A reaction against the radical experimental style…
102 CE
A reaction against the radical experimental style of early Silver Age poetry had set in by the end of the first century, and Tacitus, Quintilian and Juvenal all testify to the resurgence of a more restrained, classicizing style under Trajan and the Antonine emperors.
The work of Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus, a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire writing in the latter part of the Silver Age of Latin literature, is distinguished by a boldness and sharpness of wit, and a compact and sometimes unconventional use of Latin.
The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories span the history of the Roman Empire from the death of Augustus in 14 to (presumably) the death of emperor Domitian in 96, examining the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and those that reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors.
There are significant lacunae in the surviving texts.
The date of composition of his Dialogue on Orators on the art of rhetoric.
is unknown, though its dedication to Fabius Iustus places its publication around 102.
The dialogue itself, set in the year 75 or 77, follows the tradition of Cicero's speeches on philosophical and rhetorical arguments.
The beginning of the work is a speech in defense of eloquence and poetry.
It then deals with the decadence of oratory, for which the cause is said to be the decline of the education, both in the family and in the school, of the future orator.
The education is not as accurate as it once was; the teachers are not prepared and a useless rhetoric often takes the place of the general culture.
After an incomplete section, the Dialogue ends with a speech reporting Tacitus's opinion that great oratory was possible with the freedom from any power, more precisely in the anarchy, that characterized the Roman Republic during the civil wars but that it became anachronistic and impracticable in the quiet and ordered society that resulted from the institution of the Roman Empire.
The peace, warranted by the Empire, should be accepted without regret for a previous age that was more favorable to the wide spread of literacy and the growth of great personality.
At the base of all of Tacitus's work is the acceptance of the Empire as the only power able to save the state from the chaos of the civil wars.
The Empire reduced the space of the orators and of the political men, but there is no viable alternative to it.
Nevertheless, Tacitus does not accept the imperial government apathetically, and he shows, as in the Agricola, the remaining possibility of making choices that are dignified and useful to the state.
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