COLLOQUIUM: Cynthia Damon, UPENN, "Quod vix credibile: On parentheses in Tacitus."

Parentheses number among the stylistic devices used by Tacitus to disrupt the flow of his narrative and to make himself manifest in his account of the past. They open gaps in the text, and through these gaps we can see more meaning, be it subtext placed there by the author or a snippet of an implicit, if one-sided, conversation between author and reader. In short, the disruptive parenthesis helps Tacitus inculcate a “reading between the lines” approach to the history of the principate.