caa a22 4500 388023619 CHVBK 20180307124931.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130s1998 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0048671X00001879 doi S0048671X00001879 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0048671X00001879 Rutledge Steven University of Maryland Trajan and Tacitus' Audience: Reader Reception of Annals 1-2 [Elektronische Daten] [Steven Rutledge] In his monumental work on Tacitus, Syme suggested that Tacitus made veiled criticisms directed against Hadrian in the Annals; subsequent scholars have not always accepted his suggestion. Yet those scholars who are sceptical of Syme's argument have not yet, on the whole, taken up the question of the reception of Tacitus' work by his contemporaries; this is a peculiar gap, when one considers the politically charged nature of Tacitus' Annals, which places under a miscroscope not only individual emperors, but the institution of the principate itself. It is, therefore, the intent of this essay to examine the audience's reception of Tacitus' Annals within the work's historical and cultural context: for Tacitus' audience (which I assume to consist primarily of elite males of senatorial and equestrian status), an understanding of the past about which he writes was made meaningful in part, I should like to suggest, by the present. Such an approach results in an open-ended understanding of the work, and decentralises it from its author in favour of the audience. The end result is a text which simultaneously questions even as it reaffirms Trajan as princeps. Copyright © Aureal Publications 1998 Ramus Cambridge University Press 27/2(1998), 141-159 0048-671X 27:2<141 1998 27 RMU https://doi.org/10.1017/S0048671X00001879 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0048671X00001879 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Rutledge Steven University of Maryland NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Ramus Cambridge University Press 27/2(1998), 141-159 0048-671X 27:2<141 1998 27 RMU CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge