate of the proconsul in Bithynia–Pontus and then legate of the proconsul in Asia for two years and finally a legate of the large complex of provinces centered on Cappadocia. This last post seems to have been comparable to that of iuridicus in other provinces of the empire. It would accordingly be worth asking whether or not Tacitus too might have spent his quadriennium abroad in administrative positions of a similar kind—legate to a proconsul, in particular legate to a proconsul in Asia.
It so happens that we are acquainted with at least two other legates of proconsuls in Asia during the same period as Quadratus and Tacitus were progressing through the cursus honorum. These two people both have an additional distinguishing characteristic to their service as a proconsul's legate in the East, and that is that they both served as legate in Achaea and Asia. The earlier of the two was another citizen of Pamphylian Perge, M. Plancius Varus, who appears in Tacitus' Histories in 69 already as a praetorian. He seems to have moved to legateships of the proconsuls of both Achaea and Asia early in the reign of Vespasian. Presumably he passed from one post to the other, spending a year in each. The other senator comes from the end of the reign of Domitian. He is known from two inscriptions, one of which proclaims him the first senator of his people. He was a native of Xanthos in Lycia and was the first to reach the senate from the Lycian province. He is M. Arruntius Claudianus, adlected after an equestrian career into the senate at the rank of aedile (inter aedilicios). His translation to the senate can be placed soon after service in the last Danubian war of Domitian in 92. Claudianus passed then to the praetorship and to praetorian posts. These are given as legateships of the proconsuls of Achaea and Asia. His case, however, is slightly different from that of Varus in that he served for two years in Asia instead of one. In this respect he is exactly like Quadratus, who had also spent two years as legate of the proconsul in Asia.
What we see here, then, in the Flavian period is a tendency to combine the legateships of Achaea and Asia, perhaps in order to create a specialization in eastern administration, and even to extend the normal one year of the legateship to two in the case of Asia, It is time, accordingly, to ask whether Tacitus himself could have been a legate of the proconsul first of Achaea and then of Asia, perhaps for two years in the latter province. In other words, when Tacitus went as proconsul himself to Asia in 112, that would not have been his first visit there.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition by T. J. Luce, A. J. Woodman. Copyright © 1993 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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