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TACITUS ON HOST AGE-TAKING AND HEROISM
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TACITUS ON HOSTAGE-TAKING AND HEROISM
A
t the time when TacitUs was writing the Annals, the theme (){;
<heRomanized,benignlysubsemen~q_í-6lial hos..ge"""',
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deeply ingrained in Roman literatUre. It could be found in multiple authors regardless ofliterary genre., as writers ofthe Republic and eatly Principate usedit as one of the explanati()us ror Rome's prodigious success at the dawn ofits empire. As we have seel! repeatedly, hostage.. taking appeared in new legends for Rome's foundation and accounted foe triumphs over one impressive enemy aner another. The fact th:tt Polybius had done much to debufik: the stereotype of fue quislin: . hostage in his own case in order to gain some amount of credibili with his audienceshows the extent to which it wasconventional wis-i domo PlautUsjoked about it; Julius Caesar braggedabout it; and ináitt' case of AugtlStus, it was literally carved in stone, if one is to judgeby\ the wordsand images on the Res Gestaeand AraPads. Hostage-takin,g . had become an attractive endeavor: transforming a yotmg hostage and exercising influence over him in his later life constitUted an mexpensive, low-'risk method of winning ever more territory, orat least extending Rome's sphere ofinfluence. Longaner TacitUs,beliefin the tactic continued apace, the most telling evidence fur which wouId be the law ofMarcus Aurelius and Luc1us Veras, described in Chapter6, commanding special privileges for the farnilies ofcompliant detail1¡ees. But TácitUs, as we shall see, expressed some objections. Most prominendy in the Annals, Tacitus demolished the model of peac~fui expansion through the device of hostage-taking. Repeatedly he tells stories where foreiga hostages and the Romans who reIy on them fail utterly, while those who reject such a device are vasdy more
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TIBERIUS, GERMANICUS,
AND THE EAST
Throughout his record of Tiberius's policies with regard to Parthia and Armenia, TacitUs performs a thorough character assassination of 1
2
For a similar study ofTacitus's use of the figure of the client king in developing his characters. see Keitel 1978 and especia1ly Gowing 1990. Campbell 1993, 218 sees Tacitus's accounts of the failure of the hostages as an indictment ofParthia as an uncivilized land. See Mattern 1999, 176 on the importance ofthe perception ofvictory over Parthia. For a survey of scholarship on Tacitus's opinion of the Pax Romana, see Benario 1991.
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effective.1 Figures such as Germanicus and Corbulo handle hostages in what he views as propedy heroic ways, onen specifica11yworking against the commonly understood roles for hostages oudined in this book, whereas criticism is leve1ed, sometimes implicidy, sometimes explicidy, against Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero, whose policies in geopolitics and dependence on hostages are seen as insufficient measures not in keeping with old Roman. values ofsheer destruction and humiliation of the enemy.2 Tacitusconsciously plays on his.readers,' expectations concerning hostagesin order!t()~~chieve his purpose:he will often first descripe the deployment of a hostage in accordance with the various themes ofhostage-taking -mostnotably those of reeducation andquasi-adoption recording eXcessiveoptimism on the part of those who control the hostage;but then underrnine these>expectations by revealingtllatthehostage'in question soondisapp(}ints, ahdmatters must be set1aright by oneof the historian'sheroes.. .Tadtus's negat~ve evaluation.of certain aspects ofhostage-taking is different from thatof Polybius discussed inthe preceding chapter:whereas Polybius denied the. assimila~~ve.qualityof hostage-taking in his case, Tacitus accepted that foreign hostages could be thoroughly reformed but denied that such aprocess. had any value for Rome in the long run.The .historian instead repeats. certain criticisms'of hostage figures, recasting them as illusory, dilatory, decadent, or weak, u;ua11ybecauseoftheirándOctri:-nation.Four'cases ttOtrl Tacitus's Annals are considered.iri this..chapter asexamples oHhehistorian'sview that those who manipulatehOstages by,focusingon theircoerGive value and ignoringtheir role asvassals are modylRomanswhose success servedto cast thevillainy and ineptitude ofthe JuHo--Clandian emperors in sharp relief.
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