call per quae egeritur humus aut exciditur caespes per quae etc.

[ricardienne]

It never ceases to amuse me that Tacitus literally *does not* call a spade a spade.

The only upside of having signed up for an article presentation in German (it was stupid, yes) is that I get to read pages and pages of 19th century German squee about Tacitus. That, I can get behind.

To be sure this style (the charming and comfortable style of Herodotus, Xenophon, and Livy) has its own great advantages. However, history contains greater themes which it is able to fulfill with difficulty. Powerful struggles, enormous vicissitudes of great individuals and whole nations, the irrepressible passions that wrestle with one another -- these will, if we are to be wholly aware of them, have to be portrayed in a different style than one whose primary aim is to amuse us. The greatest historians of antiquity are above all aware of these stronger themes: Thucydides, Sallust, and Tacitus, and one can say that their greatness lies even in this awareness. They discerned that the task of history was not to amuse, but to apprehend and to ravish, and to impart to the reader the same powerful movement that roars in the life of history." --Nipperdey, Die Antike Historiographie

Who writes semnôs (=with solemnity), he writes first of all in an high style. In all of ancient literature, which indeed until the time of its decline bore an aristocratic exclusivity, there was no writer (with just possibly Thucydides excepted), who wrote so thoroughly in a high register as Tacitus. "I hate everything that is common" sounds around us on every side. He never descends to the level of his reader, he insists that one come to him, but he makes it difficult: he disdains to insert pleasant digressions for the amusement of the reader; there are indeed a few digressions, but they do not serve pleasure, being rather, as in Thucydides and Sallust, political or cultural-historical or personal (especially Annals 4.32) in content.--Eduard Norden, Die Antike Kunstprosa