De Tácito a la lex de imperio Vespasiani o la organización del consentimiento de la dominación

Abstract

The subject of this paper is not historical, but meta-historical. My purpose, then, is not to identify,even briefly, the steps that led from the Republic to the Empire, but to point out a set of practicalconditions for this process. More exactly, I will highlight a specific aspect of this process: howTacitus’s historiography did not merely describe this course of facts, but rather was a constitutiveagent of it. When Tacitus asserted, for instance, that Augustus took upon himself all the powersformerly held by the Senate, he did not mirror mimetically a historical fact. He rather producedit inside his own narrative: explained it and gave it some meaning. Even though Tacitus criticizedvery harshly some emperors and senators (or because he just does so), his very criticism generatesa system of imperial rule as a set of networks beyond the will of individuals