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Biography and Praise in Trajanic Rome

This chapter addresses Tacitus’ Agricola and Pliny the Younger’s Panegyricus. At first glance, they have little in common. Both written early in Trajan’s principate, one is a short biography of Tacitus’ father-in-law, the other a long speech of thanks addressed to the emperor. However, they are also a complementary, contemporary, and directly connected pair of literary artworks. Tacitus marshals the resources of a long biographical tradition in his brilliant apology for the career of a quietist. Pliny for his part produces a striking account, at once humanizing and mythologizing, of an emperor whose scripted life finds significant origins in the pages of Tacitus. Between privatus and princeps, across biography and encomium, Agricola and Panegyricus together offer striking illumination of the possibilities for textualizing lives in Trajanic Rome.