| This dissertation investigates Tacitus' rhetorical and literary uses of women, especially Livia and the two Agrippinas, comparing alternate traditions in other writers---not to recover lived reality, but to understand Tacitus' deliberate selection of available material. While Tacitus usually presents prominent women unfavorably, they are not his target; their characterizations instead serve to problematize one-man rule. Tacitus includes vivid portraits of women in the Annales because of their significance to a dynastic history.; Part One addresses Roman female stereotypes and the figure of Livia, the dynastic ancestress turned archetypal evil stepmother; of all women in Tacitus, her portrayal most sharply diverges from that in other writers. The stepmother theme not only undermines Tiberius' legitimacy but also shows the power outsiders could wield under the empire; with his persecution of Agrippina the Elder, Sejanus becomes Livia's stepmotherly successor. Chapter 2 argues, engaging in recent debates, that the famous parallels between Livia and Agrippina the Younger are deliberate and considerably more extensive than previously realized, highlighting the decline of the dynasty and its inevitability. Chapter 3 explores Tacitus' strategies for keeping Livia's activities offstage, thereby furthering Tiberian themes of absence, uncertainty, and discord.; Part Two concerns women that transgress the boundaries of the domus and behave like men, beginning with Agrippina the Elder, an exemplary victim of tyranny whose presentation nonetheless underlines the real dangers of factionalism. The interlocking stories of Agrippina, the governors' wives of Ann. 3.33-34, and others further reveal how, with the senate's impotence and inaction, the empire relies on laws abused by informers rather than moderation and self-control to maintain moral order. The last chapter studies the collapse of that order, arguing that Tacitus inverts imperial propaganda, turning Julio-Claudian women from guarantors of dynastic stability into symptoms of an un-Roman barbarity found only in civil war, the very evil the principate was supposed to avert. Agrippina the Younger, combining the masculine ambitions of her mother and the stepmotherly role of her grandmother, creates an emperor whose unmasculine lack of self-control provokes the civil war foreshadowed throughout the Annales. |
