Many of the chapters in this book explore in their different ways the distinctive character of Tacitus as a historian. This one will sketch some of his general conceptions of history and show how he conveys them. / A philosophy of history? / Did Tacitus have a general philosophy of why things happen and, if so, does he make it explicit? Can we look to him for a theory of history, for systematic thinking about human life and its vicissitudes? The signs are not good, for no one who has considered these questions has emerged with a plausible picture of Tacitus as a thinker. On the contrary, opinions are divided between those who blame him for muddle-headedness and those who justify the muddle. 'Certitude is not given to mortals, and Tacitus is redeemed by his respect for the eternal ambiguities', writes Syme at the conclusion of his discussion. B. Walker, charitably, had pointed to a deep pessimism as the only unifying idea.

Tacitus' great reputation owes as much to his style as to the content of his writings, the two being fused in notable harmony. Yet the expression 'his style' is potentially misleading. First, just as a well-trained composer can compose in different genres and styles, so a well-trained Latin writer could write in more than one style. Most of this chapter will be devoted to discussion of the historical styles found in the Histories, the Annals and much of the Agricola, but Tacitus' splendid Dialogus is a virtuoso performance in a neo-Ciceronian style that is the equal of anything in Quintilian. Second, even in his historical works Tacitus' style varies: in particular, speeches tend to have more pointed phrasing and less grand vocabulary than narrative.Third, Tacitus' style developed throughout his writing career, becoming more idiosyncratic as it progressed: compared to the later Annals, the earlier Agricola and the Germania are less taut, compressed and solemn. Even the most distinctive of artists owe much to their predecessors and the fashions of the age in which they worked; we shall see that earlier historians, especially Sallust, and the pointed style fashionable in his own times are the dominant influences on Tacitus' historical style.

There is a long tradition of treating Rilke as a philosophical poet. Perhaps the most prominent of those who have done so is Martin Heidegger, for whom Rilke was, in Hölderlin's phrase, 'a poet in time of need'. But Heidegger is not alone. One of the first books by Otto F. Bollnow, the philosopher of vitalism, was an in-depth study of Rilke (1951). The phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz derived the title of one of his books, The Inexhaustible Object (1990), from one of The Sonnets to Orpheus (II: 6), explaining his entire philosophical project with reference to this text. And to the list of those who have offered significant readings of Rilke, one should add a range of such philosophers, theologians and critics as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gabriel Marcel, Franz Josef Brecht, Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen, Romano Guardini, Käte Hamburger, Maurice Blanchot, and Hans Urs von Balthasar.

It is true that Rilke was never a philosopher in his own right, and it would be a mistake to read him on the purely propositional level. But it would equally be mistaken to assume that, because Rilke's ambitions were aesthetic, his work has no philosophical dimension, or that his conception of what it means to be a poet does not have philosophical implications.In his essay of 1902 on the great Belgian Symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck, Rilke specifically problematised the relationship between the task of the philosopher (the search for truth) and the task of the poet (the search for beauty), for in his view these two activities are now more closely linked than ever before (KA iv, 217). As we shall see, Rilke was right about this, not least in the case of his own work.

One of the most notable innovations in nineteenth-century literary culture was mechanical rather than imaginative: the printing machine introduced by the London-based German inventor Friedrich Koenig in 1811. It replaced the old-fashioned rectangular hand-press with a more efficient, steam-powered, cylinder, thereby hugely increasing publishing capacity. Over the succeeding decades technology developed to the point that by the mid-1850s the wonderful machine had increased production ten-fold and beyond, from around 500 printed sheets per hour to more than 8,000. To give but one instance, the most successful London daily newspaper, The Times, saw its print capacity multiplied at a stroke as a result of these innovations. Pre-Koenig, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the paper had daily runs of between 2,500 and 3,000 copies, but by 1855 it sold around 60,000 per diem. This rapid growth in sales of the 'Thunderer', as it was nicknamed, is indicative of the expansion of print culture in the Victorian era. From the 1830s onwards there was both an insatiable appetite for print and, for the first time, the means to satisfy that craving, making this period the first era of mass-market publishing in Great Britain.

Facilitated by the contemporary industrialization - as it might be called - of print culture, some entrepreneurial publishers turned their attention to the needs of what E. P. Thomson has taught us to think of as the newly made working class. If the era from the 1720s to the 1740s – according to orthodox literary history – was the period in which the emergence of the English novel catered to the cultural tastes of a newly literate middle class, then, a century later, the decades from the 1820s to the 1840s are often seen as the age in which, in analogous fashion, ‘penny literature’ served the literary appetites of a nascent working-class reading public.

Nero is portrayed by all the ancient literary sources as a dilettante with artistic pretensions, a ruler who disgraces himself by performing publicly as a chariot racer, lyre player and actor. He is also a murderer who wreaks havoc on his own family and the upper classes at Rome, the ruinous conclusion to the Julio-Claudian dynasty. In terms of composition and structure, the Neronian books are significantly different from Books 1-6. Instead of one major contrasting character to the princeps, such as Germanicus in Annals 1-2, Tacitus presents many. As Syme observed, Tacitus did not want the history of this period to be just the history of Nero. Many of these characters are put to death at the order of the princeps. By focusing on Tacitus' accounts of these deaths, we can see clearly how the historian frequently uses them to bring out strong contrasts between the characters of the victims and that of Nero, or, on occasion, to show their similarities. Such an examination will also touch on some of the central themes of the Neronian narrative.

In a groundbreaking essay in 1966, Käte Hamburger noted that the interest of philosophers in Rilke's work is no accident. Her point is carefully formulated: it is not that the answerable style of Rilke's poetry makes it sympathetic to philosophical interrogation, but rather that by avoiding explicitly conceptual forms it is able to respond in its own terms to philosophical positions. In this essay I focus on engagements with Rilke's poetry in the philosophical work of Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot; and, responding to them, in the criticism of Paul de Man.

Stefan Zweig - Robert Musil

Long before this philosophical interest, however, Rilke's poetic vision provoked sophisticated responses among his contemporaries. Perhaps the most penetrating early account of the New Poems is Stefan Zweig's review in the Literary Echo (Das literarische Echo) at the end of 1908. Observing a transition from musicality to plasticity via certain painterly qualities in The Book of Images (1902, 1906), Zweig finds a new strength and immediacy in poems that present 'a singular thing, like a drop of water held up as a mirror against the sky, an object that a single second enriches with all the life of its surroundings, a shard of the everyday set in its place within the inordinate'. Much here is prescient. The sound effects of Rilke's verse will become a crucial consideration for de Man's critique, for instance. Zweig notes how an inert object or a fragmentary moment is seen as a richly social event, illustrated by his only quotation from the poems.

Virtually all ancient historians give a high prominence to speeches. This is a complex reflection of various related strands of the societies of Greece and Rome. For one thing, in antiquity persuasion through speeches played a central political role, and hence speeches needed to be represented as a significant causal factor in history. But there is a second aspect too: precisely because of the key political role of oratory, rhetoric was central in the education of the upper classes from whose ranks historians were invariably drawn. Hence historians found it very natural to interpret history through the presentation of speeches that both discussed and putatively influenced that history, and indeed to insert speeches largely or entirely of their own composition to illustrate key themes underlying historical events. Such speeches were often constructed to appear realistic - they were presented in direct speech and thus strongly mimetic, purporting to represent the speaker's actual words. But that formal similarity to real speeches is to some degree an illusion, for it is surprisingly rare for a political speech that appears in an historical text genuinely to be something that could actually have been delivered on the purported occasion. The most obvious point is that real speeches, such as those published by Demosthenes or Cicero, tend to be considerably longer than their counterparts in historians. The latter, though sometimes following a traditional oratorical format in outline, are typically far more terse and selective in developing their arguments.

This chapter will trace the vigorous, if sometimes curious, afterlife of the poet in the English-speaking world, with a view to exploring the phenomenon that the writer John Bayley called 'Rilke-in-English', and also in order to turn the spotlight back on Rilke and ask what this reception reveals about him and his work. It is an intriguing paradox that Rilke, who had little affinity for Anglo-Saxon culture and indeed demonstrated a marked hostility towards many aspects of it, should have become in America today 'the most popular German literary export to the country outside of Goethe'. The history of his reception in Germany and Austria had been fraught: inevitably bound up with the need to come to terms with Fascism after the Second World War. Although Rilke himself was not a Nationalist and was not favoured by the regime, he was much emulated during the Third Reich and his works were often distorted to suit the dominant mood. After 1945 his reputation suffered, with poets suspicious of his aloof aestheticism at a time when the political credentials of poetry were uppermost. Indeed his quasi-mystical inwardness was so out of tune with the prevailing post-war tone that critics failed to identify any kind of Rilke-school in the emerging voices after 1945 and the poet Hilde Domin even complained of a Rilke 'black-out'.

Rilke was in the end too formative a poet in the German language for other poets to ignore him for long. By the 1970s, and certainly by the centenary of his birth in 1975, it was clear that his influence had continued working at a subterranean level and now emerged onto the scene as a decisive voice.

One of the most famous cycles of poems written in German in the twentieth century, and arguably one of the best known from any era, Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies (published in 1923) have remained remarkably influential into the twenty-first century. Translations into many languages are still being actively produced, with at least seven new translations into English alone since the turn of the millennium. Rilke's work has inspired not only major English-speaking writers such as American novelists Thomas Pynchon, British poet W. H. Auden, and American poet James Merrill but also writers from Iran (Sadegh Hedayat), the former Czechoslovakia (Milan Kundera), and India (Amitav Ghosh) - among many others. Composers such as Britain's Oliver Knussen, Russia's Dimitri Shostakovich, Denmark's Per Nørgård, Norway's Arne Nordheim and America's Morten Lauridsen have all set Rilke to music. Popular culture continues to absorb Rilke's writing and reproduces it in surprising venues ranging from self-help manuals to films to contemporary Indie rock groups. What is it about Rilke's work, and in particular the Duino Elegies, that fascinates so many readers? One answer might be that Rilke draws from a diverse cultural background. As a world traveller and lover of other traditions, Rilke is influenced by many cultures in addition to those of German-speaking countries: including, among others, Russia, where he travelled with Lou Andreas-Salomé, Scandinavia, where he stayed with Ellen Key, and France, whose poets, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry, he admired.

Tacitus' first historical work can be dated with unusual precision. Internal evidence indicates that he was writing the preface to the Agricola between October 97 and late January 98 and that he was finishing the work after Trajan had become emperor (3.1, 44.5). Since we know from Pliny (Ep. 2.1.6) that Tacitus was suffect consul in 97, he may even have started writing the Agricola while still in office. Tacitus described the Agricola (3.3) as an 'interim book' and said that in due course he would write a larger work covering both the reign of Domitian (81-96) and the present time. This larger work, which we know as the Histories and which in the event covered the years 69-96 but excluded the present time, was in progress around 107, since that is the approximate date of the letter in which Pliny refers to it (Ep. 7.33.1). In the Histories (1.1.4) Tacitus repeated his promise of writing about the present time, but in his last and most celebrated work, the Annals, he went further back still to the years 14-68. The composition of the Annals seems to belong to the period after 113, when he returned from his proconsulship of Asia, but the precise dates are unknown. Of his two other shorter works, the Germania is assumed to have been written in 98; the date of the Dialogus remains unclear: the most likely year is perhaps 102, when Fabius Iustus (to whom the work is dedicated) was consul; but this is not certain and the evidence is disputed.

In 1894, the publisher John Lane issued a prospectus regarding his forthcoming periodical The Yellow Book. In it, he encourages the notion that the volumes' physical surfaces and reputation will mark their owners as discriminating connoisseurs. According to the prospectus, the quarterly would 'depart as far as may be possible from the bad old traditions of periodical literature', and 'provide an Illustrated Magazine which will be as beautiful as a piece of book-making, modern and distinguished in its letter-press and its pictures'. The pages of the first volume, Lane ensures readers, are 'now being especially woven' and the book will be 'bound in limp yellow cloth'. In reality, the periodical was produced with paper that was not unique; for example, it is not rag (that is, it is not made entirely of cotton or linen) and it has no watermark or other indication of special manufacture. The image of exclusivity fabricated through the prospectus reflected neither the material resources nor the cost of production. Lane's language makes apparent not so much the preciousness of the objects as his desire for potential purchasers to expect them to be precious. The rhetoric also captures the popularization of the image of exclusivity that was a driving force behind the rise of commodity culture.

At the same time that Lane issued the prospectus, he also paid to have information about the forthcoming journal appear in other periodicals. This tactic, as Margaret Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner point out, reflects the populist aspirations on the part of Lane who ‘took every opportunity to insist upon the significance of this venture and to instruct readers in the proper way of receiving it’. In light of Matthew Arnold’s well-known descriptions in Culture and Anarchy (1869) of upper-class refinements as exclusionary and useless, and of the ‘raw and unkindled masses of humanity’ as incompetent at discerning cultural value, Lane’s effort to fuse high-culture tastes with mass appeal can appear to be an enterprise destined to failure.

The work of Tacitus most single-mindedly focused on war (at least in its surviving portion) is unquestionably the Histories. From the point when Vitellius begins his invasion of Italy (1.51) war stands consistently at the centre of the narrative, as the war between Vitellius and Otho gives way to one between Vitellius and Vespasian, which is almost immediately succeeded by the narrative of the revolt of Civilis, punctuated in Book 5 by the beginning of the Jewish War. Although this may be part of what has made the Histories considerably less popular than the Annals among modern readers - military history appealing to a narrower audience than political and dynastic intrigue - it is entirely expected of a historical narrative in the ancient world. Indeed it was commonplace for an entire history to focus on (as it might be) 'the Peloponnesian War' or 'the Jugurthine War'; and even when (as with Livy) the history purported to cover all the events, domestic as well as foreign, of a state over a longer period, war was often used for the purposes of structural articulation within the narrative (so Livy groups many of his books in 'pentads' and 'decades' according to the wars that were taking place in them).

With the benefit of hindsight Tacitus can single out a moment for emphasis that may seem trivial when viewed from a contemporary perspective. Claudius is the subject of one such moment in 20. Thanks are proposed in the senate to individual members of the imperial family for avenging the death of Germanicus. L. Asprenas draws attention to the omission of Claudius' name, and it is added at the end. Pondering the moment, insignificant in itself, Tacitus is struck by 'the mockeries made of mortal affairs in every business: in fame, in hope, and in veneration everyone was destined for imperial power rather than the future princeps whom fortune was keeping in hiding' (3.18.4). Tacitus clearly relished the irony of the situation, and it gave him the opportunity to glance forward in his work.In 20 Claudius had been forgotten, as he would later be in 41 before the discovery that resulted in his elevation to Empire; and his liminal presence under Tiberius prefigures his marginality in his own reign. Claudius' passivity will become the central feature of Tacitus' portrait of an emperor dominated by his wives and freedmen.

Readers of Roman history in early modern Europe showered praise on the timeless universality of Tacitus' wisdom: 'In iudgement there is none sounder, for instruction of life, for al times', wrote the author of the English translation of the Annals and Germania. But students of Tacitus in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also believed that his writings communed directly with their own present; that Tacitus revealed political truths to all ages, but most especially 'to these our times'. Tacitus had been largely forgotten or overlooked in the medieval and early Renaissance periods, and, despite the print publication of his works in various editions from the 1470s, his relative obscurity persisted in the sixteenth century. The magisterial editions of Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) from 1574 to 1607, however, anticipated a change in scholarly and political culture in the later sixteenth century, when Tacitus enjoyed an overwhelming and unprecedented popularity. Between 1600 and 1649 at least sixty-seven editions of the Annals and Histories were printed. The major works were translated into various vernacular languages, widening the readership of an author whose prose was deemed difficult even in a Latinate culture. Writers modelled the style, content and structure of their own histories on Tacitus, whilst the Annals in particular supplied dramatists with the most lurid of plots to realise on the stage.

The dates at which each of Tacitus' works was published is not known for certain, but it is generally accepted that they were written and published in a period of roughly twenty years, beginning in 98 (the year after his consulship) and in the order opera minora ('lesser works': Agricola, Germania, Dialogus), Histories, Annals . Though Tacitus was well known in his lifetime as a public figure, the prophecy of his friend, Pliny the Younger, that his histories would be immortal (Ep. 7.33.1) seemed unlikely to be fulfilled, for Tacitus was never a popular author, and during the next four centuries there are only a few references to him by name and an even smaller number of quotations from him. According to a statement in the fourth-century Historia Augusta the emperor Tacitus (275-6) ordered that copies of all Tacitus' works were to be made and placed in public libraries. Though that statement may not be literally true, a germ of truth may lie behind it, namely, that at that time works of Tacitus were scarce and hard to come by. The only significant sign of a Tacitean influence in this period is that the late fourth-century historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, a Greek by birth, but writing in a highly individualised Latin style, proclaimed that his work continued the narrative of events from where Tacitus had left off. However, one statement from late antiquity is of importance for the manuscript tradition.

Scholars in the early decades of the twentieth century were responsible for ethnographically oriented studies that invalidated much of the preceding, mostly nineteenth-century, scholarship. Tacitus, particularly in the first half of the Germania, is guided as much by ethnographical commonplaces and generalisations as by any individual or empirically derived autopsy. As Syme succinctly put it, 'If Cornelius Tacitus was ever on the Rhine, he discloses no sign of it in the Germania'. Sources were available, from Posidonius to Caesar, to Pliny's Bella Germaniae (and the Naturalis Historia as well), to Aufidius Bassus' Bellum Germanicum. Information could have been had from returning merchants and soldiers, as was the case with Pliny. But Tacitus does not tell us much on any of this. Rives, following Lund, is surely right: 'although the work does contain a few verifiable observations, it is so shaped by ethnographic preconceptions as to be virtually unusable as a historical source'. Hence the somewhat hostile reaction of Syme. Rives himself mitigates Lund's historiographically bleak assessment, looking in particular to archaeological and other records, and suggesting that use of Tacitus involves 'careful evaluation and a willingness to acknowledge uncertainty'. But the fact remains that the Germania is far from reliable as a historical, anthropological or sociological work, however important it has been in the realm of reception. So the question remains as to what precisely the Germania is trying to be or do. There is also the question of how we are to read it.

Only two ancient historians, Tacitus and Thucydides, have had a direct and enduring influence on how modern historians understand and write history. While Tacitus does not enjoy the status of Thucydides as required reading still in philosophy and politics courses, his influence is clearly evident on the two greatest historians of imperial Rome, Edward Gibbon and Sir Ronald Syme. Indeed, it is this triumvirate of an ancient, early modern and modern historian that is responsible for the prevalent pessimistic view that, for all its achievements in so many realms, Rome under the emperors was an environment of ambition, deceit and violence. Syme (1903-89) was a New Zealander but from the age of twenty-two Oxford was his home, first as an undergraduate at Oriel College (1925-7), then from 1929 as Fellow of Trinity College. He moved to Brasenose College in 1949 when elected Camden Professor of Ancient History, was knighted in 1959 and, upon his retirement in 1970, was elected a Fellow of Wolfson College. In 1976 he was appointed to the Order of Merit, one of the highest honours bestowed by the monarch in the United Kingdom and restricted to twenty-four members at any one time. The author of more than a dozen scholarly books and over two hundred articles and essays on the history, historiography and prosopography of Rome, Syme, along with Theodor Mommsen, is generally recognised as one of the two greatest Roman historians of the modern era.

New Poems, published in 1907, and New Poems: The Other Part, published in 1908, together constitute the first of the four major works on which Rilke's reputation rests. We follow Rilke in using the shorthand New Poems to speak of both volumes as a unit, since, notwithstanding differences between the two volumes, they are parts of a single poetic project. Readers have generally agreed with Rilke that these 189 poems (under 172 titles, nine announcing sequences), written mostly in Paris between 1903 and 1908, are something 'new' in his work. Strongly influenced by the example of the sculptor Auguste Rodin, whose secretary Rilke was from September 1905 to May 1906 and on whose work he had written and lectured, Rilke turned in the New Poems to a sharp focus on the individual poem as a crafted and freestanding structure. The resulting poems have often been called 'made things', the more so because the most famous of them are also about individual objects, and although we shall have to emphasise other, sometimes countervailing, aspects of the poems as well, it is not hard to see the reasons for this description.

Taken as a collection of self-sufficient things, the New Poems have been characterised as a museum. All but a handful of the 172 titles could very easily be the names of paintings or sculptures. Some are the names of paintings or sculptures: ‘Early Apollo’, ‘Cretan Artemis’, the three Buddha poems, ‘L’Ange duMéridien’, ‘Portrait of My Father as a Young Man’, ‘Self-Portrait 1906’, ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, ‘Lady Before the Mirror’.

Searching for skepticism in medieval philosophy seems to be a vain enterprise, because no philosopher in the Christian tradition radically doubted or even denied the possibility that human beings can have knowledge. Nor did thinkers in the Jewish or Islamic tradition categorically refute the claim that human knowledge is possible, despite their criticisms of the incompleteness and fallibility of our cognitive faculties. All of them agreed that our faculties enable us to acquire a wide range of knowledge – of material things as well as of mental, mathematical, and other intelligible objects. Their main concern was not to establish that we can have knowledge but to explain how, that is, by what kind of cognitive mechanism, we are able to acquire it. There is no evidence that they were interested in Pyrrhonism, one of the main forms of ancient skepticism that aimed to show how one can reach “mental tranquility” and a happy life by suspending all beliefs. Although a Latin translation of Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism was available before 1300, this key text had no visible impact on debates in Western Europe. All philosophers in the Latin tradition subscribed to the thesis that we are entitled to have beliefs; they even claimed that we need beliefs to choose specific actions and to pursue a happy life. Thanks to Cicero’s Academica and Augustine’s Contra academicos, Academic skepticism, the second major form of ancient skepticism, was to some extent known during the Middle Ages. But it did not spark an extensive debate or a “skeptical crisis.” Medieval authors in the Latin West occasionally referred to skeptical arguments and examples presented in these texts (such as cases of sensory illusions and dream experiences), but without drawing radical skeptical conclusions.