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TACITUS: DIALOGUS DE ORATORIBUS. Edited by ROLAND MAYER. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics). 2001. Pp. x, 227.
THE DIALOGUS DE ORATORIBUS is the most elusive of Tacitus' works and the most difficult to understand. It survives only in fifteenth-century manuscripts that share one large lacuna (between chapters 35 and 36) and are full of obvious corruptions; it is written in a Ciceronian style unlike Tacitus' other works; and both its date and its significance in Tacitus' intellectual development are controversial. Roland Mayer thus performs a useful service in providing "the sort of introduction and notes an anglophone undergraduate might want" (vii) for a work that has not received a commentary in English since those of W. Peterson (Oxford 1893), Alfred Gudeman (Boston 1894), and Charles E. Bennett (Boston 1894).
Mayer follows the normal format of the Cambridge series to which his volume belongs: a substantial introduction (1-50) precedes the Latin text (53-86), which is followed by a primarily linguistic and literary commentary (87-216) and bibliography and indexes (217-227). Mayer states candidly that he has not produced "a critical edition": he prints a text which, though it "does not reproduce exactly that of any earlier edition," is essentially a revision of Michael Winterbottom's Oxford text (1975) in the light of Rudolf Gu'ngerich's posthumous commentary (Göttingen 1980), and he prints it without a critical apparatus of any sort on the grounds that Winterbottom and Erich Koestermann's Teubner (third edition, Leipzig 1970) "provide the main information" (49-50). While this procedure is understandable, I doubt whether Mayer really helps students by concealing from them how very often the accepted text of the Dialogus rests on conjectural emendation even where he does not discuss the text in his commentary.
Mayer concentrates on linguistic problems and literary questions rather than on the historical aspects of Tacitus' text. On individuals to whom Tacitus refers, he usually contents himself with citing a standard modern work (such as the Oxford Classical Dictionary) instead...