Literary Style
Tacitus's writings are known for their dense prose that seldom glosses the facts, in contrast to the style of some of his contemporaries, such as Plutarch. When he writes about a near-defeat of the Roman army in Ann. I, 63 he does so with brevity of description rather than embellishment.
In most of his writings he keeps to a chronological narrative order, only seldom outlining the bigger picture, leaving the reader to construct that picture for himself. Nonetheless, where he does use broad strokes, for example, in the opening paragraphs of the Annals, he uses a few condensed phrases which take the reader to the heart of the story.
Read more about this topic: Tacitus
Famous quotes containing the words literary and/or style:
“There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classics did the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy.”
—Paul Horgan (b. 1904)
“Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only.”
—André Malraux (19011976)