Although I can't claim to have formulated this research program in advance, I have kept fairly consistently to the general theme of how writing communicates, pursuing it along different lines and in a variety of texts both Latin and Greek. For the past decade the focus has been Roman historical narrative, but my current project, on Pliny's encyclopedic Natural History and its reception, is taking me into a new genre and new periods.
My curiosity about the pragmatics of communication makes the commentary a natural format for me, the more so because it combines easily with teaching: both undertakings depend on figuring out what students need to know and how to deliver it. I have written two brief commentaries (on Augustus' Res Gestae and Nepos' Life of Atticus) and a more substantial and scholarly commentary on the first book of Tacitus' Histories. My aim in this project was to reintegrate Histories 1 into the corpus of teachable Latin texts. Tacitus is arguably the most powerful writer of Latin--to this day it requires great discipline to resist his interpretation of events--and the reader's best defence, and greatest pleasure, lie in an understanding of how his style works. This I try to supply. Other manifestations of my interest in how authors create meaning are articles on rhetoric and narrative technique, and a book, written with a former teacher, on Julius Caesar's Civil War. A literary study of a work typically used as an historical source, the book explores the rhetoric of the Civil War and its effectiveness for an audience that had lived through the war and even opposed Caesar during that war. We ourselves address a broad audience, our aim being to convey the understated brilliance of Caesar's prose to any and all readers.
My more technical articles are incorrigibly miscellaneous investigations into topics in Roman history and Latin literature in which it has seemed to me that progress could be made. This series will continue as my research and teaching leads me into fascinating (to me) byways such as these.
