SOURCE: O'Gorman, Ellen. “Introduction: Irony, History, Reading.” In Irony and Misreading in the “Annals” of Tacitus, pp. 1-22. Cambridge, U. K: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, O'Gorman contends that the very structure of Tacitus's sentences in the Annals conveys meaning and that he deliberately uses complex and ironic passages to force readers to engage in reflection.

The ironist aspires to be somebody who gets in on some redescription, who manages to change some parts of the vocabularies being used. The ironist wants to be a strong poet.

Michael Roth, The Ironist's Cage

Sentence Structure and Historical Interpretation

Tacitus is a notoriously difficult writer; the central theme of this study is what the difficulty of Tacitus means and what are the possible ways a reader can respond to this difficulty. Examining what a difficulty means is a rather different action to examining what a difficulty is: in...