الفكاهة في الأعمال التاريخية لتاسيتوس

Emma Warhofer's book Humor in Tacitus's Historical Works explores how the ancient Roman historian Tacitus employed humor in his historical writings, and reveals the importance of these humorous elements. Because Tacitus is considered one of the most important ancient sources on Rome's emperors Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero, his readers were greatly challenged by his deliberately ambiguous style, full of unbalanced grammatical constructions and surprises at the end of sentences. Tacitus's eccentric prose reflects the extraordinary era he wrote about, when emperors imposed strange and contradictory demands on their subjects and lied outright to cover up the cruelty of their regimes. In serious texts such as Tacitus's historical works, humor can expose the hypocrisy of powerful people, show the absurdity of imperial proclamations, and at the same time show why these excesses were allowed to continue. Warhofer argues that key elements of Tacitus's distinctive style, such as variations, adjuncts, and aphorisms, add humor, and that Tacitus deliberately used them to emphasize the contradictions that emerged from the empire. In his use of humor, Tacitus followed the Roman rhetorical tradition evident in the writings of Cicero and Quintilian, who agreed that humor was an important tool of criticism. So, for Tacitus, humor was not merely amusement or decoration, but an integral part of his historical construction.