The Utopian City in Tacitus’ Agricola

This chapter explores Tacitus’ reading of the question of the relationship of the individual to empire in the Agricola. Tacitus constructed an understanding of Rome’s empire as a total system to which there was no spatial or temporal outside. Although it was impossible to imagine Rome without empire, Tacitean ambivalence constructed a third space, neither imperial nor barbarian, in which Tacitus could refuse assimilation into the discourses of empire. Reading the description of the Agricolan city in Agricola 21 alongside the anti-imperial sentiments of Calgacus’ speech (Agricola 30–2), the second section establishes the totalitarian nature of imperial time and space. The concluding section considers the preservation of humanitas in an empire of servitude and argues that Tacitean humanitas is a form of detachment. In comfortable immunitas, the elite could preserve the transcendental values of humanitas, but only through acquiescence in the violent production of imperial spaces and times.