Abstract
This article uses the depiction of the city in the Agricola 21, a key text of Romanisation, to examine Tacitean imperial politics and the relationship between space and power. Following a growing tradition of reading the Agricola as a geographical as much as a historical text, the article argues for Tacitean ambivalence as fundamental to the Agricola, not in the sense of Tacitus being undecided about empire; ambivalence is not manifest in a dichotomous reading of empire as Romans against barbarians, but in the subject position of Tacitus and his assumed readers and in their relationship to the imperial project. Ambivalence constructs a third space which is not a temporal stage (a transitional moment in the historical process of acculturation, between barbarian and Roman), but foundational: this ambivalence exists in contrast and opposition to the utopian visions of an imperial city that we find in the Agricola, a city which is ‘flat’ or one-dimensional.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The Production of Space in Latin Literature |
Editors | William Fitzgerald, Efrossini Spentzou |
Place of Publication | Oxford |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Chapter | 10 |
Pages | 235-259 |
Number of pages | 25 |
ISBN (Print) | 9780198768098 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 22 Mar 2018 |
Keywords
- Space
- Tacitus
- Lefebvre
- Imperialism
- Rome