Восприятие времени и пространства в Римской империи эпохи Корнелия Тацита

Rome was considered the sacred center of the earthly circle, while the periphery of the world, which was in opposition to the center, was perceived as an alien, dangerous space and was inhabited by folk fantasy as fairy-tale creatures. The priesthood of Rome-city was given, above all, by its aegis – the Capitoline Triad of the Gods, which was the leading channel of communication between the heavenly and the earthly levels of the world. The sky and the world of wildlife, therefore, were under the vigilant control of the Romans.

Following the archetypes of their ancestors, the Romans sought to delineate the images of time and space in accordance with the binary oppositions formed in the process of their everyday practice: «one’s own – another’s», «military-peaceful», «public – private», «sacred – professional».

Tacitus as a carrier of the picture of the world inherent in ancient Roman civilization was at the same time a representative of its intellectual elite, transmitting through its historical works the original interpretation of the categories «time», «space» and «history».

His view of the history of Rome was based on the conclusions he made from contrasting images of the past and the present, as well as on understanding the contradictory tendencies of the development of Roman society in the first and the beginning of the second centuries.

The main content of the works of Tacitus is socially and politically oriented. These are reflections on the historical role of Rome in relation to the surrounding nations, the collapse of the old republican foundations and the triumph of imperial power, patriotic bravado about the power of the Empire, turning into dramatic descriptions of the decline of the moral foundations of the population of Rome.

Time was estimated by Tacitus from the point of view of his political context; therefore, it is represented by segments consisting of consular periods, military campaigns, and stories about social and political life, and all this is woven together by one common thread – the formation of the Roman World and its romanization.

Peace time for him is the time of enjoying the «benefits of peace», public time is the time of hard work in the name of the glory of the Empire. War for him is a drama, but it was the war that promoted the formation of the «Roman World».

In the perception of space, Tacitus is skeptical about the fantasies of his people about the periphery and the cosmos.