The Diaries Tacitus Analysis

In Book 16 of The Annals, Tacitus constructs a list of suicides and deaths. The deaths are all structured similarly: Tacitus gives context for the punishment before describing the death itself. Though following this formulaic structure, the depiction of Petronius’s death strays from the somberness expected from suicides. Petronius, instead, spends his moments between life and death talking to friends on frivolous topics. He carries on with his daily affairs, preparing dinner and sleeping. We are aware from the beginning of the passage that Petronius can control not only his last few actions while living but also the rate of his death, closing and opening his wounds at his inclination. What is achieved through this control? Why is it that frivolous …show more content…
As the scene continues, we watch Petronius met out justice to slaves. Tacitus remarks, “To some of his slaves, he presented gifts, to others a whipping” (16.19). The parallelism in the sentence gives each part of the sentence equal weight. As such, the sentence reads as a list that, though holding a note of finality, also holds a note of mundanity. The following sentence is constructed similarly, speaking to Petronius’s more routine actions. Here, Petronius starts dinner and “lets himself drop off to sleep” (16.19). But unlike the preceding sentences, Tacitus adds a motive for these trivialities, elaborating that Petronius sleeps “so that his death…might look natural” (16.19). This implication that Petronius asserts control for the “appearance” of his death suggests an incorporation of performance in his death. We are left to ask: are his prior actions—the perversion of values, the levity of his suicide—also part of a performance? This perspective of Petronius’s death would explain why similarities between Seneca’s and Petronius’s death are so explicit with the common vein of control, allusions to Stoic values, and nearly word-by-word reference to the aforementioned “philosophical tenets”: Petronius’s response to Stoicism is through performing a successful Stoic death. Yet with the only other occurrences of performance associated with Nero , Tacitus also seems to be associating …show more content…
The structure of the passage seems to suggest that Tacitus has been subtly confronting us with this tension. Petronius does not allow “fear or hope to further delay him” but delays his own death by bandaging his wounds; Tacitus mentions examples of Stoic topics but writes that Petronius talks on frivolous topics; Petronius gives gifts to some slaves and whips others; Petronius starts dinner in what appears to be an effort to live but falls asleep before finishing it. Perhaps this conflict is inherent to Tacitus’s intention—the fact that Petronius is able to intertwine such control in a performance remarks on the state of Roman affairs, in which performances have become equivalent with assertions of control. The same man who is known for his frivolity becomes the one who asserts control over Nero’s dictatorship. And, with that, the aforementioned comparison to Seneca serves as the point of reference, where attempts to live virtuously and without illusion fail. In this implication and presentation of control in a performance, Tacitus asserts that the one-man rule has not just perverted traditional Roman values but has reversed them in their entirety. At the same time, it is the nature of performance in this text that reflects a deeper commentary on its illusionary element. The structure of the passage becomes a performance in its own right, putting forth