| The dissertation comprises four chapters, each dedicated to a Latin author. These are: Velleius Paterculus, Seneca, Tacitus, and Pliny. Their activity span over a period of more than a century, from the end of Augustus' principate to that of Trajan (14 AD-117 AD). Looking mainly at these authors' treatment of the past, we study a continuous difficulty that accompanied the gradually-evolving Roman aristocracy throughout the first century AD: how to interpret a reality which discards one's formative values and threatens one's social identity.; The analysis shows the new Roman aristocracy consciously reinterpreting its distinguished past and in particular the Republican old value system. The nobles attempted to preserve the moral attitude of the Roman Republican aristocracy, within the ethical framework that had been developed by the Principate. However, the Roman case reveals that for a society to abandon its self-defining values, involves actively distancing itself from its past, now a source of embarrassment. This dissertation argues that a society's reworking of its values has its counterpart in the formation of a new historical consciousness: disoriented values goad society on to reassign meaning for its present by reshaping its past, hence--to use Yeats' line: a terrible beauty is born. |
